299: Recovery Is Hard. Living With An Eating Disorder Is Harder

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 299 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/299.

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 an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover. At the moment, I’m currently taking on new clients. I fundamentally believe that people can change and that you can fully recover despite what your eating disorder may be telling you. After working with clients for 15 years, I’m very good at helping people to achieve this.

When I think about recovery, there are different aspects and components with it. There’s the physical repair and the recovery that takes place. There’s this developing of resilience and real constructive coping mechanisms – not having to use the eating disorder, but having other ways of being able to deal with difficult thoughts and feelings and sensations. It’s living a life rather than just marking time.

What this leads to is more authenticity, more connection, being able to be spontaneous, having freedom, the energy and the mental capacity for truly experiencing life as opposed to just being a hostage to the whims of the eating disorder.

With my coaching, I use a combination of different things. I have personalised one-on-one coaching, and as part of these calls, I’m very compassionate and understanding of what you’re going through and I’m able to help you be accountable and for us to set goals and to really reframe and start to shift your perspective. As part of this, there’s weekly homework. This could include writing exercises, it could be listening to or reading things, it could be setting goals as part of this for certain behaviour changes or mindset shifts. And then between those calls, we have support. We can be messaging one another so that you’re getting support between these calls.

There’s also a group component. Over the years, I’ve discovered how important this is and the importance of being in a group environment. I know this is not for everyone, and often when people hear this, it can be very scary and there can be this feeling of “I have so much fear and shame about this and I don’t know how I could do this in a group environment.” But I think there is something really healing and powerful about hearing the stories of other people, being able to see that other people are going through the same thing that you are, and being able to start to talk about this in front of other people.

I really do believe that there is some real exponential growth that happens when you’re doing this in a group environment. So there are group calls that you can participate in. We do group meal support calls that you can eat a food, eat something that’s challenging in a relaxed environment while you’re talking with myself and other people who are going through recovery. All of this just helps you to feel less alone and to really receive the support of other people – not just me and my team, but the support of other people who are going through recovery.

For me, it’s really this combination of all of these things that lead to the fastest transformation, but also helping you get to a place of full recovery and having that full recovery stick.

So if you are exhausted of living with an eating disorder and are ready to do what it takes to reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help you with this. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line. So info@seven-health.com, the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and then I can send over the details of how we can figure out if we’re going to be a good match for working together.

00:04:00

Recovery is hard. Living with an eating disorder is harder

On with today’s show. Today’s episode is a solo one, and it’s actually something that came up yesterday. I was having a call with someone, and we were talking about recovery, and she was someone who has lived with an eating disorder for 10 years and she’s been recovered for quite a while now. One of the things that really hit home for her is this idea that recovery is hard, yes – but actually, living with an eating disorder is even harder.

I actually think this is very true, and the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I’ve been like, I really want to get this message out to people. I’ve jotted down some notes of things I want to cover as part of this.

Really, it is true. Living with an eating disorder is the way harder thing to do than recovery. There is so much shame, there’s so much secrecy, there’s so much hiding. It’s keeping up all these rules and following the demands of the eating disorder. It’s the daily symptoms that you have. It’s the feeling cold, it’s the inability to actually sleep through the night because you’re having to get up multiple times to pee. It’s the fact that you are incapable of taking time off, or at least the eating disorder makes you believe that you’re incapable of taking time off, so you’re walking even though you’re absolutely exhausted and you just want to rest. And then you feel guilty for the fact that you just want to rest.

There are all these symptoms that are going on on a daily basis. There’s the constant noise from the eating disorder, all the food thoughts, all the guilt and the shame. The feeling like a failure no matter what you do. Feeling like a failure if you try and do recovery stuff, feeling like a failure if you’re not trying to do recovery stuff. It’s the “I’m not feeling sick enough, so maybe I don’t deserve to recover.” It’s the feeling unworthy.

And it’s living like this again and again and again, day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade for many people. There’s this real blind spot that I think many people have of how hard it really is, truly, to live with an eating disorder. There’s so much focus on how hard it is to recover, but not recognising actually how hard every single day is just to survive a day, just to make it through a day.

There’s this great – I don’t know if analogy is the right word, or metaphor or story, about a guy who’s walking through the streets. He’s on holiday, walking through the streets, and he hears this wailing noise. He decides, “Let me figure out what this wailing is.” It’s quite a painful-sounding noise. He’s walking and getting closer and closer, and then he sees this house in the distance, and on the house there’s this stoop or step or balcony at the front of the house, and there is this guy sitting there and this dog he’s lying next to. The dog is just wailing.

He gets up to the guy and he’s like, “What is going on? What’s happening with your dog?” He’s like, “He’s in pain. He’s got a nail through his foot.” He’s like, “God, that’s terrible. He’s got a nail through his foot. Why doesn’t he get up?” He’s like, “It hurts too much to get up.”

I think this is so much what living with an eating disorder is like. It’s the “I’m in this absolute constant pain, and yet I’m focusing on how much more painful it will be to pull my foot off of the nail.” Actually, pulling your foot off the nail is a much quicker thing than living the rest of your life with a nail through your foot.

