00:00:00

Intro

00:01:49

‘Do not obey in advance’

00:04:43

Why trying to appease your eating disorder doesn’t work

00:10:20

The eating disorder is powerless without action

00:11:57

A Wizard of Oz analogy

00:15:16

Closing thoughts

00:00:00

Intro

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 head to www.seven-health.com/313.

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, irrespective of how long the eating disorder’s been going on.

Before we get on with today’s show, I just want to mention that I am taking on new clients. If you’re sick of living with an eating disorder, if it’s been going on for a year or it’s been going on for 30 years, I can help you to fully recover. So if that is what you want, please get in contact. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com, and in the subject line, if you just put the word ‘coaching’, I can then send over the details to you.

So, on with today’s show. With this episode, this is one that was actually inspired by an email that I received this week. I’m on Emily Troscianko’s email list. Emily has been on the podcast twice before; I think she’s incredible. I love receiving her emails. I will always read them. It’s a really great mix of lots of different things. But she sent over this email, and there was something in there that really interests me, and I’ve started to look into it and thought it could be useful as a podcast episode.

And this is all very rough; I think she sent an email a day ago or two days ago. We’ve actually had a bit of back-and-forth about it, and I’m just putting this together. So I’ve got some notes in front of me. You’ll possibly see me reading. If you’re watching the video version of this, you’ll see me reading for some of it. But I think this is an interesting concept to explore and for you to reflect on.

00:01:49

‘Do not obey in advance’

The email that she sent over, the subject line of the email was ‘Do not obey in advance’. The email started by saying: “Last week I came across historian Timothy Snyder’s book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century. The first lesson is ‘Do not obey in advance’, and what this means is most of the power of authoritarians is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead of what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

In the email, Emily used the recent decision by the LA Times and the Washington Post not to publish a presidential endorsement as potentially being this ‘Do not obey in advance’. These papers are left-leaning papers; historically they would’ve come out and supported a Democratic candidate, but they chose not to. She said possibly this is in connection with this, the fear of when Trump comes into power, or if he came into power at the time that this came out – and it’s now clear that he has come into power – the worry of “If we had posted these endorsements, what would be the blowback of that? What would be the impact?” So worrying about what might happen has now had an impact on us making this decision.

I sent an email to Emily saying, “Hey, I really loved this email. I’m going to do a podcast on it.” She sent back some extra information. One of them was the German translation. This is talked about as being ‘anticipatory obedience’. What Emily said was, “This way of acting would appeal as a way of avoiding the humiliation or other unpleasantness of being categorically forced to do something as a way of pretending that one is choosing for oneself.”

What this is connected to or is looking at here is that for a lot of people, they will make the decision in advance where it feels like they’re making the decision as opposed to “I’m having this absolutely forced upon me, and I’m having this forced upon me in a really humiliating way.”

If I think about someone who is in an abusive relationship, their worry is that “This thing is going to absolutely explode, and I don’t want to be dealing with that angry person, I don’t want to be dealing with that violence or that verbal abuse. So what I’m going to do is every bit of appeasement that I can do. I’m going to be walking around on eggshells, but I’m worried I’m going to be screamed at or abused, so I’m going to bend over backwards to appease the situation so that I don’t fear the wrath of the angrier abuser, and then I’m still going to have to do these things, but I’m going to be doing these things where it is forced upon me, it’s horrible. So I’m going to, in advance, choose this.” It feels like it’s the less bad option.

00:04:43

Why trying to appease your eating disorder doesn’t work

I think this is so relevant to eating disorders and so many of the conversations I have with people and so many of the fears. So much of the fear with the eating disorder is “what the eating disorder might say or do if I make a particular change.” For example, the fear around having breakfast is “How is the afternoon going to be? What’s going to happen later on in the day?”

It’s really this focusing further on. So often, when we’re talking about making a change, and I’m talking about this with clients and their fears, it’s not just about making the actual change and how unpleasant that is. And often, that’s even the less worrisome part for them. It’s “But what’s going to happen later on? What’s going to happen in the afternoon? What’s going tomorrow? What’s going to happen next week, next month?” This fear of “But the eating disorder is going to get much angrier and much worse by me making these changes.”

