336: Overshoot in Recovery

Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcript, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/336.

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 just want to say that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder, irrespective of how long that has been going on, whether it’s a year, whether it’s multiple decades, and you want to reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help. I know full recovery can feel like this very distant thing or “something that is for other people, but not me”, but I truly believe that everyone can fully recover.

So if this is something that you would like to work on and would like to achieve, then I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can get the details over to you.

So, on with today’s show. What I want to go through with this episode is the idea of overshoot. Overshoot is something that you may be aware of, you may be not aware of, but it’s something that comes up a lot in conversations with people in recovery, with clients I work with. So I want to go through what overshoot is, how the concept became a little popularized or why people are talking about it, and also why I think we need to be a little bit cautious with it and some of the downsides of really keeping this concept or idea of overshoot in the front of our mind.

00:01:50

What is overshoot + where did the idea come from?

If you don’t know what overshoot is, overshoot is this idea that when in recovery, the body will temporarily gain weight beyond the natural long-term set point of the individual. So you gain weight in recovery and it goes beyond where your body needs it to be, and the reason the body is doing this is it’s part of the recovery process; it’s the body trying to protect from a famine that might still be coming just around the corner, so it puts on more weight than where someone was originally as part of that healing and that protective process.

During this phase, there’s a lot stronger hunger and increased eating. We often talk about extreme hunger as part of this. And someone can be eating large amounts of food or still feel hungry even after the point of feeling physically full, so there can be physical hunger but there can also be mental hunger. There can be this situation where “I feel physically full but I also feel physically hungry.” So there can be this real mix of sensations that someone can be having during this time.

I haven’t really thought about overshoot in this way, but when I was doing a little bit of research for this, it can also be overshoot in lots of different areas where things feel too much. So an overshoot of needing rest or an overshoot of needing food or an overshoot of emotions. This idea that there is this period where things are more than where they would be at a latter point within recovery.

Really, the basic idea with overshoot is that you are going to gain weight in recovery; at some point that reaches a high, and then it naturally comes down. So there is this additional weight that is gained in recovery, and this is only temporary, and this additional weight is known as the overshoot.

Where did this idea come from? I think the original source of this idea and this concept comes from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. If you’re unaware of that experiment, I’m not going to go into any great details about it here; I’ve done a number of podcasts on it. My most recent one on it goes into it in a huge amount of detail, looks at some of the research that’s been done post the experiment, catching up with the men who were participants in it. It’s a really big deep dive into that. So I’ll link to that in the show notes, and I highly recommend you check that out.

As part of this experiment, there were 36 men. They were starved as part of the experiment and then they were re-fed as part of the experiment. What they noticed as part of that re-feeding was that their weight went above where they originally started, and particularly their body fat percentage went higher than where they started, and then as they continued to eat and continued to allow themselves to eat, with time that high that they reached with their weight naturally started to come down, and they then ended up basically back where they started before the experiment even took place. That is a really summarized version of what’s going on; there’s a lot more detail to it. It took a lot longer for all of these things to occur than is often talked about in many places.

But this is really where that idea of overshoot came from because this is what the men experienced, where they went higher than where they had started and then naturally came back down without them intentionally restricting, without them doing exercise or doing anything to intentionally bring their weight back down. That was just what happened.

I think from this, if I think about where are the areas that I’ve heard about this or I feel people have been talking about this, the first place was Your Eatopia, which then later became The ED Institute. This is Dr Gwyneth Olwyn’s website. I became aware of her I think back in 2010, 2009, somewhere around that time. She, as part of her site, talked about the dynamic recovery method, and I think before that it was called ‘Minnie Maud’, which was a hybrid of the Maudsley Method, which is FBT or the family-based treatment method, and ‘Minnie’ coming from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. So she talked a lot as part of her site and the way she thought about recovery of there is this period of overshoot that occurs as part of it.

Matt Stone was another person who I know talked about it. He had a website called 180 Degree Health. Again, this is something I found probably in 2009-2010, and he had a very detailed post or couple of posts looking at Ancel Keys’ Biology of Human Starvation book. Ancel Keys was the person who ran the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and after doing that experiment, he wrote two really long tomes of books. I think they were 1,000-ish pages each. Matt Stone read both of them and then did a very long post about this. As part of that, he then talked about the overshoot that happened in part of the experiment and that then happens as part of recovery.