00:08:02

Trying to do recovery vs actually doing recovery

What I think often happens and where we start to see recovery in the wrong way – there’s actually two things that I think are really useful to understand. One is there’s a difference between trying to do recovery and actually doing recovery. I think so much of what people think of as recovery isn’t actually recovery. It’s still doing the eating disorder, but just masquerading as recovery.

For example, it’s “I increased my dinner, and yet I then reduced all my other snacks and I actually increased my walking.” So in terms of the net change in all of these things, either it’s the exact same it was before, or actually I’m now taking in even less or I’m moving even more, so the net is that there’s less energy than there was before I tried. When I look at that, that’s not recovery. That’s doing the eating disorder. It’s “Hey, I’m changing this thing but I’m also going to do this other thing here that negates this change I made.” That’s not recovery; that’s doing what the eating disorder is asking of me.

It’s planning on making a change and saying, “Cool, I’m going to make this change to my breakfast or make this change to my dinner” and then getting hooked by the eating disorder thoughts that come up and then not following through in actually making that change and then saying, “Oh, recovery is so hard.” Again, in this instance you’re not doing recovery. You’re doing the eating disorder, because nothing’s actually changed. You’ve thought about something, you’ve then not done that thing, and that’s still the eating disorder.

And I’m not saying this to belittle someone or to make you feel shameful for not doing recovery, but I want you to understand that’s not recovery. That’s the eating disorder. There’s a difference between these two things, and what is going on there is still just “I’m doing the eating disorder, because I’m doing what the eating disorder is asking of me.” That is still the eating disorder.

What can happen is people will say, “Hey, I’ve been trying to recover for three or four years now and this is what’s been going on.” It’s like, no, you’ve still been doing the eating disorder for the last three or four years. This isn’t actually recovery. The more that you can understand that, the more you can say, “Yeah, that is the eating disorder. This is the thing that I think I’m doing recovery or I feel like I’ve been trying to do recovery, but actually I haven’t done recovery.”

It’s so common for clients to say, “I thought I’d been doing recovery for three years and then we started together and I realised that I wasn’t really doing recovery. My recovery in earnest started when we started to work together.”

I think this is so true – you can have 10 years or 20 years or 30 years of living with an eating disorder, and then you can have a good chunk of time of wanting to recover and trying to recover, and this can be also for many, many years or many, many decades. And yet actually, if we look at the point – when someone actually reaches a point of full recovery and we look at where their recovery truly started, there’s normally a huge amount of time that was thought of as recovery that really wasn’t recovery. It was still just doing what the eating disorder was asking of them.

00:11:50

The challenges aren’t due to recovery – it’s the eating disorder

As part of this, the eating disorder wants you to think of so many of the challenges and so many of the struggles as being recovery when it’s not actually recovery. It is the eating disorder. Even when you’re making pro-recovery choices and pro-recovery changes, which is awesome, the difficulties with this isn’t recovery; it’s actually the eating disorder.

The anxiety that you feel in anticipation of making a change, or the fear that you experience while making a change, or the fear that you have in anticipation of going to a restaurant or while at the restaurant, or having breakfast for the first time – this isn’t hard because of recovery; this is hard because of the eating disorder. It is the eating disorder that is making this hard, not the recovery part.

The thing with this and what I want to get across is that this is the equivalent of victim blaming. When we are thinking about all of these challenges as being because of recovery, we are victim blaming. It would be like, “Well, she shouldn’t have worn that dress” or “She shouldn’t have been out that late at night.” It’s like, fuck that. That is not what is going on. You don’t deserve to feel bad for eating food, and if someone or something is doing that to you, that’s not on you. That is on them.

If you saw a mother telling her child how vile she was or how awful she was or how greedy she was because she was wanting more breakfast, or if she was wanting a piece of cake, you wouldn’t think, “That mom’s right. That kid is being really whiny and really needy and she doesn’t need all these things.” You should be like, “That mom is acting in a way that is horrendous. She should not be speaking to her daughter like that. She should not be speaking to anybody like that.” It would be obvious to see that the mom is the one who is being egregious in this situation. It is not the child.

And that is true whether the child is having their fourth bowl of cereal. The child doesn’t need to be told “You’re disgusting, you’re vile, you don’t need this.” It would be really obvious to be like, “I know who the person in the wrong here is. It is clearly the mom.” We wouldn’t say that that child has brought this upon herself, like “It’s the child’s fault. If only she didn’t have so many bowls of cereal, then she wouldn’t have this happen to her. It’s her fault.” No, we’d be like, “It’s clearly the mom who is in the wrong here. There is nothing wrong with her wanting to have more breakfast, wanting to have a piece of cake or wanting to have an ice cream. She doesn’t deserve to be spoken to in that manner.”

And that’s the same here. If you’re making a change in recovery and there are these thoughts that are coming up, this isn’t because of recovery. This is because of the eating disorder. And you don’t deserve to be spoken to in that manner. So rather than thinking, “I brought this upon myself because I was the one that made the change”, it’s like, “No, fuck that. This is the eating disorder that is doing this thing to me. This is the eating disorder who is clearly in the wrong for telling me this thing.”

