Hi there! New to posting, although I've been following Skwigg for like 10 years! Like most of us, I have a long history of weight issues. I did have a long period of recovery from binge eating & restriction (like 10-12 years) by doing intuitive eating and OA, then fell back into old habits after having my second child...doing WW, intermittent fasting, and being super focused on food and weight loss again. I reached a breaking point when I was eating one meal a day (IF) and was still gaining weight.
I have been working with a therapist and recommitting to mindful/intuitive eating for the past 4-5 months. Although I'm not binging and don't even really feel like I'm overeating, I've gained like 25 pounds...maybe close to 30. That's like 20% of my previous weight. I feel totally demoralized and like my body is broken. I wasn't underweight when I started - if anything, I was teetering on the brink of an overweight BMI, so I really can't afford a large weight gain. My therapist assures me it will eventually even out, but I need some more concrete strategies to move forward in my journey. I am concerned that maybe I'm just eating a lot more than my body needs, even if it feels good and intuitive. Now I'm wondering if this whole thing was a big mistake...
THANK YOU! This is so helpful - I really appreciate it. I think I was feeling much more calm about recovery and ok with some weight gain....but now, almost five months in, I'm still gaining weight and beginning to freak a bit. I've had to buy a bunch of new clothes and I am feeling so hot and uncomfortable in my body.
Definitely still struggling with not trusting my body. I feel like right now it's trying to trick me into gaining 100 pounds and I need to outsmart it 😂
On the other hand, I've definitively proved to myself that diets make me crazy and there has to be another way. I'm going to start a journal here and dig in deeper to intuitive eating...
Restriction isn't benign. There is always a price to pay. It's like pulling back a pendulum. Weight Watchers moves it back a little bit, food obsession keeps inching it back, fasting (especially if that one meal was late in the day) pulls the pendulum of restriction and overindulgence back like another ten feet, then you let the thing go and of course it's going to swing wildly into NEEDING to eat. The system is not broken; it's working perfectly.
When I've struggled with intuitive eating in the past, gaining weight quickly, feeling out of control, that was biology saving me from perceived scarcity, not intuition going wrong. What's interesting, is that it isn't really about weight. It's not like you reach a certain weight and everything's fine. You can be "weight restored" whatever that even means, and not have addressed any of the disordered thoughts and behaviors causing you to struggle with food. If you're still fearful of weight gain, feeling guilty about your choices, and vowing to do better, nothing has changed. That undercurrent of fear and scarcity will cause us to eat more at any weight. Rewiring those thoughts is what finally changes the whole experience. Definitely check out Tabitha Farrar on YouTube if you haven't already. She has so many great, short, right to the point videos on how to counter disordered thinking and rebuild trust in your body.
That was my big problem with initial attempts at eating more intuitively, my mindset was unchanged even though I was trying to eat differently. The other one was that I was eating in an unattuned way. I was eating whatever I wanted according to my fears and reactivity, not what my body was telling me about how the food felt physically and emotionally. I could not recognize fullness or emotional satisfaction in the moment, wasn't even looking for them. The exercises in The Intuitive Eating Workbook helped me relearn these skills. I think about how I want to feel and let that be the guide. I like feeling happy, healthy, and strong. I like being flexible with my choices and able to have anything I want. I like finishing a meal and not being uncomfortable afterward. I like being just hungry enough to enjoy my next meal, whether that's in ten minutes or a couple of hours. I can't remember what the IE hunger and fullness scale thingy is called, but I went through a few days where I just checked in with it. I started out only recognizing the extremes of hunger and fullness, waiting too long to eat, and then eating well past satisfied. I definitely didn't turn it into the "hunger and fullness diet" where I could only eat at certain levels of hunger. I had complete freedom to eat whatever and whenever, but I got better at recognizing the earliest signs of hunger (thinking about food) and the more subtle signs of satisfaction (not enjoying the food as much). Doing that without judgment was a miraculous turn of events. I wasn't getting too hungry because I was eating at the earliest signs of hunger, and I wasn't overdoing it because I could have more food any time.
I hope some of that helps. You're doing great! Restriction and restrictive thoughts are still the problem at hand. They are not the solution to something. They will only get you more of the same in terms of weight yo-yoing up and down and nothing working. Changing your mindset around food and weight changes everything. That's what you're doing in therapy, so good for you! Things do get better. Nothing is permanent, or broken, or hopeless, though it's completely normal to feel that way at times. Your eating disorder wants to go, "Ah, see! I told you this would never work!" But you need to tell it to sit down and shut up. Doing the opposite of whatever that voice says is powerful medicine. When it tells you not to trust, you trust. When it tells you that you can't have that, you eat it. Pretty quickly, those thoughts that used to control you start to weaken. That's when real change happens. You're right there. You've got this!