For so many people, the way that they think about the eating disorder is as this dictator, where they need to be subservient, and if they’re not, then it’s going to get worse. It’s not even just what’s going to happen now; it’s what’s going to happen in a week, in a month’s time, etc.

I think what happens is so often, there is this obeying in advance. There is the “Hey, I’m going to do these things because I feel like this is going to be the less bad situation because I’m just so worried about what might happen if I choose not to do this.”

When I was thinking about this, it made me think of a quote from Winston Churchill. He said, “You can’t reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” And I did some googling on this; I don’t know if this was really a quote that he said at the time, or it was a quote that was just added in to the Darkest Hour film about Churchill, but really this is a phrase about the fact that you can’t negotiate or reason with someone who is fundamentally hostile or dangerous.

For Churchill, he was thinking about the fact that “I can’t really appease Hitler.” And this is how the statement came about; it was about the appeasement with Hitler and Nazi Germany – recognising that you can’t appease someone like that. You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Whatever you give them, it will still continue going on. There was no way that he would be able to appease Hitler so that everything then settled down and it was fine. It would just keep marching on. The recognition that appeasement essentially doesn’t work.

This is really what I’m trying to get across when working with clients and having them recognise this. You can do some reflection on this yourself: that no matter what you do, appeasement doesn’t happen. No matter if you follow, to the letter, every single thing that the eating disorder asks you to do, at no point do you then get a pat on the back of “You were wonderful. You did such a great job today. Tomorrow’s going to be way easier.”

All that happens is whatever you did today now becomes the bare-bones minimum of what you’ve got to do tomorrow. So if you upped all of your exercise today as a way of trying to appease, now this is what you’ve got to do tomorrow. But tomorrow, not only are you doing this thing, you’re also being chastised for “Why aren’t you doing more?” And it’s the same with eating. If you don’t eat or you miss this meal or you reduce this thing, all that happens is the next day, “Okay, now that’s the norm, and maybe you should take a little more off as well.”

So no matter what you do, there is no real appeasement. It’s never-ending. Yeah, I might get this feeling of calmness or “Gosh, it feels so much easier to not have to do that thing right now”, but all that does is it means that tomorrow, now this is the new norm.

So really recognising this, because so often there’s this feeling – especially for people who are doing recovery, or often doing quasi-recovery, where you’re making more eating-disorder-appeasing changes, and you’ve been doing this for a while and it feels like, “Wow, I’ve putting in all of this effort.” What often happens is there’s this point of “This is just so much. I just need a break from this. I just want to put a pause on my recovery” with the idea of “If I put a pause on my recovery and I start to do more of the eating disorder behaviours, then I’ll get this real sense of relief.”

The reality is that that doesn’t happen. All that happens is that you lose ground from where you were before; you’re now in a more depleted state. If there has been weight lost, it doesn’t give you this real sense of freedom, of like “Oh wow, I’ve now got this wonderful buffer.” All that happens is now there’s even more terror about putting weight on, and there’s even more terror about that snack that you used to be eating consistently and now you’re not eating. Bringing that back in sounds monumental.

So just this recognition of appeasement never fundamentally works, because all that happens is you just get stuck in an even more restricted situation.

00:10:20

The eating disorder is powerless without action

When I think about this quote of “You can’t reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth”, the thing that also came to me is that the eating disorder is actually a paper tiger. It is something that claims or appears to be powerful or threatening, but it’s actually very ineffectual and is unable to withstand challenge.

I know this can sound like quite a bold statement, but it is true. If you start to go against the eating disorder, all it can do is throw up a lot of thoughts. And yes, it can make you uncomfortable, yes, it can create sensations, all of these things, but fundamentally, that’s it. It can’t do anything. And once you can recognise that these thoughts are just thoughts, that “they can’t actually do anything to me”, then you can see through the power of the eating disorder.

