The biggest lie my ED told me

An eating disorder tells so many lies. Some are much more believable than others. It’s the ones that are sufficiently believable, or even socially aspirational, that can wheedle their way in and become part of your belief system that holds you back from full recovery. The most limiting of these lies for me was that you can’t live the life you want, and be truly happy, in a larger body.

Oh how wrong my eating disorder was! In fact, precisely the opposite was true; in my bigger, healthier body I was able to create the happiest and most fulfilled life that I could dream of. No longer was my mind consumed with food and numbers and exercise and body concerns. I was free to live my life on MY terms and fully participate in it. It took a while for me to see that this belief truly was a symptom of my eating disorder. Yes I had to actively challenge those thoughts but more than anything, by acting in alignment with the life that I wanted to live I was able to teach my brain that my body size was not what was going to determine my happiness in this life. 

For this rewiring to occur I had to act my way out of it. I had to at least try living life in my healthy body before I resigned myself to a life of misery by maintaining my eating disorder, even a little. For me, that looked like recognising my full life was on the other side of more weight gain and that I had to act as though I wanted to gain weight. I couldn’t get to that life by holding back. I couldn’t do the things I wanted to and be as free as I dreamed of without gaining that weight. That weight WAS my life and I had to eat (and rest) my way to it.  This was a tremendously helpful reframe for me, especially when I felt like I was out of a physically dangerous weight zone. Regardless of my weight, I knew that I had to keep acting in alignment with the person I wanted to be and the life I wanted to live in order to be happy. I had to put fork to mouth every time I questioned if I could really enjoy my life in a bigger body. 

The truth is that in order to rewire neural networks aligned to weight loss, actions must be in the totally opposite direction. And as scary as it is, that is weight gain. I knew this for a very very long time before being able to action it. I looked for every way under the sun to recover without acting as though weight gain was the goal. When it finally clicked that I could not have the life I wanted in the body I was maintaining, I was able to actually act in a way that supported weight gain. Not only was that weight physically necessary for full nutritional rehabilitation, it was the only way to rewire my disordered neural networks. While this reframe, and recognition certainly helped my motivation and kept me committed when times were tough, it was not a silver bullet. It did not suddenly mean that I had no difficulty making the right, pro-recovery decisions or that I didn’t have any eating disorder backlash. What it did do, was to make things more simple. To clearly highlight where my eating disorder was showing up. I could no longer use the excuse of not wanting or liking something, because does that matter when the goal is weight gain? Of course not! 

Doing this day after day finally got me to a place where yes, I was physically bigger than I had ever been in my life, but more importantly it got me to a place of freedom. Where I was able to live my big, messy, glorious life and feel all the highs and all the lows. My eating disorder was wrong. About a lot of things, but this is the biggest one. The only time I couldn’t live the life I wanted was when I was ill, not when I was in my healthy happy body. And I cannot stress enough that this is the case for you too. When you unpack this belief so wholeheartedly you will find that you can and will build the life you always wanted from a place of authenticity, compassion and so much joy. It’s yours for the taking, you just have to be brave and take the plunge.