Connecting to your core self

When I was deep in my eating disorder, and even in a quasi-recovered state I had very little connection to my core self and what she wanted. It just wasn’t even a factor in what I ate or did each day. In recovery, we are often told that we have to identify the eating disorder thought and do the opposite action. But what was I supposed to do if I couldn’t identify the eating disorder? I’d become so used to not listening to the real me that it felt like the eating disorder was my true self. 

I realised that even if I couldn’t identify the individual thoughts, I could acknowledge that my eating disorder wanted me to eat the least amount possible to qualify as “recovery”. So I had to do the opposite of that. Which simply meant eating as much as possible at every opportunity. And that’s when the magic started to happen.

After only a few weeks of forcing myself to eat more, to eat the things the eating disorder disapproved of, to enjoy the foods that I loved as a child or that I enviously watched others eat, I became much more able to identify the eating disorder. The ways it showed up were sneaky and often masqueraded as “recovery”

• I don’t want a muffin this morning because I’ll probably have some cake later

• I’ve been so uncomfortable today that I’ve “done enough” recovery actions for one day - I can skip my evening snack

• I had a big lunch and I’m not really hungry for an afternoon snack so I’ll just wait until dinner

Obviously the next step was doing the opposite action. And I found that this created the virtuous cycle of separating my core self from the eating disorder, which allowed me to identify more disordered thoughts and allowed me to do the opposite. So the moral of this story is to FORCE the change in order to allow that separation to take place. It can be almost impossible to have that separation in a malnourished state. Food first is the only approach that works in eating disorder recovery. So what are you going to get to eat right now?