319: How to Recover From An Eating Disorder This Year

Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to show notes and the transcripts and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/319.

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 the show, Happy New Year! This is the first episode I’m recording in 2025. You could be listening to this in 2026, 2027 – that’s the wonders of podcasts, that I can record something and then in many years to come, people are still listening to it. But yeah, this is the first one I’m recording in 2025.

We had a really lovely Christmas over here. Often I’ll go away for Christmas or just after Christmas and we’ll have a chunk of time off, but this year I had a couple of weeks off and really didn’t do very much, and it was lovely. We’ve had some pretty cold weather over here – I think it’s -10 or -12 today, which in Fahrenheit is 10, 12, 13 degrees, somewhere around that. So it’s very cold. There’s lots of snow, but nice blue skies. Just had a lot of time chilling out at home, putting the fire on at three in the afternoon, watching TV.

Ramsay, my son, is into Minecraft, so I actually played a fair bit of Minecraft with him over the break. We got – I said ‘we’; it was part of Ramsay’s Christmas present, but I’m the one that am using it more – put a golf net in the cabin that we have, so it’s been nice to be able to hit golf balls. For someone who is massively into golf and can’t play a lot during the winter because of snow and poor weather and all that, it’s nice to have somewhere to be able to go at home and hit golf balls.

So that was a lot of what I did over the break, but it was nice just to have some time with just the three of us and spend time at home. I feel rejuvenated. I’m excited to be back working and to be doing this podcast again, and really that’s what this episode today is about: how to recover in this new year.

Before I get on with that, I just want to say that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want to make 2025 a different year than it has been in your recovery before, then I would love to help. And again, if you’re listening to this in the future, could be 2026 or 2027.

But if you are wanting to fully recover – and I do understand that that as a concept can feel so far-fetched for someone that it feels like that is just so in the future, so unattainable. I get that. But if you want have a life that looks different to how it is now, if you want to be freer from the eating disorder, then I would love to help. I work with people where the eating disorder has been going on for a matter of months or a year through to people where this has been decades long.

So if you fall anywhere in that bracket and you would like help, then please send an email. If you email info@seven-health.com, put ‘coaching’ in the subject line and then I can send over the details and we can figure out if we’re going to be a good match to work together, and if the way that I work could be helpful for you.

Really, what I want to do today on the show, the topic is how to recover this year. I want to go through some of the things that I think are really important as part of recovery. If you’re a regular listener, you will notice that these are topics that I’ve hit on the show, or at least some of them are, at various points. But I wanted to put this all into one place so that you could have a listen through. If you want to take notes, you can take notes. But if you’re trying to do recovery, this is where I would be putting my focus. This is how I think about recovery from a 30-foot view.

There are lots of other things that I’m not going to cover as part of this because everything I do is very individualised; I work with people and it’s depending on what is coming up for them of how we strategize, but there is a lot of overlap. Really, I would say that what I’m going to cover today is really the core or the bulk of what I’m doing with most people because this is what is essential and important as part of recovery.

00:04:39

Don’t aim to be just a ‘normal eater’ in recovery

When I think about recovery, I think about it as being biopsychosocial. This means that there’s a biological component, there’s a psychological component, and there’s a social component. If I’m thinking about this from a biological standpoint, eating disorders are very much about being in a low-energy state. When you get into that low-energy state, that in a sense turns on the eating disorder. That’s the thing that starts to make it that you are fearing certain foods or fearing stopping movement or fearing making different changes because it starts to have a shift in terms of how your brain works, how your nervous system starts to catalogue different things. It’s being in this low-energy state that has a huge impact on a lot of the eating disorder thoughts.

But even outside of that, it’s what has a really big impact on the body and physiology. I’ve done a huge podcast – or a number of podcasts, but the most recent one – on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and as part of that experiment, those guys didn’t go on to develop eating disorders, but what they did suffer with was all of these changes in terms of their physical health and their psychological health, and that is down to the body’s not getting what it needs, so it has to turn down and turn off certain functions. And when that happens, certain symptoms start to arise. People’s perceptions start to change and their beliefs start to change and the thoughts they have start to change, and all of this shifts solely by being in a lower energy state.

I think this is something people really need to understand, because I think what often happens is someone’s been living with an eating disorder for a really long time, and their thought process is, “How do I become a normal eater? I just want to become a normal eater instantly.” And really, the goal of recovery isn’t for you to become a normal eater in the short term. In the short term, the goal of recovery is we need to bring in food to be able to deal with all of the energy debt that has accrued and to get out of that low-energy state.

What happens is if you’re not taking in enough for what your body needs, as I said, it turns certain things off, it turns things down, but so many of the repair processes that are meant to be happening day in and day out just stop happening. We need to spend some time doing all the catch-up for all that stuff.

So if the goal is “I’ve lived with an eating disorder for the last year or five years or two decades and I’m instantly going to go back to eating what a normal person needs”, you’re missing out on all the recovery that needs to happen. If you’re in 200 grand worth of debt, just starting to save the way that a regular person saves, where they don’t have any debt – you’re not going to then deal with all that debt. You’re not going to be in the same financial position that that person is.

