The idea of giving up anorexia, in principle, is a no brainer.
Each set of birthday candles,
Every shooting star in the sky,
Each coin tossed in a fountain,
Every new pair of shoes –
It was my sole wish.
Please, please let this be the year I fully recover, I hoped.
And though not everybody reading this blog will be in this place right now, I believe that the vast majority of people with an eating disorder do eventually get to a stage in their illness in which they want out more than anything in the entire world.
But what I certainly discovered myself, and what I've witnessed other people experience, is that 'wanting out' is not necessarily quite enough. Not even if it's really, really desperate.
In this blog, I hope to tell you a little about my journey from recovery desire and know-how, to actually becoming Recover-ED, with particular emphasis why a commitment to weight gain is such an integral element when it comes to actually getting it done.
A Handy Visualisation
For a moment, I want you to imagine that you live in a remote cabin.
It’s safe. It’s warm. It has everything you need.
Once you've envisioned that, I invite you to imagine that one day, an exhausted stranger emerges out of the woods and tells you they desperately require two things:
1) Refeeding in order to gain weight
2) A variety of foods to neutralise the morality of all foods
My question here is: how would you go about supporting them with this?
Would you be happy and confident that if they matched your own recovery intake that they would heal?
Are the types of food you are eating those that will truly benefit a body in the state of malnourishment*?
Are the portions you’re providing this individual ones which you’d feel confident with serving?
If food was requested between established meal times, would you be willing to provide food beyond the baseline plan?
If your family spontaneously came to the cabin bringing a delicious feast, would you force your new friend to eat something different to everybody else because it wasn’t on their pre-agreed plan for the day?
Would you be advising any superfluous movements (let alone formal workouts...)?
And finally - and perhaps most importantly - would you leave it in any doubt whatsoever that the individual would gain weight on the amount of food and rest that you were providing them, allowing them ‘just’ enough food and 'just' enough rest?
*You can be malnourished at any size.
My hope is that the answers to those questions provide some insight as to what may be going wrong in your own recovery – if you are attempting to refeed yourself in a way that is clearly not aligned with increasing body weight, nor challenging ED rules. The rest of this blog post will describe why continuing with actions that directly oppose weight gain leaves you unable to make progress both physically and mentally.
Intention
I believe that one of the fundamental reasons that I felt stressed in recovery is because I forgot that I was meant to be irritating my eating disorder brain and because I so frequently lost sight of the fact that I was supposed to be intending to gain weight. And with forgetting these 2 elements, every single decision that I made seemed like a tug of war, a battle of ‘should I shouldn’t I?’ and a game of ‘how can I sort of challenge, but avoid the full discomfort of it?’
In short, if you wish to fully recover, but don't accept that you must gain weight to an unsuppressed point, you can’t fully recover. Please note here that I use the word 'accept'. I don't say enjoy. I don't say love. I mean, you surrender to the fact that it must happen.
Without a repeated commitment to allowing it to happen, irrespective of the almighty fear, all of your actions and choices will have a shadow of uncertainty over them. This, will, ultimately nudge you in the direction of seeking safety from the use of ED behaviours over and over again.
A Commitment to Weight Gain
Without further ado, I finally come to the main point of this blog. That is, why a commitment to weight gain, and not suppressing your body weight, is a non-negotiable component of your ED recovery.
If you want recovery, but don’t want to gain weight … well, that’s why you haven’t recovered yet.
Full recovery isn’t a magic trick. You have to fully refeed yourself there. But, not only do you have to eat what appears to be more food, you actually have to convince your brain that you are not in an area of food scarcity anymore. And lots of the actions involved with this will be invisible to the external eye.
When I reflect on the months and years that I was “trying” to gain weight, I can see so clearly now what I was doing wrong. I was continuing to do behaviours I would never have dreamed of advising to that stranger who turned up at my cabin door.
I was still persisting with movement that was purposefully burning calories. Any exercise that I did, or compulsive lower-level movements that I continued with, directly conflicted with my ‘goal’ of weight gain.
I was still eating a lot of low-nutrient density foods. These were foods that would not have been choices that a person committed to weight gain would opt for.
I was still eating as if I were on a diet. It sounds like madness, but there’s no other way to describe the way in which I was eating. Though I had successfully established a regular eating schedule, so much else of what I was doing reflected the way in which a dieter would eat. Yes, I was still eating diet foods. But deeper than this, I was eating in a regimented way that was controlled by the time on the clock. I was eating the same, or similar, foods on rotation. I wasn’t abundantly any ‘extras’ that I liked, but deemed ‘unnecessary’, like sauces or condiments. If I used them at all,, I was very sparing with cooking oils and butters. I mainly opted for low-calorie drinks. My portions we small (or rather, the certain macronutrient portions were smaller that they should have been, whilst there was often a mound of salad and vegetables…). And finally, I rarely had seconds.
Does this ring a bell?
If I was to truly committed to weight gain, none of the aforementioned could continue.
