315: You’re Giving The Eating Disorder Too Much Credit

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/315.

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 clients to fully recover. And this is true whether the eating disorder has been going on for a year or has been going on for decades.

Before we start, I just want to say I’m currently taking on new clients. So if you have been living with an eating disorder and you’re sick and tired of living with an eating disorder, I would love to help you get to a place of full recovery. I’m a firm believer in full recovery, and that anyone can get there. It’s not a ‘might happen’; it’s an ‘it will happen’. If you do the things that you need to do to recover, you will reach a place of full recovery.

So if that is where you want to get to and you want the freedom and everything that is involved as part of getting there and getting your life back, I’d love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and then I can get back to you with the details of that.

So, on with today’s show. This one is actually a very late, last-minute episode. It’s Thursday afternoon; this is going to be going out on Monday morning, when this will finally go live. It’s really snowy outside. We’ve had a ton of snow over the last couple of days. My workday is coming to an end in the next couple of hours, and I had the realisation of “I haven’t recorded anything.” There was a part of me that just wanted to put out a re-broadcast episode, but I’ve been pretty consistent with doing episodes, so I thought, “Let me put some stuff down on paper and put out an episode.”

00:02:03

What does the eating disorder do for you?

This one has come about by a conversation that I had, or a couple conversations I’ve had this week with clients. But it was one client in particular where we were going through something, which I’ll talk about in a moment, and she said the phrase “I think people give the eating disorder too much credit.” So I wanted to do an episode riffing on this idea.

This came about because we were having a back-and-forth messaging about her and the eating disorder and some of the challenges that were coming up with making some changes, and one of the things that I suggested – and I do this often with clients – is “I want you to write down what the eating disorder does for you. What are the benefits of you having an eating disorder?”

I’m very much of the opinion no-one does something that doesn’t give them some kind of benefit. If someone says “The eating disorder does nothing for me”, I don’t believe that is true. I definitely believe that there are other ways of doing that thing or getting that need met – we can talk about that a little bit – but it’s doing something for you, or for anyone who is living with an eating disorder. I think it’s important to understand what that is.

The reason I like doing this as a writing exercise or a reflection is we as humans are meaning-making machines. We are always trying to make sense of our situation or why this thing occurred or “When that person said that thing, what did they really mean?” So we’re always trying to figure things out, and so often, we make up stories – stories that don’t necessarily connect to the reality of the situation or the truth of the situation, but they feel like this is what is going on.

This is part of the reason why this exercise, I think, can be helpful: we can start to do some reflection on what the eating disorder is doing for them, or at least what that person thinks it’s doing for them. Typically when I look through the list of things that they say it’s doing for them, some of those I may agree with, but some of them, it’s not actually true, and it’s often just an illusion.

So I want to run through a couple of things that came up – and I actually did this exercise with two clients that I saw this week, so I want to talk about some of the things that came up for both of these clients when going through this, because I think a lot of these types of things are going to be fairly universal. When you’re hearing me go through this, have a think about this for yourself. If you were to do some writing and jotting stuff down, what would you say are the reasons that you have the eating disorder or the eating disorder is continuing on? What needs is it meeting for you in your life?

00:04:58

Giving the eating disorder too much credit for academic performance

With the first person – and this is the person who talked about people giving the eating disorder too much credit – one of the things that she said was that it helped and helps her academically. She talked about the fact that prior to developing the eating disorder, she hadn’t been particularly academic, and then coinciding with that occurring, she did get more into academics, she did start to study more, and that then led on to her doing the study at university that she did, having the career that she has. She gave the eating disorder a lot of credit for that.

When I looked at that, one, it’s not that those two things didn’t coincide with one another – her eating disorder developed around the same time that she started to pay more attention in school and started to be more academic. But to say that the eating disorder made her more academic, I don’t agree with that as a statement. There are many people who, at 14 or 15 or 16, go from “Hey, I wasn’t really that into school” to suddenly really getting into school.