So really understanding that this is a low-energy problem and the way to get out of that is that there needs to be a so-called surplus of energy. I don’t think it’s a surplus of energy; it appears to be a surplus because it’s more than what other people are eating or it’s more than what someone needs if they haven’t had an eating disorder. But we need that extra energy coming in to be able to deal with all of the things that have happened previously, because you do then get to a stage once you’ve done the recovery where the energy you’re bringing in is just to cover today’s expenses because that’s all we need to. We already covered yesterday’s expenses yesterday with eating. But as part of recovery, you’re not just dealing with today’s expenses; you’re dealing with all the expenses that have accrued over the last however long that haven’t been paid.

So getting out of the mindset of “Hey, I just want to be a normal eater” to start with and recognising, “I need to do all this other stuff to then get to the stage of being a normal eater.”

Connected to this is then the idea that bigger changes are better. One thing I should say is I mentioned at the top that there’s lots of these topics that I’ve done other podcasts on; I will put these in the show notes. If this is a topic that I’ve hit on another podcast and I’ve gone into even more detail with it or I’ve used different analogies or whatever, I will link to all of those in the show notes so that this can be your starting point, and then you can go back through even more information connected to this.

00:09:05

Make bigger changes rather than smaller ones

So the second idea is that bigger changes are better. I think what often happens for many people is that they think that “If I make these smaller changes, it will be easier for me. It will be easier for me making this little change, and then I’ll maybe build up to this medium change and then I’ll maybe build up to this larger change.”

There’s a couple of reasons why that doesn’t work. One is that as I said earlier, this is a low-energy problem, and when you only bring in a little bit of extra energy, it doesn’t actually get you to that place. It doesn’t change anything fundamentally, so you’re still stuck in the same eating disorder patterns, you’re still stuck in the same lines of thinking. You haven’t brought in any amount of energy that’s making a difference in your physiology, so what happens is “I’ve made this little change but nothing fundamentally has changed.”

Then there’s all these eating disorder thoughts of “That didn’t actually work” or you recognise that it’s really, really hard to make this small change, and there then becomes this falsehood of “If it’s really hard to make a small change, it’s going to be even more difficult to make a bigger change.” And that also just isn’t true.

The difficulty in recovery is making any change. It’s doing anything that goes against the eating disorder. It’s not that much more difficult to do something that is larger versus something that is smaller. And I’ve done this, I’ve tested this with people, and people have tested this themselves, where they’re constantly trying to make these little changes and they realise that it doesn’t get any easier.

One of the examples I’ll often use with people is, let’s start with the idea of a big change. Someone says, “That feels really scary.” Then we break it down. Let’s say, for example, the change is that I want you to have a sandwich, and that then feels scary. Okay, I want you to have half a sandwich. That still feels scary. I want you to have a quarter of a sandwich. That still feels scary. And yes, there might be slight degrees of this, but really, whatever change you’re trying to make, there is still this baseline level of fear or worry or unsureness or scariness connected to it.

Basically, for any change, there is this level of – call it an 8 out of 10 for fear, irrespective of what the change is. If it’s a small change, it’s an 8 out of 10. If it’s a large change, it’s a 9 out of 10. So yes, there’s a little bit more fear, but the reality is for that little bit of extra fear, you’re getting a massive win by making that bigger change.

Really, no-one goes from smaller changes to medium changes to larger changes. I know it feels like that would be the way that it works, but it just typically doesn’t happen. The people who keep doing smaller changes and smaller changes, typically within a couple of weeks, there’s the realisation of “This is too hard, I can’t do this, I’m never going to recover” and then it just stops. So it’s not that small changes create this little snowball that builds; there needs to be a big enough change to start with. Otherwise it just doesn’t get started.

The other piece with this is that if we think about the way that we learn and we’re trying to learn something new, you’re wanting to go outside of what you’re doing to really be able to do this. I’ve been reading a lot of golf books over the break – as I said, I’m very into golf – and one of the books I’m reading, a lot of it is around how we learn. For example, if I’m trying to change something with my shot and I try and change it just a tiny little bit, so much of what we do – and this relates to food and the eating disorder – you’re doing it on autopilot. So when you try and make this really minute change, you just come back to doing exactly what you were doing before.

You need the change to be big enough so that you’re now moving out of that regular rut that you’re in. This is what I found for so many people. They’ll say, “I tried to make all these little changes that didn’t matter, but then one day I just did something completely different, and I now don’t have the same point of reference that I’m trying to keep my day on track because I’ve now done something so different that the whole context has changed.” This is what we’re wanting to occur, where “I’m not trying to rein it in or be within some little band because that’s what I’ve usually done; I’ve now done something so different that it’s just a different thing.”

I think that’s when you then start to shift your learning because you’re not trying to do something that is really similar to what you’re already doing but hoping to get different results. You’re doing something that is fundamentally different, which is actually what you’re wanting as part of recovery.

00:13:58

Set clear + precise goals

The next piece I would say is setting clear and precise goals. This is what I do every time that I have a consult with someone. We will go through lots of different things, but we’re always setting either a goal or a couple of goals to know, “This is what you’re focusing on for the next couple of weeks or the next week”, however long it is between our consults.

