00:00:00

Intro + free live training

00:03:14

A big fear with weight gain that clients often have

00:05:35

Why weight increase can happen in this situation

00:10:59

Fear of the unknown in recovery

00:13:38

A nourished body acts differently than a depleted one

00:00:00

Intro + free live training

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 289 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/289.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover.

I’m recording this on Friday the 9th. Yesterday was the first day of my 3-part live training, and it was incredible. It was amazing to see so many people on the call. There was so much interaction. I’d set aside time at the end to do Q&A, and I could only do the tiniest of a fraction of the questions. So I’m definitely going to have to do a bonus Q&A call or something so that people’s questions get answered. But it was just such a great start to this training.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m currently hosting a free 3-part live training series. It’s called How to Fully Recover From an Eating Disorder. I did a similar training back in September of last year and the feedback was incredible. I got lots of lovely emails. I’ll share a couple of things that I got from people as part of this last time.

They said, “I’ve had an eating disorder for almost three decades at this point and I found your information more helpful than an entire treatment stay.” Another said, “Thank you so much for caring enough to offer your time and energy to helping others.” Another, “I wanted to thank you for providing this very, very helpful information and sharing your approach to reaching full recovery. I would like you to know that I would’ve paid for this training. That’s how valuable it was to me.”

Then the final one is: “I want to thank you for taking the time to create these three trainings. They’re probably the most helpful 5-½ hours I’ve ever had in my recovery, and I’ve been at this nearly three decades. After many inpatient, residential, PHP, and IOP stays, this is invaluable information that is tangible, doable, and understandable. I’ve never met someone to have such an insight into eating disorders that hasn’t had one themselves. Thank you again. I really appreciate you.”

The training last time and yesterday really resonated with people, and from the comments you can hear how valuable it is. So if you would like to be part of it, you can go to the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/289, and you can click there to register. There’s a link there you can click on to register, and when you register, you’ll be sent the link to the replay of yesterday’s call. So you can watch that replay and then you can make the other calls live, or if you’re unable to make them live, you will get the replays sent to you.

It’s because of this live training that I’m putting out some extra episodes of the podcast right now. There will be a few each week rather than just one. Today’s episode, this is one of these bonus episodes. It’s not going to be a long one, but it was something that came up recently with a client. It’s actually a conversation I’ve had many times, so I thought it would make sense to talk about it on here.

00:03:14

A big fear with weight gain that clients often have

What had happened with this client was that there’d been a small change in terms of what they were eating in terms of an increase, or they believed there’d been this small increase in terms of what they were eating, but there had been a change in terms of their weight. They hadn’t got on a scale, so they didn’t know what that change would be or had been. They couldn’t know for sure whether that had really changed or what was going on. But there was this feeling of “I’ve had this change in my weight, and I’ve only changed what I’m eating in some fairly small way.”

So the extension of that, and the fear that then comes up connected to this, is: “If I’ve started to gain weight and I think it’s noticeable, and I’ve only changed a really tiny amount in terms of my eating, what’s going to happen if I start to make even bigger changes?” This is then the fear that runs away with people and is so often what puts the brakes on recovery really before it even gets started. It’s this “I made some small change, I had some feeling that I’ve gained some weight, and then I’ve had to put the brakes on. I can’t do this.” So I want to talk a little bit about this.

There’s a couple things I want to mention with this. One is, as I said, this person hasn’t weighed themselves, so I’m not sure what has truly happened with their body and in terms of their weight gain, but I know with many other people, there’s a lot of dysmorphia in terms of the perception connected to this. I’ve had this happen in the past, where people have been so certain that they’ve gained weight, and then when they’ve got on the scale, their weight hasn’t actually gone up. So there can be this piece connected to it.

But there are definitely instances where people have changed a small thing with their eating and it has led to weight going on. Again, in the whole scheme of things, it is normally a fairly small amount of weight. I guess these things are all relative; what I think of as a small amount of weight and what the person standing on the scale may think of as a small amount of weight are very different ideas. And for that person, something that feels inconsequential from my perspective and feels very much within the realm of normal daily fluctuations, for someone else can feel like a really big deal.

00:05:35

Why weight increase can happen in this situation

But what I want to really get across as part of this episode is if you are making a small change and a small change in what you’re bringing in is resulting in you gaining weight, from my perspective this is just demonstrating where your body is at at this point, and how much it is prioritising putting aside reserves rather than using that extra energy to run your body.

In fact, there’s been instances with clients – and this has been a reason why people have reached out to start working together – where they didn’t actually increase anything with their eating. They hadn’t changed anything with their eating, they hadn’t changed anything in terms of their movement or exercise, and they started to have their weight increase. They didn’t change anything, but their body was now in a sense choosing to use less of what is coming in and putting more to the side.

This makes sense when your body is in a starved state, when it’s not getting everything it needs, and this has been going on for a really long time. Your body becomes incredibly conservative. It has to triage what it is going to be spending its limited energy on, so it turns off or turns down so many different functions. You can get to a point where it is only really using and running and doing the most absolute bare minimum just to keep you going, and there can be points where it’s like, “I’m not sure there’s going to be enough coming in over this next week or month or year” or whatever it is, “so I need to be even more conservative.”

This is where you can be in a situation where nothing has changed but your body has started to put on some weight.