And then there were other people who came from both of those original sources. Tabitha Farrar seems to be fairly impacted by Gwyneth Olwyn’s site and obviously her own experience as part of recovery. There’s times where she talks about it. I know Caroline Dooner, who wrote The F*ck It Diet, was someone who followed Matt Stone’s work and so was impacted by him talking about it. People like Kayla Rose Kotecki or Elisa Oras from Follow the Intuition. These are some of the people online, whether that be on YouTube or in blogs or whatever, who really then started to popularize this idea and made a lot more people aware of it.

00:08:09

Why weight gain is necessary in recovery

I want to just spend a moment talking about weight gain as part of recovery. We can put the overshoot concept to the side just for a moment, but I just want to explain what happens in terms of the weight gain in recovery and why it is so necessary.

I know nearly everyone – or we can remove the word ‘nearly’ from that sentence – everyone would wish that this didn’t happen as part of recovery, and if you were getting to design how recovery would work, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be saying, “Hey, I want my body to gain weight and I want my body to go through these processes”, but unfortunately that’s just what has to happen.

With weight gain in recovery, really this is about your body healing. When we look at the order of healing that has to occur as part of the body, for whatever reason – you may think it’s a bug, not a feature – but the body to start with really prioritises weight gain, and weight gain above all else, and often weight gain around the middle, around the abdomen, as part of the first stage of recovery. It does this, one, because it doesn’t know if this is a temporary thing. Is this more food going to keep coming in, or are we just getting lucky for a couple of weeks? So it’s a little gun-shy in terms of how much it’s going to start spending on repair functions and moving out of its priority, which is solely about survival at this point.

So what it does is puts on more weight to start with. And then as time goes on, it will start to use more of this new energy to do a lot of the repair functions, and that can be repairing muscle, it can be repairing organs, it can be repairing bones, it can be doing all the repair work that gets missed out on when you’re living with an eating disorder and the body’s not getting what it needs. Because every night when we go to sleep, if the body has been getting what it needs, it adapts. It breaks certain cells down, it rebuilds certain things. It’s constantly doing this clean-up around the body, getting rid of certain substances that the body produces.

And all of that takes energy. And if the body’s not getting enough of what it needs, it has to triage what it can spend on, and certain things get turned down and certain things get turned off. So when we start to then do recovery, we’re bringing in more food, we’re doing more rest, the body starts to gain weight. And in the beginning, that weight gain is very much focused on just gaining weight, and then as time goes on, more of it gets shuttled towards helping the body to do the repair functions that it needs to do.

This means that often – this isn’t always the case – but the body will gain weight quickly if it is given what is needed because it tends to err on the side of caution. So when that new energy comes in, it is just “Okay, we’re going to hold on to this thing.” This isn’t the case for everyone; I’ve worked with people where they’ve really upped their calories in a short amount of time and yet their weight gain is very, very slow. But on average, the more that someone is starting to eat and do to change that energy balance, the more that the body will start to gain weight.

And I do also want to note at this point that by going slowly, you are not decreasing the weight gain that you are eventually going to need to put on. I think there’s this idea that “If I can just give my body the exact amount of calories and nothing more, I will negate any extra weight gain that I may put on” and that’s just not the case. The body’s going to gain what it’s going to gain, so trying to do this more slowly I really don’t think is helpful or productive. It just drags out how long recovery takes, and the biggest fear that most people have is “Where is this going to end?” You’re just taking a longer time to be able to get to that answer point because this thing is now taking longer.

So the body gains weight quickly, especially in the beginning. It seeks to store more of that energy as fat, especially around the abdomen, especially in the beginning. It ratchets up your biological cues towards hunger. And this is something where people can feel like, “Hey, I’ve started to eat a lot more, and I’m now hungrier than I’ve ever been.” This often makes no sense to people because they’re like, “I don’t understand. I was living on so much less before and I was fine.”

Really, what’s happened is that the body is now aware that food is available and it is now using some of that extra energy to turn on certain functions that are now driving someone towards that food. Because if there’s no food available, it’s a lot of waste of energy to be turning those things on, but if now food is possibly available, then “We need to get going while the going is good.” So you can notice “I’m eating a lot more, double, triple what I was eating before, and now I feel hungrier than I ever did.” That is a fairly common thing that happens during this weight gain stage with recovery.

As I said, the real goal with this is the body wants to then rebuild tissues and organs and bones and muscles and hormones and all of these things to get the body back into a real place of homeostasis, where it is able to function happily and healthily and it’s able to meet the demands of everything that is being asked of it.

