Your eating disorder will never approve

For years my recovery looked like writing meal plan after meal plan with carefully micromanaged “challenges” included. I was willing to challenge my eating disorder, but not too much. I was willing to gain some weight, but not too much. I was willing to ease up on some rules, but only to create new ones. Despite doing some of the recovery work, I found myself just as stuck, with little flexibility and a mind still thinking about food and tradeoffs and hoops to jump through.

When I first started working with my coach we, together, drew up a two day meal plan to get me started. We worked from a list of ED disapproved foods and my ED had nowhere to hide. I absolutely baulked at this. My anxiety was so astronomical that I induced an IBS attack. I realised at that moment that the reason my meal plans hadn’t been working is because I’d been the one creating them. Me, with an eating disorder still raging in my head. Me, trying to do recovery and also keeping my ED happy.

Those two things are incompatible:

You cannot do recovery AND keep your ED happy. Your ED will never approve of your recovery.

For me, that concept was revelatory. Sure, I knew you had to be uncomfortable to some degree but this was something else. This was backing my ED into a corner and giving it nowhere to go. This was something I had to do day after day. After all, the slow and steady approach had not worked. The micromanagement had not worked. It is only with consistent, proactive recovery aligned behaviours that I saw any shifts in my neural networks. This was not a pleasant process but it absolutely worked.

Luckily for me, and everyone with an eating disorder, this process becomes easier as you consistently show up doing the opposite of your eating disorder’s suggestions. By eating exclusively from my list of ED disapproved foods I made the process much simpler, even if not easier. Having a toolkit of restful distractions handy for when the ED noise was loud was helpful. But for me the most helpful thing in those moments was coming back to the core truth that the fear and discomfort I was feeling was only evidence that I was making progress. It confirmed that I was on the right path. So while unpleasant and difficult I could ground myself in the knowledge that I was trying to make my ED unhappy for me to be free. 

Admittedly in the early stages that trust and belief was not quite so clear. During that phase I benefited so much from having a coach who I could trust. They were able to hold that truth for me - that going into the fear was the only way out of this illness - and I could allow myself to lean into the process. 

Eventually I reached a point where I was surprisingly comfortable with most things on my ED disapproved list. It was at that point that I had to go hunting for the less obvious things - often conditions - and continue to snuffle out any areas where I was keeping the ED happy. It can hide in very sneaky places so I used regular and honest reflection to keep myself moving forwards. I knew I could only reach full freedom if I rooted out any and all ED wiring in my brain. At that point I had confidence that the process worked, I simply had to keep doing it until it was all gone.

So just remember: if you’re “happy” or “comfortable” with your meal plan or your intake for today, really question if you’ve actually just held hands, even a little bit, with your ED. And then take rebellious action ALWAYS.