What I find for most people when they’re doing this (or not doing this) is there’s a couple of different options. Either they do absolutely nothing and they wake up each day and think “Okay, today I’m going to do recovery”; there’s no real game plan around it, it’s just like “Today I’m going to eat more, I’m going to do more.” There hasn’t been any extra shopping, there hasn’t been any “We’re going to do this at the snack.” It’s just this general “We’re going to do something” and then invariably, you get to every single meal and nothing actually changes. So there’s this “No plan, but I’m just going to wing it and see what will change” and invariably nothing changes.

Or the other one is someone who is so meticulous and they are trying to create this plan, but really it’s trying to create the plan often in service of the eating disorder. It’s trying to work out, “If I add this extra amount of blueberries, how much is that going to change in terms of my weight and what’s that going to do in terms of my carb grams?” There’s all of this getting completely into the weeds, and often what happens is either you’re making this very, very small change because of that kind of a plan, or you never actually make any changes. It’s just this daily pursuit of “I’m trying to figure out the best possible plan, and I keep coming back to this thing, and what about if I did it this way?” – the eating disorder masquerading as “I’m doing recovery.”

The plan then isn’t really a plan; it’s just spending hours thinking about all of these things. So you’re wanting to be able to have this clear and specific plan but where you’re not getting lost in the weeds with it.

The other alternative that I often see is someone who does then come up with a plan, and it’s often something small, and they’ll do it and then two days in, they start to change it. “I was doing this thing with my breakfast, but I’m wondering if I change this other thing with my breakfast instead”, and then they change that and then two or three days later, it’s like, “What about this other thing for my breakfast?” What often happens here is the goal with this is “I’m making these changes. It feels really hard. I think if I change this other thing, it will feel easier and maybe I’ll go for a slightly safer food, or maybe it will be different if I have this type of cereal instead of this type of cereal.”

But the goal is constantly “This is challenging, and I’m trying to make it easier for myself.” As we go back to what I was saying earlier, whatever change you make, it’s going to be difficult, but someone gets stuck in this loop of changing and changing and changing, and they’re not changing to something bigger. Often, it’s changing it to something smaller. But it’s this “I’m constantly shifting things around.”

What happens is that becomes exhausting. It can feel like after a number of weeks, “I’ve tried so many different things” – or if you’ve been doing that for months, “I’ve tried this thing after this thing after this thing” and it builds up this story of “I’ll never recover, I can’t recover, I’ve already tried all of these alternatives and it’s not working for me.” But actually, you’re not really making progress in terms of the changes. You’re making changes with the end goal of it being easier for you, but not really with the end goal of “What is going to be most likely and most helpful for helping me recover?”

It’s really about, “How do I set clear and precise goals that I know whether I’ve done them or not?” So there’s no ambiguity. At the end of the day, I can say, “Yes, I did that goal” or “No, I didn’t do that goal.” And the goals are then in service of recovery. They’re big enough so that there’s going to be a physiological change from doing them consistently. It’s taking you out of that usual rut that you’re in and putting you on a different path.

So you’re doing that, and after you’ve done that for a week or two weeks, it’s “Let’s figure out what the next goal is going to be connected to this” and building up in that incremental fashion.

00:18:27

Develop resilience + constructive coping skills

The next area, if I’m thinking about these in areas, is really looking at and understanding how to develop resilience and constructive coping skills. What typically happens is the longer an eating disorder goes on, the more it becomes someone’s way of coping – and someone’s way of coping irrespective of what the thing is. It could be connected to food or body or exercise or that type of thing, but it can also be related to anything connected to life. “I had a tough day at work. Someone sent me this email about my performance at work. There was this message I got from my mom and I’m not really sure how to respond. I’m having trouble with my kid at home and something’s going on with his school.”

Really, whatever the challenge is, my way of then dealing with that is some form of eating disorder behaviour – so doing something with my food, doing something with my movement, really just using the eating disorder as this blunt instrument. This is then how I cope with everything.

And it’s often that this is completely unintentional. It’s not that I get this email and then I think “Hey, I’m now going to intentionally restrict because I think this is going to help me.” That just naturally starts to occur, and there’s some times where people are very aware of it and a lot of the time they’re not even aware that this thing is happening.

Really, the goal with recovery is, how do we learn other skills about coping that are not the eating disorder, and ways that are much more constructive – alongside, how do we learn that we can actually tolerate a lot more? I think what often happens is there is this feeling of “I have to do something to take this thing away or to put a mute on this” as opposed to recognising, “Hey, I’m actually able to tolerate this. It is uncomfortable, it is unpleasant, and I know that I’m able to survive this thing. And actually, when I have practices to be able to create that space for it, I can start to notice that after 20 minutes or after an hour or after some length of time, this thing starts to go down of its own accord. And it may come back a couple of hours later, and then I can notice that it comes down.”

Just being able to recognise that there is this pattern with these things, and “I’m able to tolerate this” as opposed to having to instantly change something.

When I think about this area and really developing resilience and these coping skills, one of the first things is you’ve got to start before you feel ready. I think so often, people are just waiting. And the waiting can be “Hey, ‘m listening to all of these podcasts and I follow all of these recovery accounts and I watch all these YouTube accounts on recovery and I can tell you absolutely everything about recovery and all the different aspects of it – and yet I’m actually not doing anything. I’ve built up this incredible amount of knowledge about these things, but I’m not actually taking any action on it.”

This means that people don’t get anywhere. It can be five years on and yet nothing fundamentally has changed. I think often what people are looking for in this content is “There is going to be this ‘aha’ moment that then kicks me into gear, and I’m so motivated, I feel no ambivalence whatsoever about recovery, I’m like ‘this is the absolute right thing to do’, and from that moment forward I started making all these changes and it felt blissfully easy.” And that’s just not the reality of recovery.

Yes, you want to have this feeling of “Hey, I want to do something different, I want to have a better life than what I’m currently living. This is not how I want to be. This is unsustainable.” I want that to be there – and the reality is there is going to be ambivalence around this. There’s going to be a huge amount of ambivalence before you get started. I think the thing that people mistake is that they’re wanting motivation at the start, and I think motivation tends to come a lot later on. The more you’re starting to make changes, the more you’re starting to notice that this thing is improving and this thing is improving, and “Oh my gosh, I’m actually able to do this thing that I didn’t think I’d be able to do” – that’s when the motivation kicks in. But it’s not there in the beginning, and even when motivation kicks in, it’s not particularly dependable.

So really getting out of that mode of being really stuck in consuming information and getting into the mode of actually taking action. And it’s not that I’m against people listening to podcasts or recovery content. I think it can be really helpful, and I want people to create a bubble for themselves where they’re feeding that information into themselves, because it’s not what we’re seeing in the wider public, and especially at this time of year with all of the stuff around ‘new year, new you’, dieting stuff. It’s coming thick and fast at the moment. So I get that it’s important to create a bubble.

But it can’t be just creating a bubble of content. If you’re not then taking action, then nothing changes. I think action-taking has to be the most important thing connected to this, and starting before you feel ready.

And with this as well, again, making a start with something that is going to make a meaningful difference. I think the other piece with this is “I’ll make these tiny changes and then when I feel more ready, I’ll make the bigger changes.” And again, that just doesn’t happen. If we’re looking at the size of change, the person who makes an 8 out of 10 change, instantaneously, all the changes that are easier than that, all the 7, 6, 5, 4, etc., now they become a lot easier for someone because they’ve already done something seismic. They’ve already done something really big. In a very short amount of time, you’ve done something that you thought was impossible and you’ve now discovered is possible. And that opens up a lot for you, whereas if the only change you’ve ever made is 0.5 out of 10 or 0.25 out of 10, then the 2 out of 10 still feels ginormous.

Things are always relative, so if you can make that big jump to start with, that really helps. And when I reflect on the people I work with and the people who make the biggest inroads and the biggest shifts, it is the people who are typically making the bigger changes to start with. Again, coming back to this idea that bigger changes are definitely better.

00:25:28

Eating disorders are anxiety disorders: exposure is key

The next thing when I think about the resilience and the coping skills piece is understanding what an eating disorder is. One of the things that I’ve said for a long time – and this came about from a previous podcast that I did with a person called Sasha Gorrell, and again, I will put this in the show notes – she talked about eating disorders as being anxiety disorders.

This is really fundamentally how I think about eating disorders and what they are and really how to recover from them, because if we look at all anxiety disorders, anxiety disorders are about avoidance. They’re about avoiding certain thoughts or feelings or sensations or events with the idea of “I want to either avoid this thing before it even happens, so I’ve got to get out in front of it” – which so often happens with someone thinking “I want to make this change, but wow, how bad would the afternoon be if I did make that change and then I’m going to have to sit with that uncomfortableness and all of that”, so then I don’t make any change at all.

It’s avoiding the potential of something happening, but it’s also when this thing does start to occur. So “I do feel some uncomfortableness” or “I am having these particular thoughts; I need to shut it down immediately. I need to do something to shut this down.” That might be that I now go out for a walk or I go and do exercise or I now decide instantly that I’m not having that snack in the afternoon or whatever it may be. It’s “I’m doing something to really avoid these thoughts and feelings.”

If we look at all anxiety disorders, they’re all about avoidance, and the way to overcome them is through exposure. It is then doing the things that are scary. It is doing the things that you’re afraid of. This can be done gradually, it can be done over time. You don’t have to start with the most difficult thing to start with. But as I’ve said earlier, I think the bigger you can start with, the more helpful it is.

You can do imagery connected to this. You can visualize yourself making changes first and then you can start to do them. So there are lots of different ways to do the exposure piece, but it really is about the exposure that then allows you to overcome this.

When I think about the exposure piece, really what you’re wanting to do, what is occurring, is you’re retraining your nervous system. In essence, with an eating disorder, the nervous system has been hijacked and the nervous system is miscataloguing certain things. For a regular person who doesn’t have an eating disorder, you put a sandwich in front of them – and again, I’m just using an example; this might not be exactly for you, but you put a sandwich in front of that regular person, there isn’t any reaction to that. Maybe it’s like “Mm, that looks delicious” or whatever it is, but the nervous system is really not involved with looking at that sandwich and making any sort of decision.

But with someone with an eating disorder, the way that the nervous system has now changed is that that is now seen as a threat. It doesn’t matter whether someone logically can say “Hey, it’s just a sandwich; it’s not really a threat.” There are all these changes that take place within the nervous system, and this has an impact on someone’s breathing, on their heart rate, on different hormones, etc. So it makes those changes if a threat is actually occurring. That then honestly has an impact on someone’s ability to eat that food or to make that change.