I really want you to understand that that is not recovery that is the challenging part. The recovery piece is you making the changes. All of the other noise and all of the other stuff is the eating disorder, and the eating disorder is still there and still saying all of these things even if you aren’t making these changes.

I had a call with a client yesterday and she’d spent the whole previous day going back to doing all of the things that the eating disorder was requesting of her. I was like, “How was your day? Was it this wonderful day where there was no anxiety, there was no worry, it felt really relaxed and chilled and all of that?” She’s like, “No, it didn’t feel like that a tall.” This is the thing: it feels like “Everything’s going to be so much easier if I just give in to the eating disorder thoughts and I don’t keep going with recovery”, but it then just creates another day and another day and another day, and the days very quickly turn into years.

So recognising that, hey, the challenges in recovery aren’t because of recovery. The challenges in recovery are because of the eating disorder, and the more I can recognise that this isn’t my fault, I’m not bringing this upon myself for making these changes – the eating disorder is being a dick, and I should not have someone talking to me like that because I’m eating more food, or I’m taking time off exercise, or I’m doing whatever it is that I’m doing in recovery.

00:17:04

Would you recommend this lifestyle?

The final thing I would ask with this is, would you recommend this lifestyle to someone else? Looking at how you spend your day with the eating disorder, would you say, “Hey, this is a great way of living. I think more people should be getting in on this. I want to recommend this”?

My assumption is that the answer to that question is no. When you think about “If I’m still doing this in a year’s time or five years’ time…”, how do you feel about that? Are you bursting with joy thinking, “Yes, this is what I want to be continuing to do and I can’t wait till five years’ time and this is still going on and I get to live this lifestyle”?

I know this can sound like a very rhetorical question, but the assumption, again, is that “No, this is not how I want to be living. This is not what I want to be spending my time on, and the thought of this still going on in five years’ time is just horrible. I don’t want this to be the case.”

This is just further reason why it’s important to recognise, yeah, recovery can be hard, and I’m not saying that there aren’t parts of it that are challenging – but living with an eating disorder is way harder than having to go through recovery. And actually, when I think about recovery, recovery when someone is doing it in earnest, making a change, not compensating, doing the things that are genuinely pro-recovery, it’s not actually that long in the whole scheme of things. Especially considering that many people I’m working with have been living with this for 20 years, 30 years. The actual recovery process when someone really does it and puts their head down and does the recovery, we’re talking about six months, a year, maybe 18 months.

00:19:04

Recovery can actually happen pretty quickly

The thing as well is, once you actually start making genuine changes, and changes where you’re not doing tiny little goals that are an appeasement of the eating disorder, or not making this change here but then compensating over here, you actually start to notice changes pretty quickly. And it’s not that everything gets easy and amazing overnight, but there is this upside that you can start to notice.

I think what often is the message is that there’s this huge leap of faith, you’re going to have to go through this really long time of noticing no benefit, and then after some point things get better. I don’t actually believe that to be true. This is so true with the clients I’m working with; when they start to make a change they’re not compensated with, there is some benefits that they start to notice. It can be “Yeah, I did notice I had a little more concentration” or “I did notice I had a little bit more energy” or “Yeah, I had a little more patience with my kids in the evening time.”

What the eating disorder will always convince you is that you’re going to eat this more food and then you’re going to spend the rest of the day feeling so terrible about it. It’s going to be the worst day, it’s going to be way worse than any of the other days that you’ve had. This is why you need to keep doing what you’re doing. And the reality is that that’s just not the case. From making the change, yeah, there can be this increase in noise for half an hour after, an hour after, whatever it may be, but that then starts to come down. And actually, you do benefit from that extra energy that has come in or that change that has been made.

Or if someone is taking time off exercise, again, if you’re genuinely doing that in earnest, and you’re then not compensating in some other way, within a matter of days – 5 days, 7 days, 10 days, 2 weeks – you’re starting to really notice a benefit from doing that.

I think that often, recovery is portrayed as being excruciatingly hard, and the eating disorder actually is way harder. And it’s portrayed as this thing that takes forever and is this ongoing thing that it’s going to be a really long time before you notice any benefit, and that is also not true.

So that is it for this episode. I hope that you’re able to see and that this is creating a shift in how you’re thinking about recovery, because I think the way that we see things is then the way that we experience them, and how our beliefs really do affect our experience. I would really like you to start, or I’d like to suggest that you start to see the challenges in recovery or the uncomfortableness not as being recovery, but actually as being the eating disorder. And “I’m not the one that is at fault here; it is the eating disorder that is at fault here.”

Because again, most people can see that for other people, when they are having a piece of cake or when they are having breakfast, they don’t have these feelings that come up, and I don’t believe that they should have these feelings that come up. So if you’re experiencing them, it’s not because you did something wrong; it’s because of the eating disorder.

As I said at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you would like help getting to a place of full recovery – and this is where I want you to get to, that I totally believe you can get to – then please send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put in the subject line ‘coaching’ and I can then send over further details.

That is it for this week’s episode. I will catch you again next week. Until then, take care of yourself, and I’ll see you soon.

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