00:13:42

What weight gain in recovery looks like in reality

What this can then look like in real terms is that you gain weight fairly rapidly, and this can be pretty scary, terrifying, given the culture that we live in and also given the kinds of thoughts that the eating disorder brings up. It can mean that you feel always hungry or you get satisfied and then half an hour later you’re hungry again, and this can happen irrespective of your BMI. Something like overshoot, which I’ll get onto, something like extreme hunger, none of these are just something that happens with someone who is in an underweight body. It can happen to people all across the weight spectrum because all across the weight spectrum, you can be restricting; all across the weight spectrum, you can be malnourished; all across the weight spectrum, your body can be in a state where it’s not been getting what it’s been needing.

It can obviously then bring up lots of feelings around “I must be doing recovery wrong because if I was doing it right, I wouldn’t be this hungry” or “If I was doing it right, I wouldn’t be gaining weight in this way.” So it’s very normal in this stage and going through recovery to have a lot of those thoughts come up. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means that these are the thoughts your mind is generating in this moment.

There can also be this fear that this is never going to stop, that this is just going to go on forever, it’s going to keep going exponentially. Again, this is why I think it can be so much more helpful to do things quickly, because you get to reach that point where you discover “This doesn’t go on forever” much quicker than when you’re dragging it out.

00:15:23

Overshoot doesn’t happen for everyone

What I want to say, as I mentioned at the beginning, this idea of overshoot is that your body gains weight, and it gains it above where it needs to be long term, and that with time, it then starts to lose it and it starts to do this very spontaneously, very naturally, and then your body comes back down to where you were pre-eating disorder or to some point.

I will say that I have noticed this. This has happened with clients. It’s not that this thing is a fairy tale and it never happens. It does happen. And overshoot doesn’t happen for everyone. Lots of people do not lose the overshoot. Lots of people don’t experience the idea of this overshoot happening. They just get up to a higher weight and that’s where they are.

I want to say this because I think what often happens is that this idea, when someone’s heard this idea, whether it’s from a podcast or on a blog or whatever, can really get lodged in someone’s mind and it can have an impact on recovery, and there can be this real feeling of “It’s fine, this is all overshoot. In time this is all going to go down” and it has a really big impact on how they’re doing recovery, the kinds of foods they’re eating, all of these different things because “this is just temporary.”

What I want to do for the rest of this episode is really go through why I think that kind of thinking and this real focus on overshoot is a problem and the problems that it can create. What I would suggest doing is it’s fine to know about overshoot, but I would really put it to the side and not be thinking about it. And if it happens in the end, fine. But I would not be basing your recovery around it because I think that’s a problem.

00:17:22

Reinforces the idea that weight gain is temporary

When I look at what are the problems, one, I think it can really reinforce this very conditional view of recovery. This conditional view of like “It’s okay to gain weight as long as it’s just temporary.” There can still be a lot of this attaching of safety or attaching of morality or attaching success about being in a smaller body because “Whatever’s going on now in my recovery, that’s not how things are going to be forever. This is just for now, and later on I’m going to be back in that smaller body and then I’m going to be fine. Then I’m going to be safer, then I’m going to be healthier, then I’m going to be” – fill in the blank.

It means that so much of what’s going on feels very conditional. I think what that prevents is it prevents someone being able to fully accept where their body is and where their body may naturally settle. Because as I said, some people, there is an overshoot, but for many people that just doesn’t occur, and they’re then in that larger body. And we are then having this situation where “But I thought this was going to go down. But I thought this was going to be temporary” and there’s been this very conditional part of recovery on “But this is not how it’s going to stay.”

What I think that does is really leaves the door open for future restriction because “The body didn’t reduce the way I thought it was going to. I thought recovery was meant to be different to this.”

00:18:59

Creates a waiting game with the body

I think another way it causes a problem is it really creates this waiting game with the body. The idea is that “I’ll eat enough now because I know I’m going to lose it later on” and “It’s fine to do this now, but later on it won’t be fine.” I think what this can also do is lead to a lot of life being put on hold, where “I don’t need to go out, I don’t need to do the things to challenge myself, I don’t need to start dating or go out to that event or do this thing or go on that holiday or any of these things. I’m going to just wait, and then when my body changes, then when I’ve lost the overshoot, then I’ll start to reemerge back out into the world.”

