310: You Never Have To Restrict Again

Chris Sandel: Hey. If you want access to the transcripts and the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can go to www.seven-health.com/310.

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.

Before we get on with today’s show, I want to have two announcements. The first is I’m taking on clients. If you are struggling with an eating disorder and you want to reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help you get there, and this is the case whether you’ve been struggling for a very short amount of time or this has been going on for decades. There’s many clients that I’ve worked with where this eating disorder developed in their teenage years, and they’re in their forties and fifties, and they’re able to reach a place of full recovery.

So if that is you and you’re sick and tired of feeling sick and tired and exhausted of living with an eating disorder, I would love to help you get to a place of full recovery. To do that, if you’re interested, you can send an email to info@seven-health.com, and in the subject line, put ‘coaching’ as part of the subject line, and then I can send over the details about that.

The second thing that I want to mention is that I’ve been using Instagram again fairly consistently. I’ve got a pretty love-hate relationship with social media, and I’ve decided this year that I wanted to get over that in terms of recognising how useful social media can be for (1) putting out good information about eating disorder recovery, and sharing my knowledge and expertise and tactics and all these different things that people can be doing and realising that this can be a really great way of being able to communicate, but (2) really, from around about the August time, I’ve been very consistent with. I think prior to that, I had nearly two years of just not really posting anything on Instagram.

But it’s really been since August time that I’ve really embraced this and been very intentional about, okay, I’m going to be creating content specifically for this; I’m going to be really structured with the stuff I put out. So yeah, if you’re not following me on Instagram, I really want to suggest that you do. It’s @sevenhealthcompany. Go there, follow it, and there’ll be lots of helpful advice, suggestions, there’s clips from the podcast that go up there.

Previously I would never have mentioned it because it was so sporadic that I didn’t feel it was even worth people following me, but now I truly do, and it’s going to be more and more stuff that is going to Instagram because I’m seeing the value in it. I’m having more people who are finding me through that, who are becoming clients because of that, and I’m seeing that it’s getting in front of the right kind of people, and people are resonating with what I’m putting out. So if you are on social media and want to have access to that, then @sevenhealthcompany.

00:03:24

The mistaken idea that you have to restrict again someday

On with today’s show. What I want to go through today – and I’m titling this show ‘You’ll Never Have to Restrict Ever Again’ or something similar to that. I haven’t figured out the exact title, but it’ll be something like that. The reason I’m titling this, and what I want to cover today, has come about in terms of a couple of conversations that I’ve had with people, but there’s one client in particular that I think about when I think about this idea.

I think what often happens when people think about recovery and starting to loosen the restriction and then fully allow themselves the permission to eat is this mistaken idea or belief that this is only for a limited time.

So, “I have this window where I’m allowed to do recovery, where I’m allowed to eat certain foods or eat all of the foods and I’m allowed to do that, but I have this window that I can do it for. I have this window where I’m doing recovery, I’m gaining some weight, I’m allowing my body to heal – but at some point I’m going to be told by me and the eating disorder, but it could also be I’m going to be told by the inpatient facility that I’m staying at or the outpatient people that I’m working with, they’re going to tell me, ‘Okay, you have now done this for long enough. Now is the time that we do maintenance. Now is the time that we put the brakes on. We’re going to go to some lighter version of restriction. From now on, do restriction; just don’t take it as far as you took it last time.’”

This then creates this false idea that there is this really short window of time that someone has to be able to do this. This creates lots of fears and worries about this. One of the fears is that “I have to make the absolute most of this time. I have to do this absolutely perfectly.”

When I was thinking about the client that has inspired this, she had this idea in her mind of “There are all of these foods that have been off limits for so long”, and she wanted to eat them all, but making sure she absolutely maximised this time. What this meant was that she never got started, because in her mind she was like, “I can’t figure out what’s going to be the perfect combination, and what if that time window goes by much quicker than I thought it was going to be?” It just created all this worry in her that then prevented her from actually even getting started, from even making the necessary steps to do it, because there was this worry of “I’m going to waste this finite amount of time that I have to do this correctly.” So I think that’s one thing that can come up for people.

The other part is that for many people, they’re already just hanging on by a thread. They’re able to maintain the restriction, but every single day is so hard to be able to do that. They’re having to use exercise, they’re having to use other forms of distraction. It feels like “I am this dam that is about to break and I’m holding on by a thread”, and the feeling there is “If I let go of this, there is no bringing this dam back.”

So the worry is “At some point I have to do restriction again, but everything tells me if I release this, then I’m not going to be able to get this back under control at any point, and then I’m going to have ruined everything. Then I’m going to be turning into someone who has binge eating disorder, and that’s the worst thing in the world if that happens. So I can’t even think about loosening the reins here. I can’t even think about eating unrestrictedly because there’s no way that I’ll ever be able to stop again, and that’s what I think I’ll have to do. I think that this is for a short amount of time and then I’ll have to put the brakes on intentionally again.” Again, this is then the block for being able to get started.