What I want to get across is that this is an adaption. This is an adaption that your body is doing to try and keep you alive. What the body truly wants to do is to be able to heal. It wants to have enough energy come in so that it has enough to meet its day-to-day demands and it has enough to be able to get out of the energy debt that it is now sitting in and has accrued over however many years or decades that this has been going on.

What often happens is there is this feeling and this fear of “If I’ve made some small change and this is what’s happened in terms of my weight, if I make a bigger change my weight is going to go off exponentially from here.” In the beginning, your body is very much going to be prioritising whatever extra energy is coming in is going to be put aside as reserves, because it’s not used to having more energy come in, and it doesn’t want to spend that because it doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week.

I also want to be careful here; when I say ‘extra energy’, I’m not talking about extra than what your body truly needs. I just mean more than has been coming in before. I think what can happen is people can get to this stage where their body has turned so many things down that it feels like “This is all my body truly needs to survive on. I’m weight steady even though I’m eating a small amount of food, so this must tell me this is what my body really needs.” The reality is very different to that. The reality is your body has adapted to that amount of energy because there wasn’t any more coming in. There wasn’t any more that was available to run more of the systems and the processes that need to happen, so it’s had to turn everything down.

So what happens in the beginning is, yes, there is more of a prioritising storing this, and this is often stored as fat. It’s often stored around the abdomen because that’s really important for where the internal organs are and really preserving and protecting the body. But with time, as you start to eat more food, the body starts to realise, “We are getting more energy coming in consistently”, and it looks around and sees, “We have so much here that we need to repair, so we’re going to start to put some of that energy into doing that repair work.”

As this then continues on, as you’re having more energy coming in and you’re doing it for a longer and more consistent amount of time, your body now doesn’t have to be in that same conservation mode. It can start to do the repair, and with time, it then starts to spend more and more of the reserves and more and more of that energy on doing other things that your body can heal – repairing the tissues, repairing bone, repairing your different organs, rewiring the brain, making all the changes that we need to see a full recovery.

I want to just say because I think this is a fear that comes up so often – and happens so often because people are typically making pretty small changes to start with. There’s all this fear around “I don’t want to make a big change, I don’t want to have my weight change rapidly. I need to, in a sense, really dip my toe in, and then I do this and this is the result that happens”, and it just stops people in their tracks.

00:10:59

Fear of the unknown in recovery

I also want to say that I’ve had the opposite of this happen in terms of someone has, instead of increasing their eating by a small amount, they’ve decided “I’m going to rapidly increase what I’m doing. I’m going to bring in a lot of extra food. I want this to be done as quickly as possible”, and they’ve rapidly increased their intake – and yet the number on the scale really hasn’t changed, either at all, or it’s changed by the tiniest amount ever.

What often happens – if I was to offer this as an option to someone before we started, nearly everyone I speak to would put their hand up and say, “I want this. I want to be able to eat totally freely, have all of this extra food coming in, and not have any number on the scale budge.” But what people who have gone through this experience realise is this is not really the golden ticket that you think it would be, because you are now in a situation where “I’m eating a lot more food, my weight really isn’t budging, but I still have the same worries and fears that are going on. I’m just now eating a lot more, and I now have the fear that I have to eat even more than I’m currently eating.”

The reality with eating disorders is the fear is actually about the unknown. The fear is, “I don’t know where this is going to end up”, especially in terms of the recovery process. “I don’t know where my weight’s going to end up, I don’t know how much food I’m going to have to be eating as part of this, I don’t know how long this is going to go on for.” So slow weight gain isn’t necessarily easier because if that’s happening, you still have the same fear of “Where will this end up?” The weight going on slowly doesn’t change anything about the fact that there is still an unknown of “Where will this end?”

So someone can be gaining weight slowly and then there’s the fear of “But will it stay like this? What happens if tomorrow or the next day I start to gain weight really quickly, and it suddenly starts to take off? Or what if I’ve damaged my metabolism and I’ve messed up my set point?” There’s all of these fears, and they’re really the fears of the unknown.

I’m just saying all this because I think often there is this feeling of “If I got to write how I could create the best recovery experience, I would do these things”, and so often I’ve had clients who’ve experienced those things and it wasn’t as good as you thought it may be. There’s still this fear of the unknown and fear of “How is this all going to end up?”

00:13:38

A nourished body acts differently than a depleted one

So I want to end this by saying a nourished body acts very differently to a depleted one. In the beginning, yeah, your body is going to be prioritising gaining weight over repair, but that does change, and it does change because your body wants to heal. When you’re able to give it more food and you’re able to do that consistently, you’re able to give it more rest, it will heal, and then you get to a place where you’re in a nourished body. And a nourished body behaves and acts very differently.

The final thing I’ll say is your body is not a calculator. It is a living, breathing organism. It’s not something where it is this perfect math, where if I add in this amount of calories, I’m going to have this amount of weight gain, and it’s going to go on in this fashion. That is just not how bodies work.

I hope that this was helpful to hear. If you’re someone who has had this experience of “I made a little change and I saw my weight go up and this has stopped me in my tracks”, this hopefully is an explanation for why that has occurred, and it doesn’t mean anything in terms of the fact that your weight is going to go off exponentially. I never know where someone’s weight is going to end up, and that is one of the challenges in terms of eating disorder recovery. But what I always know is that people’s lives fundamentally and drastically improve when they’re no longer living with an eating disorder.

That is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently doing the free 3-part live training series, and if you would like to register for that, if you go to the show notes (www.seven-health.com/289), you’ll be able to click on the link and register for that. I will see you in the next episode.