I think that’s a really dangerous way to do things, one, because when I think of eating disorders, eating disorders are anxiety disorders; eating disorders are about avoidance. And if you are continuing to say, “I’m not going to do this thing and that thing and that thing until my body changes”, you are still doing avoidance. You’re not learning how to do the exposure so that you can learn, “Oh, I’m actually able to cope in these situations. I’m actually able to do that thing that I thought I wasn’t able to do.”

This then becomes a problem, one, if the overshoot doesn’t come off, because now someone’s stuck in that place of “I never challenged any of these things and I’ve been waiting for my body to change and now it hasn’t”, or two, even if someone’s body then does naturally change, there was still this very conditional acceptance on this thing. All they’ve learnt is that “I can now go reemerge back out into the world at this body”, but if anything in the future ever changes, we haven’t learnt how to do that.

And the reality is that things are going to change. You’re going to get older. You’re going to hit menopause or you’re going to have this time where your life has changed, you’ve got older and your body’s changed. And that’s true for all of us.

If we’ve made this real condition of being able to be in the world and do certain things in the world on the body being a certain way or a certain size, at some point that’s going to catch up with someone. So I think this is a problem even for the person who does have the overshoot drop off and their body becomes smaller. My recommendation is that you shouldn’t be waiting for these things. You should still be going out and doing them.

00:21:45

Delays true body acceptance

I think connected to this is it then delays that work of true body acceptance, because when you focus on the overshoot, you’re putting off a lot of the deeper work around body image or fatphobia or internalized weight stigma because it’s like, “I don’t really need to do that work because my body’s going to go down to a smaller size, and then that work becomes irrelevant because of course I can now love my smaller body.”

Again, this then becomes this coping mechanism through avoidance. So “I’m coping with recovery by avoiding the grief of actually having to deal with some of these things, having to deal with the body image stuff or the fatphobia” or whatever. Again, I don’t think this serves someone whether the overshoot drops off or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then someone at some point has to start doing that work, or even if it does drop off, we haven’t really learnt about those things and been able to deal with those things and challenge those things because the only way we became okay was when the weight dropped down.

00:22:57

Leads to shame or guilt

I think it can also lead to a lot of shame or guilt if the overshoot doesn’t reverse. As I said, this is true for many, many people. When that happens, it can feel like “But I must be doing recovery wrong” or “I must be the exception here. I must be the broken one. I must be the one that isn’t doing the right things. Maybe I should’ve got into exercise earlier or maybe I needed to eat healthier foods as part of my recovery.”

I think it’s this shame, this guilt, these kinds of emotions that then can really lead to someone going back down a disordered path because there can be this feeling that the overshoot is what’s meant to happen, and if that hasn’t been what has happened, “I must’ve done something wrong. I must’ve overeaten, or I must’ve taken too much time off exercise.”

What I want to get across as part of this episode is no, you haven’t done something wrong. Overshoot is not something that happens for everyone, and I think it’s really important to understand this because otherwise it can very easily lead to a relapse. And really all of the areas where I’m saying I think this can be problematic is because I think it can lead someone back down that path.

00:24:25

Distracts from the work of healing

I think it can also distract someone from the real work of healing. And when I think about eating disorders, there are different stages with recovery. I’ve done a podcast recently on that, so you can go and listen to that.

With each stage, there are different things that are important as part of it. In the beginning, in the first phase of recovery, yeah, weight gain is really important. Focusing on food is really important. Focusing on exercise is really important. Making changes in those areas is actually where it’s at and where the focus needs to be.

But as time goes on, there’s a lot of other stuff that becomes much more important. And it’s not that it’s not important in the beginning; it’s just that if you’re not doing those other things to address the energy balance, then it’s just Groundhog Day. You’re not really fundamentally dealing with the thing that’s driving this.

So when there is too much of a focus on weight under the banner of overshoot and that this thing’s going to come down, etc., someone’s missing out on the opportunity to really start focusing on emotional processing or nervous system repair or support or relationship rebuilding or developing new coping skills, reclaiming identity or joy or all of these different things, because we’re working on the idea that “My weight’s going to come down, I’m going to lose the overshoot, and then I can drop back into everything I was doing before.”

So it removes the idea that “I need to do these things” because the overshoot’s going to swoop in and save everything – much like the eating disorder. “It’s going to come in, it’s going to solve everything for me, and then I don’t have to do some of this stuff.” It’s like, no, this is really important stuff to do, and really important whether the overshoot comes off or whether it doesn’t.