What recovery is about is doing these things over and over – and when I say over and over, it’s typically 5, 10, 15, repetitions before something starts to become a lot more normalised. But it’s doing these things over and over so that your nervous system relearns, “Oh okay, this thing isn’t scary. Originally I thought it was and now I don’t think it’s scary, and I’m now not labelling it as a threat. I can now eat this thing and I’m not having the reaction in the way that I was or not to the degree that I was.” That’s really what recovery is about. It’s just doing all of the things again and again so the body relearns that this thing is not something to be feared.

I think if this isn’t how you’ve thought about an eating disorder, really starting to frame it in this way and understanding, “This is an anxiety disorder and this is how I deal with it.”

The thing I would also add connected to this is the people who develop an eating disorder typically, on average, have higher anxiety than the average person. And when the eating disorder is over, they will still typically have more anxiety than the average person.

Part of the things that you learn through going through recovery is how to deal with that anxiety. In recovery, we’re dealing with it through the lens of stuff connected to food and movement and eating disorder-centric stuff, but these are then all skills and practices that become relevant later on when this is more about the challenge of going to work or how to have a difficult conversation with someone or whatever the reasons that that anxiety is coming up, you’ve then learnt how to deal with it. You’ve learnt, “I can have that anxiety be there and I can still make the choice that is actually in service of me having a better quality life and in service of me doing the more challenging thing, even though it can feel uncomfortable.”

00:31:09

Stop trying to make thoughts go away

This then connects on to the next point, which I would say is stop trying to make thoughts go away. I would say this is true for whether we’re talking about thoughts, whether we’re talking about feelings. So often, with an eating disorder, as I said, with avoidance, you’re trying to avoid certain things, whether that’s getting out in front of it before it happens or as soon as it comes up, “How do I stop this immediately?”

That is not the goal within the eating disorder. The more that that becomes the focus, the more you keep getting trapped and stuck in the behaviours and doing things to try and shut that down. Yes, by recovering, the eating disorder thoughts, for example, will start to go away and they’ll start to have less of an impact and you’ll get less attached to them when they come up and they lose their power. But really, that happens of its own accord. The eating disorder thoughts and the power that they have and the frequency are really a symptom of the state that someone’s in. When someone is in a low-energy state, these thoughts naturally arise.

If you’re not changing the state but you’re just trying to “How do I dampen down all these thoughts?”, you’re not going to be particularly successful because you don’t think your thoughts. Thoughts naturally occur in your mind and then they enter into your consciousness. And yes, we can direct our line of thinking and reframe things and do certain things to help out, but if you’re in a particular state, then you’re going to just keep getting those thoughts over and over again.

So rather than thinking “How do I stop these thoughts?”, it’s “How do I learn ways of still being able to do my recovery goals and my recovery actions even though those thoughts are there, or even though those sensations are there, or even though those feelings are there? I’m still going to continue on.” By doing that again and again, one, those thoughts do start to become less frequent, they do start to become less intense; you do learn that you can tolerate them.

But two, it means that you learn how to take action even though those things are there, and I think that is one of the most important things as part of recovery. And again, this means that this is a skill you’ll use for the rest of your life. So much of what I focus on in this area with people, I use in my own day-to-day life. I’m not in recovery from an eating disorder, but there are lots of challenges that will come up, whether that’s challenges with Ramsay or with Ali or with running a business or with finances or with just being a human.

There are things that happen on a fairly regular basis, so being able to have these skills to recognise that “Okay, this is challenging at the moment. I’m having these thoughts come up. What would be best to be able to genuinely deal with this? Not to try and make them go away, but how do I want to be able to deal with this situation?” Which could be learning techniques for how to defuse thoughts, so thoughts can be there but I’m not acting on them, or learning tools for how I can create room for certain emotions to be there even though they’re unpleasant and I might want them to go away. I learn that they can be there and I don’t have to do anything to try and take them away.

And it’s not that if you know how to have that thing decrease or dissipate, that there’s something inherently wrong with that. It just depends, what is the thing that you’re doing and what is the collateral damage that is coming up because of that?

For example, if doing a breathing exercise for 10 minutes really helps to lower your anxiety, there’s not a huge amount of downside with doing that. But if doing an eating disorder behaviour is the way that you’re trying to reduce your anxiety, there is a downside connected to that. So if you can find ways that are genuinely constructive and helpful for you, I’m all for it – and how can we also learn to be able to tolerate those things as well?

00:35:15

Rebuild a joy-filled life

The final area when I think about recovery is really having someone rebuild their life. I talk about this as being a joy-filled life. This can happen on a spectrum, because there are people who have an eating disorder for a really long time, and for all intents and purposes, it looks like they’ve been unaffected. They’ve been able to keep a job, they’ve been able to have a marriage, they’ve been able to have kids, they’ve been able to do the things that it looks like, to the outside world, that they’re just a regular person. They’re able to keep this up.

And then you have the people at the other end of the spectrum where everything has fallen away. Everything has fallen by the wayside. All the hobbies that they used to have are no longer happening except if those hobbies were exercise-based and now they’re happening to a high degree. They may be now unable to keep down a job. If they were in a relationship, they no longer have a relationship, or that relationship is at straining point. All of these things have started to happen where things are falling by the wayside, life is very impacted upon by the eating disorder, and it is pretty obvious. And it might not be obvious to everyone in the outside world, but it’s pretty obvious when someone starts to take stock with this.