Because really, the only power that the eating disorder has is when you acquiesce and you follow along. If you don’t do that, then it’s just a whole lot of hot air. It’s just a whole lot of noise, but it’s not actually having an impact on you. Yes, it is having an impact on your quality of experience in that moment, but it’s not actually able to do anything.

So the power isn’t in the thoughts; the power is in the fact that you then take certain action and are obedient to those thoughts. But without that actually happening, the eating disorder is just a paper tiger. It can’t actually do anything.

00:11:57

A Wizard of Oz analogy

This made me think about the film The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this analogy on the podcast before; I definitely included it in one of the articles I’ve written at some point. But I think about the eating disorder very much like seeing the Wizard of Oz. There is a scene early on-ish (I can’t remember at what point it happens in the film) where Dorothy and the Tin Man and all of the characters, I can’t remember who all of them are, go and visit the Wizard of Oz.

And when they visit the Wizard of Oz the first time, they’re in this big, cavernous room. There’s lots of smoke, there’s lots of loud noises, there’s lots of bright lights. The Wizard seems all-powerful, and they’re all shaking in their boots. They’re all completely terrified of this Wizard. The Wizard tells them all these things that they need to go off and do, and they blindly go off and follow what the Wizard has suggested because they’re terrified to do anything else. So they go off, they do all these things, and then they come back.

And again, the next time they’re confronted with the Wizard, they’re equally terrified. There’s the same loud noises, the same green lights, the same smoke, the same booming voice, all of it is still going on. And then Toto, the little dog, goes and pulls back a curtain, and hiding behind this curtain, in this little booth, is this old man. It’s this old man that is doing all of this. He’s pushing some buttons, he’s making the smoke machine work, he’s speaking into some kind of microphone that changes his voice.

What they all realise is the Wizard isn’t this powerful thing; it’s just this old man using some tricks. I very much think about the eating disorder in the same way. At some point, there is this recognition of “It’s not this big, all-powerful thing. This is all just this grand illusion, and it’s this grand illusion only if I don’t look behind the curtain. But when I start to look behind the curtain, I see that it’s just this old man who’s trying to play a prank on me.”

I want you to start to recognise this, because how we think about something, how we conceptualise something has a really big impact on how we relate to that thing. If we are conceptualising the eating disorder as the original Wizard of Oz, then yeah, it’s terrifying. It’s this thing that is scaring me, it’s shouting really loudly at me, it’s very confronting. I don’t feel like I have any power connected to it, so I have to blindly follow along because I’m otherwise scared of the wrath of what might happen.

Versus when you conceptualise the eating disorder as it is a paper tiger, it is an old guy in a booth pushing some buttons, you feel very differently. And you can still hear the same loud noises, you can still hear the same words, the same thoughts. There can be still the same production that is going on. But you recognise it is just a production. I’m now watching a theatre production as opposed to this being life or death.

00:15:16

Closing thoughts

That is what I wanted to go through as part of this episode. I really feel that this email from Emily just set the gears in my mind working, and I really do think that for so many people in recovery – for all people with an eating disorder – it’s that there is so much of this obeying in advance for fear of what may come, of “what may happen if I don’t obey in advance, so I just give my power away.”

I would like to suggest that as part of recovery, it’s about recognising that “Hey, I don’t need to do that anymore. Whatever comes up, I’m going to be able to cope and deal with”, and that so much of what is there is just an illusion of what may happen and all of these fears. But actually, you have control, and you can do something different.

So that is it for this week’s episode. As I said at the top, I’m currently taking on clients. If you are wanting to fully recover from an eating disorder, if this is something that you recognise is something you struggle with and it’s so hard to do anything but follow along with the eating disorder, I would love to help you get to a place where that is no longer true, and that you do have full freedom and you are no longer living as a slave to the eating disorder thoughts – and actually, you’re not having the eating disorder thoughts anymore because you have done the things that were necessary to have that completely change in your life.

If that’s where you would like to get to, I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com, and as part of that, just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

All right, I will catch you all again next week for next episode. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon!