Trust is everything, and it's created through repeated action. Doing the new behaviors, facing the scary thoughts, and seeing that everything is still ok. You can't decide in your mind, "ok, I trust now, problem solved." Or, "I'm not going to take action until I trust." That means never taking the steps necessary to experience the positive mental shift. Each time you try something new and learn from it, your confidence grows. Then you trust. Then it's real and not hypothetical.
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It's not, "If I don't trust, I can't do this." Nooooobody who has restricted for years trusts that not dieting is going to be ok. You've kept yourself in chains all this time by actively telling yourself the opposite. "If I eat this, terrible things will happen. If I don't do that, terrible things will happen." It's fear and negativity all day long. Even when we're doing restriction "right" there's always the fear that it can't last, and the horrible story about what will happen as a result.
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See the problem there? So, when you eat what you actually want for dinner, and don't restrict the next morning, diet brain goes INSANE, but that's what you've programed it to do. Now, we're going to teach it a new way of being. The more you do the new behaviors that you want and react with kindness and curiosity instead of guilt and fear, the more your brain is going to dial down the panic alarm and begin to turn up the trust.
Trust is everything, and it's created through repeated action. Doing the new behaviors, facing the scary thoughts, and seeing that everything is still ok.
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Good lord, how many times have I said similar words aloud to my therapist and failed to act on them. I know without a doubt that I will never build up self-trust around food or release its power over me until I start eating the damn stuff without continuing to eat until I'm sick and then making a beeline to the bathroom. I don't know how to break the cycle between eating, and eating, and eating, mindlessly without stopping, and then getting rid of it. I know that the changes lie in my thoughts and the negative and untrue stories I continue to tell myself. Without a doubt I'm living in a restrictive mindset, because when I "allow" myself to eat M&Ms at home I grab handful upon handful, shove them in my mouth while I' standing in the kitchen, and then place a handful on a napkin and eat them sitting down only to go back for more and more. I repeatedly tell myself, "One handful isn't enough. 2 handfuls isn't enough. 2 bowls of cereal isn't enough. You can't stop at 1 or 2 or even 3." It's so blatantly black and white and has been for so many years I don't even know where to begin. I guess my point is that I have zero trust in myself around food because I repeatedly "prove" to myself that I can't be trusted around it.
"I know that the changes lie in my thoughts and the negative and untrue stories..."
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What you tell yourself is important, but change comes with action. The action has to come first, going ahead and eating all the M&Ms, the ten bowls of cereal, not getting rid of it, and waking up and having breakfast in the morning, and lunch, and dinner. If there's no purge, you're very full, and your body is actually getting all of the energy and nutrients from the food you eat, soon you'll only want three bowls of cereal, or one, or none. No mental gymnastics required, you genuinely won't want it.
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A seemingly out of control appetite is caused by restriction and overexercise. It goes away with eating plenty of food on a predictable schedule and repeated exposure.
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No amount of tinkering with thoughts can help a person stop eating when they're starving. It's the other way around, when you're adequately fed, the thoughts change. Being chronically hungry affects your brain. It causes the anxiety, fear, and obsession. It's survival mode, fight or flight. Everything feels like a crisis because it is. Without enough food, you'll die. That's where your body is coming from, and it's no dummy. It's not going to be swayed from its mission to keep you alive with positive thoughts or sugar free gum. The more you can give it what it really needs (food), the more the stressful thoughts and the urges to eat everything in sight will fade.
You're exactly right. 2 really important things: taking action in order to implement the changes and develop the self-trust but also adequately nourishing myself without trying to compensate. I know the only thing holding me back is fear - fear of getting so full I can't move, can't function, can't think about anything else other than how full I am, can't be present with my friends/family/kids, and also fear of weight gain.
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I watched a Tabitha Farrar's Youtube video on "Struggling with compulsive movement" and (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ap1-huzs2Q) her response & suggestion was basically to commit to weight gain. I sort of get with TF is saying - the writer is attempting to suppress her body weight by allowing herself less restrictive foods so long as she could compensate through activity or maintaining a high level of restriction and moving less. But it seems kind of crazy (to me) for Tabitha to say, "Commit to weight gain." Like it is the be-all-end-all to recovery. Maybe I misinterpreted or maybe that's my eating disorder brain's response?