What I would say is even the person where it looks like they’ve kept it all together, it looks like they’ve been unaffected, if I have a conversation with that person, pretty quickly we can start to see how it is affecting them. It’s affecting their capacity to be able to concentrate, to be able to be in this world without all of the noise around food and calories and “When should I have my next meal? Has it been a long enough amount of time? When am I going to fit in the exercise?” – all of that kind of noise that is going on.

It can affect a person’s ability to enjoy the things that they’re doing. “Yes, I was able to go on holiday, but no, I didn’t really eat the food that I wish I could’ve been able to eat. And I wasn’t able to relax in the way that I wish I could’ve. And I had to take my weights with me on holiday, or I had to still keep up the routine in terms of the walking or the running or whatever I do each day.”

So even if they’ve been able to do the things, those things are being impacted upon and are negatively impacting someone’s ability to genuinely enjoy them, to be present, all of this type of stuff.

What I typically think about with recovery, and where this may differ from how people often think about it, is that while doing recovery – and really from the very beginning – you want to be bringing things back into your life. If certain things have fallen by the wayside, I’m wanting to bring those things back in as soon as we can. If you used to be eating out with friends, I’m wanting you to be bringing that back in. If you used to have a hobby where, I don’t know, you were really into painting or you were really into singing but that’s fallen by the wayside, I want to bring that back in.

The reason for this is the more that we can be bringing things back into one’s life, the more that someone can start to recognise, one, “I want to have more of this. This was a really enjoyable experience seeing my friend today and being able to go out for dinner. I want to have more of this because I want to have more connection, I want to have more ability to do this”, and it helps someone to have this regular reason why I’m doing recovery and what I’m working towards.

Or “Hey, I went to that thing and it just didn’t go as well as I would’ve hoped. I had intended to do this thing and then it didn’t happen”, and I start to recognise, “The eating disorder is really having an impact on me because I wasn’t able to do this thing.” It’s really interesting when I speak to people and they say, “Hey, I just don’t feel like the eating disorder is impacting my life”, and then I ask, “What are you doing?”, and basically the entirety of their day is following the eating disorder’s rules and wishes.

The reason that they’re not noticing how much the eating disorder is impacting them is because they’re not trying to do anything different. It’s like, okay, cool. At this point it doesn’t feel that way, but can you just go out for dinner now with a friend? Can you go to the local ice cream shop and get an ice cream? Can you take the next two weeks off from the exercise that you’re doing? It’s at that point that someone starts to knock up against how much they are immersed in the eating disorder.

So if there’s this feeling of “I’m not impacted by my eating disorder”, think about the different things that you’re unable to do at this point, because I would imagine and I’m going to guess that the list is pretty long of “These are all the things that I can’t do.” And I know the eating disorder is then going to come in with some logical reason why that thing either just doesn’t matter, “That’s just not who I am, I’m a really healthy person, I really love exercise” – there’s going to be all of these logical reasons that the eating disorder will use to try and convince you that this is not really a problem.

But the reality is you don’t have psychological flexibility. You don’t have the capacity to do these other things. That’s really what recovery is about: being able to have the capacity to do a whole wide range of things without fear, without worry, without anxiety. It’s just “I can now do these things.”

The trap people often find themselves in with this recovery piece is “I’m going to put everything on hold. I’m going to do recovery. I’m going to go into my little cocoon, I’m going to recover, and I’ll then reemerge into the world.” As I said, I don’t think that works because you’re needing to bring the world in. You’re needing to bring in these new things to, one, recognise how much the eating disorder is impacting you, or two, recognise the ways in which “I want to recover because it’s important that I can now do these things or experience more of this.”

00:41:25

Don’t put your life on hold

When I’m thinking about this area, one of the big things I would say is don’t put your life on hold. I think there is a lot of this idea of “I need to stop this thing and I need to stop that other thing and maybe I need to quit my job and I can just focus the next six months on my recovery.”

It’s not that that can’t help someone. There are probably some outliers where that truly did help. But typically what happens is more idle time leads to more eating disorder thoughts and typically more eating disorder behaviours. The amount of times where someone said “I took six months off work and actually it was in that time that my restriction ramped up, my exercise ramped up, and I found myself in a much worse place after those six months.”

So yes, we want to take a break from certain things, but we also want to be bringing in a lot of things. As much as possible, I want people to be having a structure where there are things that are helping them to have the day work along nicely so that it’s not just this whole wide-open chasm and then the eating disorder is like “Great, let’s fill this with all of these behaviours.” There is “I’m at work, so there’s this natural distraction because of the fact that I’m at work. And yes, I need to remember that it’s snack time now, and I need to take that time out, but once I’ve done that, I’m now back into it and I’ve got this natural distraction that is keeping me thinking about other things apart from the eating disorder.”

I think that’s a really important piece. And I would also say connected to this, there can be a lot of wishing how things would be different. “Oh, if I didn’t have a family, it would be really easy” or “If I didn’t have to go to work, it would be really easy. If I didn’t have this thing, it would be really easy.”