And that can happen for a number of different reasons. There could be this wonderful teacher that really takes them under their wing or is this real mentor to them and helps to give this boost of self-esteem or to notice something in them that they haven’t had noticed before, and this is the thing that totally changes someone’s perspective and they really get into study.

Or there’s a particular book that they read that just gels with them, and there’s this interest in this thing that they didn’t even know about before. This sparks something in terms of either their creativity or their curiosity, and then they become a much better student because of that.

It could be someone goes to a new environment, goes to a new school, and there’s just something about being in this new place and being in a way that school is done differently, or “I’m not with my old friends where I had this persona before, but now I’m in this new environment where I have a different persona.” This is what then leads to this change in someone’s dedication around their studies.

It can also happen for not great reasons. There can be a divorce. Your parents get divorced, and your way of being able to cope with this is “I just threw myself into my studies.” We wouldn’t necessarily say if we’re going to be recommending ways of people getting better into studies that we should be suggesting parental divorce, but there can be these things that coincide with it.

But if I’m thinking about, I’m wanting someone to do better academically – and not just better academically, but also then feel enjoyment with that, feel this real intrinsic motivation – I’m not going to be recommending someone have an eating disorder. Typically that’s not going to be helping someone from an academic standpoint. So even if these things coincide, if I think about this client and her ability to be able to have mental capacity and to be able to function really well, her not having an eating disorder is going to be way more beneficial than her having an eating disorder.

So that was one of the things that she gave the eating disorder a lot of credit for. “It really turned my life around in terms of my academics.”

00:08:35

Giving the eating disorder too much credit for decision-making

Another one was that for her, she said it takes over a lot of her decision-making. She can just palm off some of the decision-making to the eating disorder. So much of her life is decisions, whether that be around work or around her family or around her partner, kids, everything – her life is busy and there’s a lot of decisions, so for her, it feels like “I get a break from the decisions, and particularly I get a break from decisions around food.”

But again, when I had a look at this and we actually talked about it, there is a lot of indecision around food. She spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about food and preoccupied about food and worrying about food and all of these things. When I look at her, I don’t feel like this takes away her need to make a decision; if anything, it just ramps all of this up, and there’s this ambient noise all the time about food.

So while it can feel like on the surface, “If I just give in to the eating disorder’s requests, I get this temporary relief”, it’s not truly that this is a huge relief and she’s never thinking about food. If I think about my relationship with food and how much it spends time in my mind versus her relationship with food and how much time it spends in her mind – drastically different.

Where I believe she can get to is that me and her have a very similar relationship with food and spend a very similar amount of time thinking about food because she’s not living with an eating disorder.

It can often feel like “It’s helping me”, but the only reason it feels like it’s helping you is because you’re living with an eating disorder. If I have this momentary piece of relief because I decide to not have that snack, that’s not truly taking away the decision for you, because in 45 minutes’ time or 2 hours’ time, we’re back in that place of anguish and indecision, etc. So it’s not actually truly doing this thing that the client thinks it was doing for her.

00:10:48

Giving the eating disorder too much credit for self-worth

For another client I was working with this week, when we were talking about this, one of the things she said was that having the eating disorder provides her with a sense of self-worth. But what was interesting was when we were then reflecting on how the last couple of weeks had been going, it hadn’t been going well. And part of the reason it hadn’t been going well was she had been doing more things in accordance with the eating disorder and had been back doing more of the eating disorder behaviours.

It’s always really obvious to me when that is occurring. I can spend 5 minutes talking to a client and I can know that that’s occurred simply by the kinds of worries that they have, simply by hearing about some of the symptoms that are going on, simply by just being able to look and see what’s going on in their face and what’s going on in terms of their expression and how uncomfortable they are.

And I know this sounds really counterintuitive if you’re living with an eating disorder – you feel like, “Hey, if I was doing more of the recovery stuff, I would be so much more crawling out of my skin. I would be in so much more pain. It’d be so much more difficult.” This may be true on Day 1, but actually, as you start to do that more and more, we notice a really big difference. And with this client that I’m talking about, when I compared her after a couple weeks where she was doing a lot more of the recovery stuff, it was night and day in terms of how she was. There was laughter when we would have our sessions – something that was definitely not there this time. There was a difference in her outlook and her perspective, which wasn’t there this time.