So, when I finally did commit to weight gain, the following happened:
I completely stopped all exercise (including lower-level movements) and made it my mission to stop forcing myself into movement that I deep down didn’t wish to do.
I prioritised nutrient dense foods.
I stopped eating as though I was on a diet. I stopped making myself different foods to the foods my family ate. I stopped buying or eating anything labelled as low sugar or fat. I served myself proper portions of the macronutrients I needed, and my body was actually asking for. I forced variety into my intake. I intentionally added the ‘extras’ I’d previously labelled as unnecessary (turns out they were necessary for my full recovery, both mentally and physically!). I cooked in generous quantities of olive oil and liberal knobs of butter. I drank delicious milkshakes and juices. I ate seconds, then thirds, and so on.
If you want to fully recover, you will have to do the same.
In short, I consistently ate as if my purpose – my intention - was to gain weight.
With this purpose in mind, my food choices had to be very different to what they were previously.
How this helped
Committing to gaining weight helped me in many ways. Firstly, the results of it – gaining weight – helped my brain to become nourished enough to start making more rational decisions that weren’t clouded by a lack of sustained energy.
Second, since the decisions that I was making were no longer weight-gain avoidant, my brain stopped receiving the messaging that weight gain was the scariest thing in the world and something to avoid allowing to happen at all costs. After all, I was consciously doing it. Why else would I be doing an action that was consciously dangerous over and over again? My brain also, obviously, stopped receiving the messaging that less food is better and certain foods are scary – since I was giving my brain evidence of the opposite, via my actions. Thus, slowly but surely, my brain began to rewire out of food and weight gain fears.
And finally, here’s one you might not believe until you try it yourself: committing to weight gain actually reduced a lot of my anxiety. Every single time my brain slammed me with the thought that an action I had just done might make me gain weight, or that something coming up later in the day might cause weight gain, I could answer those fears with: “uh huh, that’s the whole point…”
When I realised that most of my inner conflicts and dilemmas came from my fear of weight gain, decisions became strangely simpler. Not easier, necessarily. But certainly simpler. For, there was none of the impossible nonsense that I had been attempting before; ‘trying’ to do recovery without pissing Anorexia off.
You'll know what I mean by 'impossible nonsense', I think. Attempting to do recovery whilst also pleasing Anorexia is incredibly stressful business because you cannot ever win. You can’t have both - a happy ED brain and a satisfied recovery brain. Simply put: You cannot have recovery and not piss anorexia off.
So, rather than trying to find foods that I wanted to challenge and then somehow trying to ‘fit’ them into my plan in a way that still left Anorexia comfortable, I found foods that I wanted to challenge and I … ate them. Full stop.
When I finally committed, there was only one right answer to any food decision: an abundance of recovery wise foods. Over and over again.
That’s not to say that my Anorexia brain didn’t have something very loud to say about these decisions, of course. But, if the ED was riled up with a fear was of weight, I tried my upmost to tell myself, “uh huh, that’s the whole point…”
And I dug in as hard as I possibly could with all of the resolve and commitment I could hang onto.
Not without pain, or tremendous doubt, slowly by surely, sure enough, there was less to-ing and fro-ing in my head. There was less Should I or shouldn’t I? Can I or can’t I? I was doing it and there was no other option.
Weight gain is the goal
Full recovery is the sum of two components: weight gain to an unsuppressed point + full neural rewiring.
So, if you wish to fully recover, there is no alternative than to allow yourself to gain weight.
If you aren’t gaining weight, I urge you to look into the way you are eating and ask yourself if your commitment to weight gain is showing in the way that you eat or not. Then, look at your activities and your choices, and ask yourself if you commitment to weight gain is reflected in those.
Then, with that information, force the changes that you need to make.
Let go of the excuses and the perceived obstacles and start eating like you mean it.
Above all else, check yourself and stop selling yourself short.
Stop ignoring the knowledge I know you have mounds of.
Stop avoiding doing the actually work of gaining weight; reading the blogs and watching the videos, nodding your head in agreement, but simulataneously keeping the company of a low-fat yogurt pot and berries.
Give yourself a talking to.
Tell yourself that eating a proportioned low-fat yoghurt isn’t good enough.
Tell yourself that this is still the case even if you didn’t even used to have a snack at all. Remind yourself that you wouldn’t dare serve that to the stranger who turned up to your cabin who asked for your assistance.
Be honest with yourself and see that not only does that choice not reflect a commitment to weight gain, but it also verifies ED fears (e.g., of calories, of fats) and therefore shuts the door on neural rewiring.
You can do this.
I know you want to get better.
Maybe more than anything in the world.
I know that because if you didn't, you wouldn't have read this blog. Nobody engages with recovery content for fun. There is always, at very
Now, you must do what you know, deep down, is required from you. You must start acting like you want to gain weight, even if that prospect is the opposite of what your ED brain commands of you.
And you must do so with as much honesty and commitment as you can muster, day after day after day.
Then, and only then, will you have the two components required to Recover-ED.
A nourished body and a rewired brain.
Comments