The reality is that, one, some of those things might be true; it’s not that there aren’t things that can make recovery more difficult or more easy. But the vast majority of times, for the person who says it would be easier not having kids, I’m working with a person who doesn’t have kids and thinks it would be much easier if they did have kids because they’d now have something to motivate them towards recovery. Or the person who didn’t have a partner thinks it would be easier having a partner, and then the person who has a partner thinks it would be so much easier if they didn’t have a partner.

Getting stuck in that wishing piece doesn’t change anything. I’m very much of the opinion of when thinking about “Is this a helpful thought?”, not “Is it true or not?” Because some of those things could be true. It’s “Does this help me to take the change that I want to take? Does this help me to live the life that I want to live?” And the reality is, for most people when they’re getting stuck in those thoughts, it doesn’t change anything for the better; it just prevents them from making change. It just creates all these reasons why “I can’t do this.”

So recognising, “This is just not a helpful line of thought. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. It’s not helpful for me to spend my time focusing on this thing. I need to focus on things that are going to be supportive for my recovery.”

00:44:30

Recovery is easier than living with an eating disorder

The next piece I want to say – and really, this sums up so much of how I think about recovery – is that recovery is easier than living with an eating disorder. I really want to hammer this point home. Since I’ve started talking about this, I keep bringing it up again and again, because I really do believe that it is true.

The eating disorder will convince you otherwise, that “My gosh, it’s so much easier staying where I am.” There’s so much fear of changing, all of the ‘what ifs’ and all the loss that is then attached to making changes, and really not recognising the place that someone’s in and how much they’re paying a high price for that. The thing with recovery is recovery is a temporary amount of time.

Depending on how quickly someone changes, how big the changes are, how long they’ve been dealing with this will have an impact on the time, but realistically, let’s say it’s a couple of years, just to use a number. Say it’s two years to go from where someone is to them being in a fairly fully recovered state. And look, in terms of full recovery, typically my suggestion is when you think you’re there, add another 18 months and then you can use the term ‘fully recovered’. I want someone to have enough time that they go through some significant challenges that then allow them to test out just how strong they are in their recovery.

So rather than rushing to wanting to claim that badge of ‘fully recovered’, be able to say, “I feel like I’m in a really good place. I feel like I’m unaffected. I feel like I can do anything, eat anything. I’m learning all these other skills that I didn’t have before in terms of being able to set boundaries with people, to not be people-pleasing with people, I’ve worked on my relationship with intimacy, and I’m doing all of these other things that feel less about the eating disorder but are actually still connected very much to the eating disorder and part of the reason why it started in the first place. I’ve done all those things and I think I’m in a really good spot.”

Great, add 18 months and then let’s see how you’re going. And it’s not that I want someone to regress or think that they’re going to regress; I just don’t want people to take recovery for granted, and I want people to really still stay in the place of being really consistent and really forthright in doing the things that really matter, because you then do get to a place of full recovery where the eating disorder isn’t having an impact on your life, and you’re not having to be worried and highly on guard and all of these different things. But I don’t want someone to try and get to that place or think they’re at that place earlier than they are and then things start to regress.

As I said, let’s say, for example, that recovery is two years from start to finish. Yeah, that can be some challenging two years – but I think that those two years are still easier than someone living with an eating disorder in terms of looking at the day to day and what people are going through and how often people say “I get to the end of the day and maybe I have this moment of relief like ‘oh my God, it’s all done’ and then the panic of ‘and now I have to do it again tomorrow’.” Just that again and again and again.

By doing recovery, you get past that. Recovery can be challenging in many ways, but it is temporary. In that two years’ time, you’re now no longer dealing with any of that. And it’s not that you have to wait the entirety of the two years and it’s a horrible two years and then the day after, everything gets easier. As things go along, things get better and better as you keep going. Really, for most people, if they’re truly doing the recovery actions and making big changes and doing it, I would say 3, 6, 9 months where it is much more intense in terms of things being more challenging. And even with that, things are continually getting better. Within 2 weeks of people making changes, they can see improvements. It’s not that everything’s improved, but things are starting to improve.

But yeah, there is a time where it’s more difficult and then it’s getting easier, and it’s not necessarily linear in that way, but on the whole, things are starting to improve and improve and improve and get easier and easier and easier.

So we come back in two years’ time and there’s one person and they’ve fully recovered, or they’re at a stage where they’re no longer impacted by the eating disorder and they’re doing the things to really cement that full recovery. And then the other person who’s still living with the eating disorder, nothing’s changed. Two years on, they’re still dealing with the same worries, still have the same anxieties, they’re still spending the same inordinate amount of time doing the exercise or restriction or whatever it may be.

Living with an eating disorder is way harder than recovery, and I really want people to understand this because this is not how the eating disorder presents things to you. That’s not how it feels when you’re thinking about making a change. But every time I’m working with someone and I ask the question, “In two years from now, would you like to be in this position or would you like to be recovered?”, it’s very rare that someone says, “I want to still be in this position.”

We can then have the challenge of it’s then hard to make the changes and it feels very uncomfortable and all of the things that come up, but most people, when they’re reflecting, if they were offered the idea of “Hey, in two years’ time, do I want to be here or do I want to be recovered?”, the vast majority of people – I would say nearly everyone if not everyone – is saying “I actually want to be recovered.”