So when we come back to this thing of “it gives me self-worth”, when we were chatting, there was lots of recognition of “Hey, I’m not being the mum that I want to be able to be. I can notice that my kids notice that I’m not present, and that’s not really great.” So there were all these areas where she noticed that things weren’t going as well as she would like, and that things weren’t as well as they had previously been, and this was having a huge impact on her sense of self and self-worth, and actually having the opposite effect; “I feel so bad that that’s why I want to go back to the eating disorder, because I can’t deal with the fact that this thing feels so bad.”

When I look at that, I’m like, this isn’t giving you self-worth. This is giving the opposite of self-worth. You feel way worse about yourself by doing this thing.

So recognising that this gives you an illusion of “It gives me self-worth” or “I only get self-worth when I really narrow in the band of what I focus on.” If I narrow in the band of “Hey, I went X number of hours without having something to eat” or “I did this many number of steps”, then yeah, I can get my self-worth by focusing on that tiny thing, that tiny sliver of a so-called achievement. But if I then bring in all of the other components of my life in terms of my reflection of how I’m doing in terms of my partner and my relationship with them, how I’m doing with my kids, how I’m doing at my capacity to do my job or my ability to just be with people and be in this world – actually, no, this is not actually helping, and this is having a detrimental effect on my self-worth.

And the same person was saying, “It gives me this sense of safety and control and comfort” – and again, when I reflected on the person I was talking to this time versus the person I was talking to a few weeks ago when they had been doing more pro-recovery choices, it’s night and day how comfortable they actually appeared to be. And yes, it can be hard to make those choices, but the person who I was talking to at this point, there was no comfort there. There was no feeling of safety.

That feeling of comfort and safety was only there temporarily. It would be there at the point where “Am I going to have that meal? No, I’m not going to have that meal” and then I get that sense of comfort or safety. But in terms of how that panned out for the rest of the day, there was not real comfort and safety. If anything, things were getting worse and worse and there was a lot more eating disorder thoughts, there was a lot more mental anguish, there was a lot more fear. So it didn’t deliver on any of these things.

00:15:14

Eating disorder behaviours are like sweet, slow-acting poison

I often think of eating disorders and the eating disorder behaviours as being somewhat like this nice-tasting poison, where there’s this delayed effect from the poison. Someone feels like, “I need this drink. I have this drink. Oh, that tastes very nice”, and yet they don’t recognise that this thing is just poison.

It’s then creating all the things that they’re scared of and afraid of in terms of the fear of weight gain. It creates that fear of weight gain. It creates the fear of food. It creates the fear of stillness. It creates the fear of taking time off exercise. It creates the fear of eating with other people. All of the fears that are there are because of the eating disorder and the eating disorder behaviours.

And yet we take this drink of this thing that tastes sweet and then later on, when we’re feeling terrible about all the different things, we don’t make the connection between “Hey, that’s occurring because I’ve now got into a more low-energy state. That’s occurring because I missed that snack this morning or I went for that run this morning” or whatever it may be. It’s not connected to the fact that “Hey, I did these eating disorder behaviours” because what that feels like is “That was my solution.”

It then becomes this really vicious cycle, because then the next day, I’m actually feeling worse, so what do I do? I reach for this poison that I don’t recognise as poison, and then I take more of it, and then I feel worse, and then my digestion is even worse, and now I’ve got this other thing that’s going on, and it just becomes this really, really vicious cycle.

What I’m wanting people to recognise by going through these kinds of exercises and chatting with them, and as I am sharing here, is the true cause-and-effect relationship. Because I think it gets very skewed in someone’s mind where the thing that they think of as the solution is actually the problem. The thing that they think of as helping them is actually making it worse.