@Hayley I think Tabitha's point with "committing to weight gain" is that you can't stop the restriction, binge eating, purging, excessive exercise etc until you commit to or accept weight gain because all of those things are likely supressing your weight. To me "commit to weight gain" is just like saying "stop fearing weight" or "stop fearing weight gain". Whether it's 2lbs or 20lbs, it's possible your weight will increase when you stop the weight supressing actions
@sunshine That makes sense. I think the eating disordered/irrational part of my brain heard that and went "She's just trying to force everyone to gain weight!" That's probably the hardest part of this whole concept for me - simply letting go of trying to control what will happen to my weight and being deathly afraid of ending up at 200lbs. Which may or may not happen. It's just something I don't know and I know the brain hates uncertainty. But like with trust, how will you know unless you try?
@Hayley I totally get it. I feel the same way.
I don't know if this is helpful at all, but when I am trying to talk myself out of eating (when I think I "shouldn't" be hungry, etc.) I just ask myself if I'd force myself to hold it if I really had to pee. No. Even if I felt like I shouldn't have to pee, I would just go anyway. So, I am trying to just eat anyway.
Oh thatās awesome @snail and such a great metaphor. I will NOT forget that one! š
@Hayley So, say you're struggling from a restrictive eating disorder. Your current weight is one achieved through vomiting, overexercise, constant movement, and prolonged semi-starvation. How exactly do you recover from that if maintaining the low body weight is the number one priority? What is the alternative that's going to work better than resting and eating? That's why she's saying commit to weight gain. As long as you're only willing to recover a little bit if it doesn't affect your weight, you stay stuck in that limbo land of quasi-recovery for years.
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That's what she's getting at, not a conspiracy to make everyone fat, as my own eating disorder would have shrieked, š± just logic. Like @sunshine said, it's basically just taking weight off the table and doing what's necessary to heal. As long as we're focused on weight, we'll keep engaging in the behaviors that caused the whole predicament.
@skwigg Yes - the "conspiracy to make everyone fat" is exactly where my brain goes even though "logical brain" says is untrue. I remember having a conversation with myself at one point where I basically said, "Self; if you have to stay at this weight through compulsive exercise, over-eating, under-eating, and vomiting, is that what you want?" The answer is always no. And the even crazier thing is that I tend to lose weight when I cut back on the exercise. Technically I don't know that for sure (I can't recall the last time I stepped on a scale) but our Yellowstone trip for example...we hiked some, we spent hours in the car, I ran maybe twice (short distances) over a span of 8 days and my doctor told me my weight had dropped some when I went in for a checkup.
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It's just that for some reason at home I've wired my brain to exercise in the morning, drink a smoothie, eat lunch, elliptical, go pick up kids, eat snack, elliptical, etc, etc. I know without a single doubt that it's causing more harm than good and yet I can't flipping stop. I mean I can. It's all of the thoughts and feelings and anxiety I'd have to face that I'm afraid of. Not to mention the fact that it's taking away time I could be spending with my kids. Or teaching my daughter that it's necessary to exercise as much as I do. Although I have been up front with her and said that I exercise too much. Talk about going down a shame spiral right now.
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On a different note, I've been immersing myself in Kayla Rose and Tabitha Farrar videos, which are incredibly helpful. In one of the Kayla Rose videos she mentioned having a video where she faced her food fears but I couldn't find it. I guess I'll keep searching.
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I've noticed the same phenomenon. I always lose weight when I stop exercising, and easily maintain when I'm not overdoing it. Too much exercise makes me ravenous and exhausted. I experience water retention, cravings, and a general bottomless pit feeling. I end up eating and weighing considerably more in that state with worse body comp. That gave me a whole new perspective. More exercise is not better.
Coming back to say I agree wholeheartedly! My body does so much better on lower impact exercise. All of the times when I've felt like I should exercise more, do more high intensity stuff, I get puffy and tired. A lot of walking, with lower impact stuff helps me feel so much better.