I think what this means is that it’s really important to put this idea of the overshoot on hold and just focus on, “Let’s pretend the overshoot is never going to happen; what is going to be important for me as part of my recovery? And not just recovery, but what’s going to be important for me as someone who wants to live a quality life for many, many decades, who wants to have relationships, who wants to be able to be emotionally regulated, who wants to have skills to be able to deal with the challenges of life?” I think that’s where the focus needs to be.

00:27:04

Can lead to missing that a relapse is occurring

The final piece I want to mention of why I think this can be a problem is I think it can lead to someone missing when a relapse is occurring. If there’s this idea that there’s an overshoot, if weight loss starts to happen, this is accredited to “Oh, it’s just the overshoot. This is dropping off, this is what should happen” without someone starting to pay attention to “Is this actually what’s going on, or are there other reasons for this? Have I started to take my eye off the ball in terms of the amount of food that I should be eating? Have I started to bring exercise back in and I’ve done so too soon or I’ve let it increase too soon?” It can mean that someone becomes very blind to some of the other things that could be occurring and just putting everything into the “this is the overshoot that is doing this thing.”

I think it can also be that even if the overshoot does start to happen of its own accord, it can be that someone is so giddy and excited and so happy for this thing that they can start to do things to try and speed it up. It’s like, “Oh right, my body’s now starting to lose weight, we’re in a really good spot. Let me speed this thing up, so I start doing more exercise”, or this is where things get a little more orthorexic and we’re having more ‘healthy’ foods and all of this.

And again, this then spirals. Someone misses the fact that “What I’ve started to do is unhealthy behaviours again, and I’m doing them under the guise of being healthy, but actually the results, as we go out the longer term, is that this thing isn’t healthy. This thing is now leading me back into an eating disorder. So even if in the very beginning I’m feeling really positive, I feel like I’m getting my old me back – oh wow, now I’m back in a relapse. How did I not see this occurring?”

So I think that while people are wanting the overshoot to happen, it feels like that’s going to be such a benefit to their life and it will make recovery so much more worth it that this thing has occurred, I really think that even if you do start to notice it’s occurring, you want to be on the lookout for making sure that this is happening for the right reasons.

I think this is really true for people who’ve spent a long time in recovery. If you’ve spent the last year, two years, five years, whatever it is trying to get to this place, you want to make sure recovery sticks. Living with an eating disorder sucks. Going through recovery sucks. You don’t want to have to do it multiple times.

So really making sure, “Hey, if I’m noticing some weight coming down, let me pressure test this. Let me take a little more time off movement and see what happens then. Let me intentionally up my eating and see what happens then” and just start to notice these things. I don’t want to just accept from the word ‘go’ that if this is coming down, it’s for really good reasons and it should be happening. I want to make sure that I’m not unintentionally slipping back into a bad place with this.

This is why I think that the idea of overshoot in and of itself I don’t think is a problem, but I think when it becomes the real primary focus of someone’s recovery, I do think it can be a problem. And it can be a problem not just in the early stages of recovery but it can be a problem a long way into recovery, especially, as I said, if things do naturally start to come down but people are then doing things to exaggerate or to speed up that process.

I think that creates lots of problems, and this unfortunately has been the case for a number of clients that I’ve worked with. “It felt like this was just the overshoot, and now lo and behold, I’m back in a relapse.”

So that is it for this episode. I guess the final thing I would say connected to all this is how much of the importance of practising self-compassion and care for oneself is through recovery.

I think there’s a lot of body grief that comes up. I very much think of eating disorder recovery as being a grief-filled process, and this is especially true connected to the changing body. So really, to be doing practices that support that grief – and grief is never a fun process to go through, but being able to allow yourself to move through the different stages with grief and to be having practices that are able to support you as you go through that that isn’t just about “let’s wait and see what happens with the overshoot.” Because as I said all throughout this podcast, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful and doesn’t typically lead to a good outcome.

So, that is it for this week’s episode. I hope that this has been useful. If this is a topic that you’ve heard about before, I hope it’s given you some new information on it or maybe challenged you to think about it in a different way. I will be back next week with another episode.

As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients, so if you really want to get to a place of full recovery, if this is a topic that you’ve thought about and maybe you’re in the quasi-recovery place and you’ve been doing things but you’re waiting for this overshoot to drop off and actually realising “This is not where I want to stay, this isn’t particularly helpful”, I would love to help. Send an email to info@seven-health.com and then just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line and I’ll get the details over to you.

So that is it for this week. I will catch you again with a new episode. Until then, take care, and I’ll see you soon!

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