That in and of itself can be an indicator of actually, being recovered is easier than living with an eating disorder, and most people would agree with that. But I would say even recovery is easier than living with an eating disorder.

00:50:38

You deserve full recovery

The final piece I would say connected to this is that you deserve full recovery. I think there can be so much impact by being in a malnourished state that it has an impact on someone’s beliefs about themselves, on their self-worth. It can impact on them feeling like they’re not deserving or “I’m not sick enough”, and there can be all of this stuff that comes up. It’s part of the state that someone’s in.

I know that some of this stuff can definitely predate the eating disorder. In the same way as someone can have very high anxiety before the eating disorder, someone can have very low self-worth before the eating disorder. I talked about at the beginning, eating disorders are biopsychosocial, so there can be so some social stuff that’s occurred. There can be trauma. There can be growing up in a household where Mum was dieting and “I was taken to Weightwatchers when I was nine years old or I was always being commented on my weight” or all of these different things, and this can then have an impact on someone, how they think about themselves and how they think about their body and how they think about their worth in this world.

So it’s not that I believe that this is all connected to the eating disorder, but definitely, when you put someone in the state of living with an eating disorder, it really has an impact on the kinds of thoughts and feelings that arise in terms of the memories that arise, in terms of the intensity and the importance of certain events that have occurred.

I really believe that everyone deserves to fully recover and that everyone can fully recover. Really, there’s nothing that I can say that will change that for someone in terms of if someone’s stuck and they don’t believe this, there’s no magic set of words I can say that will shift this for them. You need to start making changes, and then this will start to shift.

And again, if these things predate the eating disorder, it’s not that eating in and of itself will change everything for you, but it does start to make a really big difference, and it’s then with time that you learn other skills that are important as part of this. We start to then look at things like self-compassion. We start to look at ways of taking care of oneself and all of these different things that can start to shift how someone thinks about themselves.

But none of that will start to change unless action is taken. So much of what people want with recovery is just not how it is in reality. They’re wanting the motivation to turn up first. They’re wanting to feel differently about themselves and their capacity and their ability to do things first. None of these things change first. They change with time by making the actual changes.

I really just want to hammer this point home: you do fully deserve recovery. Despite the thoughts that your mind may be generating right now, despite the beliefs that you may hold right now, you do fully deserve recovery and you can get there.

00:53:47

Don’t do recovery on your own

The final piece I just want to add with this is that I don’t recommend that you do recovery on your own. I know how hard recovery can be. I still think it’s easier than living with an eating disorder, but it’s not an easy thing to do, and part of the reason why it’s not an easy thing to do is there can be so much second-guessing. There can be so many thoughts that naturally arise that are unhelpful. There can be so much indecision that comes up. There can be all these different things that then get in the way, so that even if someone is actually doing the right things and the things that would help, people just get stuck.

People get derailed because “I’m doing the right thing, but there’s these thoughts, and they’re making me think that I’m not doing the right thing, and then these symptoms come up, so then I stopped doing that thing and I started doing something else or I just went back to the eating disorder.”

Having someone who is able to support you and guide you and do all that – and look, you’re listening to this podcast; I would love that to be me. As I said at the top, I’m taking on clients, and if this resonates with you and you’d love to do this with me, then fine. But if it’s not me, find someone else. Or find a facility or whatever it is, rather than trying to do recovery on your own.

I know that there are coaches out there, there are people out there who have said, “Hey, I recovered on my own” – they are the outliers, the tiniest fraction of a percentage of people who have done this, and then there’s just a mountain of people who have tried to do it themselves and have failed. So yes, there are some people who’ve done it, but it’s just not what I would recommend. And for most of the people who have done it on their own, they also say, “Hey, I wouldn’t recommend doing this on your own.”

So please, get help. Often, the start of the year is one of those times where people are reflective. It naturally – and maybe not naturally; it’s because of the culture we live in – but there are things that people start to reflect on, in the same way as a birthday can be a time when someone starts to reflect on the last year or the year ahead. Using this time to really reflect on, “Do I want this year to be similar to the year I’ve had prior to this, or do I want something to be different?”

If you’re wanting something to be different and you’re wanting to recover, then please get help. Don’t try and do this on your own because I think you’re just making it infinitely more difficult, and probably making the process a lot longer than it needs to be. As hard as recovery can be, I think people make it way, way, way harder because they do things that they really shouldn’t be doing, or they do things in a way that make it much longer.

That’s the benefit of working with someone. If they know what they’re doing, they should be trying to help to speed up that process as much as possible. And it’s not that the goal is that you’re trying to get recovery done as quick as humanly possible, but let’s not drag it out more than it needs to be. Let’s actually put our focus and our energy into the things that truly matter as opposed to getting sidetracked by all these things that just don’t matter at all.

Okay, so that is it for this episode. I hope that you found it useful. I think there’s some really very good stuff in here. As I said at the top, if you’re wanting to fully recover, I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can get back to you.

I’ll be back next week with another new episode. That’s it for now. Take care of yourself, and I will see you soon!

Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please ~~share~~ it using the social media buttons you see on this page.

Also, please leave an honest review for The Real Health Radio Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Ratings and reviews are ~~extremely helpful~~ and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.

Listen on:

Here’s what we talk about in this podcast episode:

Intro