HEALING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD & BODY DURING RECOVERY
Written by Katy Gaston
Every person’s journey through recovery is going to look different. However, working with clients through the years and going through recovery myself, I have seen some common themes. It is helpful to talk about how your relationship with food and body shifts in the beginning and then later in recovery as it can help give some light in what can be very dark times.
Here are some common themes at the beginning of recovery from a restrictive eating disorder and some ideas on what things may look like later in your process.
“My body is broken. I can’t control myself with food. I try to be good and then I binge and I feel so gross.”
First of all, your body is not broken. It is doing exactly what it is meant to do to keep you alive. When we are under-nourishing our bodies (as is the case with restrictive eating disorders), they go into emergency mode. They don’t know that you are trying to restrict your calories, food groups, etc.; they just know that this could eventually lead to death.
So every time you ignore a hunger signal, your body yells louder until you listen. It’s your body’s way of getting you to consume enough energy. This creates a sense of “lack of control around food” and “loss of willpower” but really, it's just biological. Your body wants to choose to eat.
A peaceful relationship looks like cultivating trust with your body and nourishing it adequately and routinely so that it is no longer in emergency mode. Then, you can listen to your hunger and fullness cues and know that you are free to have food—any food—if you want it.
Furthermore, eating to a point of discomfort can happen even when you listen to fullness cues. There is no shame in this; it’s part of learning. Maybe you were really enjoying the food. Maybe you were anticipating a fancy dinner so you ate a smaller lunch. Every time it happens it’s a chance to learn more about your body.
As a note, it is important to talk about those with binge-eating disorder separately as the route to changing and healing these patterns with food may look different than what I spoke about above. This is a good example of why it is important to work with practitioners who are informed about eating disorders because often there are multiple complex co-occurring disorders like OCD or PTSD alongside the eating disorder. Working with a therapist, dietitian, and other treatment members as part of a team can individualize treatment when we are looking at the binges themselves and also all that surrounds the binge mentally, physically, and emotionally.
“But if I let myself eat whatever I want I’ll eat so unhealthy.”
This is an example of black and white thinking. Good or bad food, healthy or unhealthy food, clean or…dirty food? This kind of thinking puts morality on food and therefore puts morality on you. As you heal your relationship with food, you work on seeing foods as neutral. There are no good or bad foods, healthy or unhealthy.
All foods can serve a purpose and provide nutrients, pleasure, satisfaction, and comfort (and maybe simply alleviate the discomfort of feeling hungry). When we come from a place of strict control, letting go of that control may feel like having the pendulum swing the other direction into chaos. Maybe at first it does. But over time, everything settles.
You get to choose the foods you want to eat, and truly choose them. Not out of fear, shame, guilt, restriction or punishment. But out of questions like: “What would feel good in my body?” “What am I craving?” Your body will pull what nutrients it needs in that moment. It may tell you something like “today for lunch let’s have a salad, and for dinner something like a burger sounds appetizing or cookies for dessert sound amazing, but right now I’m too full so maybe tomorrow.”
We need to reframe the “health” of our food choices to include our relationship to food and our bodies.
“I’m scared to gain weight.”
Weight is a very nuanced topic because I always want to know what is behind the fear of weight gain. I know that our anti-fat, biased society and medical system don’t support a diverse range of sizes, which only feeds into this idea that fatness is bad. As you go through recovery it is critical to unpack your own anti-fatness. Over time you will also build trust with your body and know that just like everything else, your body likes to find a homeostasis and a weight fluctuation range that will work best for you.
Your body has your best interest at heart; it wants to keep you alive and well. The more you try to “control” your weight, the more it will feel like you’re out of control which will exacerbate this fear. I know that letting go of that idea of control is not easy, but it is a huge way to transition from being at war with your body to being at peace and trusting it to do its thing. If you gain weight in recovery, then that is most likely your body telling you that you needed to!
“I don’t think I have a problem; my labs are normal, I don’t get dizzy and I’m not ‘underweight.’”
As we know, external markers are not always an accurate representation of what is happening on the inside. Two people who have an eating disorder are not going to present in the same way.
Though we have guidelines as to what could indicate an eating disorder, that does not mean that if someone does not check these boxes that there is not a disorder.
Early in recovery there may be a lot of thoughts about not wanting to recover because you do not see yourself as having a problem. This can be further enabled by society which praises disordered eating and so it makes sense why it is difficult to break from the eating disorder mindset. When you embrace recovery and want to change from within, that is when the healing really begins. Not because external markers are telling you how severe or not severe you are, but rather because you don’t want to keep living in the patterns you have been living ,and you want to change in a positive way.
Choosing to change in this positive way takes great strength because it can also mean letting go of the security that a smaller body can provide to you.
The structural violence of anti-fatness can make this journey even more difficult for those in larger bodies as just engaging in the desire and act of trying to lose weight can afford one some levels of safety. It is crucial that we all take on these structural violences together because all bodies are worthy of breaking disordered eating patterns and need to be afforded with basic human respect and rights.
“If I eat that food, it will hurt my stomach so shouldn’t I stay away from it?”
When we are early in recovery it can be difficult to navigate our relationship with food outside of our eating disorder. Since eating certain foods can trigger emotional and physical responses, this is a great example of how working with eating disorder practitioners can help you by going through these triggers and finding they are truly intolerances or actually psychological responses. Your body and intolerances may also change as you go through recovery because your body will not be in such a stressed state. It is about gradually healing your relationship with food and giving yourself unconditional permission to eat.
Recovery is not a destination. When I first started pursuing healing from my eating disorder, I had many thoughts like “when will I be recovered already?” and “what is a ‘normal’ way to eat?” When my clients ask me these same things, my answer is that you will find your own version of recovery. It will get easier but you will never “arrive” at recovery because as with everything else, it is not black and white. You will learn how to navigate your triggers and eating disorder thoughts. You will learn to nourish yourself with food from a place of peace with your mind and body.
My name is Katy (she/her) and I am a registered dietitian with a virtual private practice based in San Francisco, CA. I work with clients with eating disorders and disordered eating. I know what it is like to navigate through recovery as I had an eating disorder of my own throughout high school which led me to heal my relationship with food and body in college.