The heart of so much of the fear around the eating disorder is that “I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to gain weight; it’s then going to hit some point where either I’m told ‘You’ve gained enough weight; you need to stop this now, you need to do maintenance now’, or I’m going to reach a point where I physically am like ‘I can’t do this anymore, I can’t go any higher than this’. And what I’m going to notice is that I’ve gained weight, the thoughts are still there, nothing fundamentally has changed. Yeah, I’ve eaten some extra foods, but in terms of my lived experience, in terms of my actual freedom, in terms of my quality of life, nothing’s going to have gotten any better. And why did I go through this whole process? I would’ve been better off just staying put where I was, having everything still be under control. It’s just a waste of my time to go through that.” Because again, there’s this idea that “At some certain point, I’m going to be told that we have to stop this.”

00:08:35

Why you don’t need to restrict ever again

From my perspective, none of that stuff is true. Once you start to eat unrestrictedly and you remove all of those restrictions, at no point do you then need to intentionally build those things back in. You are not then at some point having to choose, “Okay, I now need to put the brakes on again.” The reason is that your body will take care of this on your behalf.

When you start to eat food again, in the beginning you need a lot more food. Your body has not been getting what it needs to be able to function properly and to be able to do all of the repair work that it needs to be able to do to be able to run all of your various systems and organs. So yeah, you need a lot more energy because you’re not just needing energy for today; you’re needing energy for today and yesterday and however long this thing’s been going on for. If this has been going on for 5 years or 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, there is a lot of debt that is accrued. There’s a lot of energy that didn’t come in that the body actually needed to do all of the things that it needs to do to be able to function properly.

So in the beginning, there is a much higher demand for energy so that your body can do that repair work to get you back to a place where everything is working as it should. So there is going to be a period of time where your calorie needs and the energy demands of the body are much higher.

And how long that goes on for will depend. It will depend on (1) how long has the eating disorder gone on for in the first place, (2) how much energy debt has accrued, and (3) how quickly are you able to allow that energy to come in so that that repair can take place. All of those are then going to be factors in terms of how long that process takes, so I can’t give you a number of “it’s only going to be two months” or “it’s going to be definitely two years.” I don’t know what it’s going to be. And I know that doesn’t ease any of the anxiety, but I want to be honest when talking about this stuff.

But what will happen – and this isn’t a “maybe it’ll happen”; it will happen – at some point, your body has done that repair work, and the amount of energy that it needs is now much more reduced. Because no longer is it having to deal with the energy for today plus all of the days prior; it’s now just dealing with the energy for today. So then what you need starts to come down because it doesn’t have to pay off any of the debt. You’ve paid off all of the energy debt that has accrued.

When that happens, you notice, “Hey, I’m just not as hungry as I was before. I’m not needing as many snacks as I did before.” Maybe during your recovery, at some point you’re like, “I’m needing to eat every hour. I’m needing to eat every two hours.” And at some point, “Hey, I can have a really solid breakfast, four hours can go by and I haven’t even thought about food, and then I have something else to eat, and then another handful of hours go by.” So your capacity to get by is much more improved, and not because you’re restricting or white-knuckling it or anything along those lines, but because your body truly can go longer stretches of time without having that food.

What happens is the energy that you need comes down, so you don’t need to then use restriction to do this; your body is taking care of it.

00:12:19

Example: Going to a buffet

An example that I can give with this: if I go on holiday and we go to, say, a resort, we go to somewhere that has a buffet – and it might have a buffet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – what often happens on Day 1 is I will more food. I’ll eat more food because it’s kind of novel to be somewhere where there’s all of these different options. Yes, I have lots of food in my house, but I don’t often have all of these different options, so on Day 1, it’s like, “Great, cool, let me add a donut to the plate, and I’m going to get some of that chicken thing and I’m going to get some of that burger and let me try the chips and let me try this thing and that thing.” So yeah, on that Day 1, I probably eat more food than I generally do just because, wow, this is novel, this is new, I’m on holiday, this sounds fun.

Day 2, maybe I’m eating a similar amount as I did on Day 1. But pretty quickly, that novelty starts to come down. It’s not as exciting because we’re now at Day 3 of seeing most of the things that are here, we’re now at Day 4, cool, it’s a repeat of what I’d seen the day before. My excitement about all that food just starts to naturally down.

And it’s not because I’m shaming myself, like “Remember how much you ate on Day 1. We really need to get a handle on this” or “It’s really bad to be eating that amount of sugar or that amount of carbs” or “Do you really need to be having ice cream with your breakfast” or any of those kind of things. My body is just like, “Yeah, we got in quite a bit of energy the last couple of days. We’re just not needing as much going forward.” That’s not a conscious thing; that’s just what naturally happens.

So I’m waking up for breakfast, I’m just not as hungry as I was before, and as the week goes on, by the end of the week, my eating’s kind of what I do when I’m back at home. So rather than having all of these different things for breakfast, I’m getting back to what I usually do. And again, not from a place of restriction; just because I’m just not as interested as I was before.

