Is there always a deeper meaning?

Traditional treatment did not work for me. I spent years in and out of psychologists offices, dieticians, scouring the internet for anything and everything recovery related, and reading all of the recovery books ever published. I’ve spent so much time digging into my past to find the repressed trauma, to understand how my parents treated me (really well), what their relationship with food was like (really healthy) and what my schemas said about the way I thought about myself. The only thing that ever worked was realising that I was just really really hungry and really scared to eat. Turns out that punitive parent mode was just a raging eating disorder. I vividly recall going to see my well-intentioned and lovely therapist in an absolute state one day - I was deeply emotional, at a very low point in my life and deep down I wanted her to give me permission to eat more. The whole session was spent analysing my feelings and other things that were going on in my life. Right at the end I asked her if she thought I should eat more. Her response was that she didn’t think that was possible until I had soothed my inner child. I left deflated. But there was a deep knowing in me at that point that eating more food was actually the answer. That despite how scared I was, that it hadn’t been sanctioned by my psychologist, it was something that would bring me closer to the life I actually wanted to be living.

While traditional treatment may be appropriate for some - especially for those who do have underlying trauma - I believe that all people with an eating disorder ended up there through a prolonged energy deficit. This response to energy deficit is hardwired into those of us with the genetic predisposition. Through our conditioning, and the length of time that we experience these symptoms, we are likely to build neural wiring around the meaning of our fear, but fundamentally this is a biological trigger. Recoginising this, after reading Tabitha Farrar’s Rehabilitate, Rewire, Recover and the supporting evidence in the Adapted to Flee Famine study by Shan Guissinger and the Minnesota Starvation Study, I was able to recognise my ED for what it was and the path forward felt much simpler.

For me to recover, I had to eat my way out of it. Not think my way out of it. Or love my way out of it. Or understand my way out of it. I had to eat and eat and eat all of the things that my eating disorder disapproved of. In quantities and combinations of all descriptions so that the neural networks were completely destroyed and my body was able to nutritionally rehabilitate. There was a lot of doubt along the way. There were many false starts. There was a lot of debating and hand holding with my ED to begin with. If there was one thing that decades of traditional treatment did give me it was a huge amount of self awareness. I could use this to my advantage during my recovery but only in the sense of being able to be brutally honest as to where restriction was showing up, and marching head first into that fear.

This understanding did not make the process easy. Simple yes, but not easy. With commitment, and repetition and a whole lot of up and down in between I eventually emerged fully recovered. I still do not have childhood trauma that led to my development of an eating disorder. I have built a lot of self esteem and self worth through the process of recovery - but that is a byproduct, not what was essential to my recovery. What was essential was a lot of food and a lot of rest. For me, once I resolved the energy deficit and rewired the anorexia neural networks, through lots of food and lots of rest, there was no further psychological work to be done. This may not be the case for all, but I strongly believe that the traditional treatment is solving for a problem that doesn’t likely exist for a vast majority of people with eating disorders. At the very least, the approach needs to be far more food first and action based. If, after the nutritional rehabilitation and neural rewiring has taken place there is still psychological treatment needed then that is the time to address it. When there is sufficient cognitive function and physical stability. 

There are other, less traditional, treatments that also advocate for rumination on causation and dissection of environmental factors. You can write all the letters and do all the journaling you like but it will not result in full recovery unless you eat the food in the amounts and of the types that your ED completely disapproves of. I have no doubt that writing and other techniques are useful adjuncts for recovery - I’m an avid proponent of journaling - but this cannot be the focus of action taking in this process. If there is one action you take on this journey, let it be eating in abundance. It will feel hard, and it will feel scary and there will be so very much resistance, but that is exactly why you have to do it. Let that fear and that resistance guide you. It will show you the areas where you really need to work. You cannot journal your way out of this and I implore all treatment professionals to prioritise the action taking of food and rest over any internal work. This will all come in time, and some will need greater levels of support than others, but at the end of the day there is a biological energetic deficit that must be remediated before any further healing can take place. 

So in times of doubt, please remember the simple truth - that you need vast amounts of foods and the types of foods that your eating disorder disapproves of. If you can do this over and over and over again until there is no combination of food that would cause anxiety then you will recover from this illness. For some, there may be additional trauma work, but there also might not be. It may actually not be that deep.