And again, it’s not that I don’t notice that there is some momentary relief that this provides, but in terms of the bigger picture, it just creates harm and more harm and more harm, and then doesn’t really provide any solution outside of that little moment. So this was the thing that we talked about.

00:17:45

The eating disorder is a tool of avoidance

I said at the top that eating disorders do provide something for people. It does meet a need or them. And really, if I’m breaking it down and thinking, what need does it typically provide? – and there’s more to it than just this, but this is a short podcast, so this is what I’m going to cover today – but really, the need that it provides is a tool of avoidance. Eating disorders are anxiety disorders; eating disorders are about avoidance.

It’s avoidance of thoughts or feelings or physical sensations or avoidance or particular activities or stopping particular activities or going to certain events. It’s either “I’m doing this avoidance in advance of this thing occurring; my fear is that if I don’t do this, this thing will occur, so I’m going to do this in advance” or “This thing started to come up, and I thought I couldn’t cope with it, so I now had to do something immediately to take it away.”

Really, that is what the eating disorder provides for someone. It is a tool of avoidance so that I don’t have to deal with that thought that was coming up, or I can at least try and mediate that thought that was coming up so when I’m having those thoughts, I’m at least able to tell myself, “Look, I did this compensation” or “I skipped this thing” or “That thing’s lower calorie than that other thing”, so I’ve been able to try and do something to mediate it.

The problem with this is that it’s never quite enough. At no point is there a real eating disorder congratulating you and saying, “Well done, this is fantastic. Really great” and someone is able to have this real, genuine sigh of relief and “Hey, cool, I don’t have to think about this for many hours or many days.” What happens is “I did this thing”, and no matter what you do and how much you give in, there’s the “You probably could’ve done more” or “That’s fine for today, but tomorrow we’re going to have to halve that.” It’s just never enough.

You try and avoid, and it does something temporarily, but it just never quite gets you there. It’s the itch that you can never quite scratch. I think there’s a quote of “You can never get satisfied by something that’s almost enough”, and I think this is true of eating disorders. It’s that thing of “It feels like it should be getting me there, and then I do that thing and it’s still not getting me there, so I do a little more and it’s still not getting me there”, and then before you know it you’re in a completely different state to where you started.

00:20:24

Meeting those needs without the eating disorder

Really, if I’m thinking about what is the goal of recovery from this needs standpoint, it’s twofold. It’s, one, how do we start to meet those needs, but meet them in some other way? Finding ways to help someone genuinely feel safety and comfort that aren’t using the eating disorder or the eating disorder behaviours. Or to help someone feel like they do genuinely have self-esteem and that they’re worthy of love and that they’re worthy of respect and worthy of taking care of and all of these things. How can we learn how to do that without using the eating disorder?

So its’ learning ways that are constructive that genuinely meet that need, because I think with an eating disorder, it’s an illusion of meeting that need as opposed to it actually being met.

And then the other part of this is recognising that actually, there are certain things that need to change so that you realise, “I don’t need to even meet that need. That need is no longer something that needs to be met because I’ve been able to do these other things.” I think it’s really a combination of those two.

And by going through this, you learn, “Hey, I can actually cope without using the eating disorder. I am stronger than my mind was making it out that I could be, or at least the eating disorder was making it out I could be.” It’s learning ways and tools and techniques of how to be with that discomfort or how to be with those uncomfortable thoughts, and it’s learning that “I’m able to do this, I’m able to tolerate it.” That comes about through lots of different things that I focus on as part of recovery.

But that’s truly how we start to then meet the needs that someone has, or to change the needs that someone has, through recovery as opposed to through the eating disorder.

So that was it for today. I would love to hear your thoughts based on this. Does this resonate with you, or did I just get lucky with two clients in one week and that’s biasing my thoughts on how important this is as an idea?

As I said at the top, I’m taking on new clients at the moment, so if you’re interested and you’re wanting to end however long the eating disorder’s been going on, if you’re wanting to not be dealing with that, then I would love to be helping. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.

That is it for this week’s show. I’ll be back with another episode next week. Take care, and I will see you soon!

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