I think when most people hear that, there’s this idea of “No, that could not possibly ever be true. If I go away to a buffet and somewhere where there’s that every day, I really need to be on guard.” There’s this idea like “It’s going to go exponential and every day’s going to be worse, and it’s just going to turn into this horrible situation.” It’s the same as over the holiday period. If I have Christmas dinner, yeah, we have a lot of food. And then the next day there could be tons of leftovers in the fridge and in the cupboards. My enjoyment or my pull towards that is significantly less because, “Wow, I ate a lot of food yesterday; I’m still pretty full from doing that.”

I’m just trying to give this example of the fact that you don’t need to restrict at some point in the future, to put the brake on or get in control again or any of those things, if you allow your body to get in the energy that it needs as part of recovery and to get out of the energy debt and to really repair your relationship with food, so your body knows that all foods are on the table. You have full permission to eat anything that you want at all times. You get to a place where, “Hey, I can now start to pay attention to what genuinely makes me feel better. How do I feel after eating that food? What do I want to eat in this moment because of what I’m craving from a taste perspective?”

You can then bring all of these different things in. And there could be times that you eat something purely for pleasure that maybe doesn’t leave you feeling that great afterwards, but it’s like, “Hey, I made that choice because actually that was what I wanted in that moment.” And then there’s other times where, “Hey, I’m going to make a choice that feels a little more bland or a little less exciting, but I know that I’ve got quite a busy day ahead of me, and this is the kind of meal that is going to keep me having good energy for the longest amount of time. So that’s why I’m eating in this fashion.”

And it’s not always black and white like that. There’s lots of different nuance connected to this. But I guess the point I’m trying to get across is that you get to a stage where you’re not having to micromanage this. You’re not having to restrict. I’m a big fan of intuitive eating; it’s not where recovery will start with someone, or at least there’s many of the principles of intuitive eating that we need to hold back on because you’re just not in a state to be able to use them right now.

But intuitive eating is really the place that I take people to and that you want as an end goal. And not, again, where you’re checking off, “Am I doing each of the 10 principles each day?”, but this just becomes the natural way of being. You’re not even necessarily having to think about these things because it is just so ingrained within you.

00:17:21

Why negative emotions can arise around unrestricted eating

The other thing that I think can also come up with this is that when you’re starting to eat in a more unrestricted way, there can be certain emotions that come up. There can be guilt, there can be shame, there can be regret, there can be these negative emotions or these uncomfortable emotions that are then connected to that experience. What I can often hear from people is this idea of “Maybe those things are really helpful for me. Maybe they’re serving a function that, actually, if I didn’t feel this guilt or if I didn’t feel this shame, then it would go exponential and I would never get a handle on my eating. This is a good thing that I’m feeling these things because they’re going to be the things that keep me in check.”

I would say that I vehemently disagree with that as an idea because you don’t need those kind of negative emotions to be able to eat in a very balanced, normal, have a healthy relationship with food. Really, those emotions are coming up because of beliefs that you may have. They’re coming up because of being in a state and having the eating disorder. Because the reality is that you don’t need those emotions to help you to eat in a way that is supporting your body. They are coming up or arising because of the fact that your body is seeing food as a threat at this point, and that’s what happens when you’re in an eating disorder.

Your body has then connected to that experience that you just had of eating and is having these emotions rise up because it sees food as a threat and you’ve just done something that’s threatening, and it’s trying to keep you safe, so you’re having this emotion come up as a way of seeing if we can change your behaviour next time. “I felt guilty after eating last time, so if we have that guilt arise up, maybe next time I won’t do it.”

But really, it’s recognising that this isn’t helpful. I can use discernment to recognise that actually, these emotions aren’t helpful. And they can be here, they can occur, but it’s actually not going to change my behaviour, because in the long run, long term, we don’t want those emotions to be there. And that’s nothing that you have to do; emotions will rise of their own accord. But the more you do this – and by ‘this’, I mean do recovery, eat in a way where you’re providing your body with everything it needs, you’re eating in a very unrestricted way – that’s how those things start to change, because your body then learns, “This isn’t actually a threat” and you get out of the state that you had been in.

00:20:07

Closing thoughts

That is really all I had to say today. This is a topic or an idea that I’d been thinking about for a while, and I see it coming up a lot, but I really want to hammer this point home: that when you do recovery, you are never going to have to restrict ever again. You aren’t going to have to put the brakes on. You aren’t having to do ‘restriction lite’ at some point in the future. You are able to give your body what it needs, and your body will then be able to guide you to do this, and at the point where it now needs less food, it will allow you to know that. It will let you know of that.

So that is it for this week’s episode. If you are wanting support in recovery, if you want to reach that place of full recovery and you’re wanting coaching and support, I would love to help you to get there. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com, put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can get the details over to you.

That is it. Have a great week. I will be back with another episode next week. Until then, take care of yourself, and I will see you soon!

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