HBO’s Thin Documentary

Just the deleted scenes had me sobbing from empathy last night. Too bad I can’t receive it here in Europe.

Check out http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/thin/ for more information.

What really spoke to me as a former compulsive eater was the anger and frustration of the women. They know their illness well, but find it very difficult to take the next steps in recovery. I understand firsthand how hard it is.

Jen preparing to leave Renfew was heartbreaking. She so passionately wnats life for her partner to be the way she imagines he wants it, and she knows she’s failed physically. With no period for so many years, she cannot have children unless she recovers and her system goes back to normal. But she doesn’t believe she can make that change. I’m not so sure it helps to spend time with other people who are not in recovery, although I am sure that it does help to know others share your pain. They could use more people who have recovered to show them the way. But it’s so easy to forget the path you walked to recovery - I know this. For every time I do something naturally, there’s another time in which I have forgotten what happened to bring me here. The shadows of the big binges are fading, although I can clearly remember how easy it is to start.

I really appreciated the counselor who stated so clearly that BED was included with anorexia and bulimia. It’s so easy to judge externally when a person has gone too far in losing weight, and people somehow feel comfortable with putting them into a center like Renfew. But it’s so much harder to decide if an overweight person has a real disorder or just poor habits. Since the line of unhealthy for overweight is so fuzzy compared to anorexics, it’s easier to overlook them. I also suspect that the sheer number of obese people in the world now overwhelm the possibility of helping them recover in an institutional fashion.

The counselors in the program seemed to be doing excellent work. They were calm, managed the discussions well, and seemed to be really helping people. Especially their emphasis on the power of the client to make decisions was moving. What I’d like to see more of, and maybe it’s in the documentary itself, is the client planning and managing recovery steps herself. That’s the only way to permanent recovery.

When I stayed emotionally attached to discussion groups around eating disorders, it was easy for me to stay sick. I don’t know how often I had to repeat to myself the message that it was my recovery and I have to do it myself.  Other ideas that helped me were that I don’t have to follow any one book’s plan, that all of the counselors are flawed, and that I need to take care of all areas of my life.

Perhaps the most important ideas for me, though, are that it’s actually possible and that it’s permanent. As far as I can tell, the only differences between a diet and normal life are restriction and the temporary nature of a diet. My recovery is about creating a permanent new lifestyle.

Previously I could not believe that I could possibly stop binging, and that it can be better to eat less. This idea of trading off one thing for another is harder to do in your personal life than when you make an engineering design decision. However, it’s true. Food tastes better when I actually spend time and effort tasting it. Physical movement is better when I do what pleases me, and my body is in a state to achieve it. Being stuffed full of food make it unpleasant to move. Making a change to eat less and move more is perfectly logical, but impossible when you don’t have any way to comfort yourself during the difficult times. When my only way to comfort myself was to hide and eat, enjoying less food was impossible, since less food was deprivation, and I needed to comfort myself that this deprivation was not only tolerable, but preferable.

How did it happen for me, this reduction in binging? Good question, and I’m not sure that my answer will always remain consistent. What I think right now is that I knew I had to change, because overeating was getting in the way of other things I wanted to do. Realizing that is the result of my therapy, in which I learned that the critical voice in my head didn’t have to be there. After the critical voice was quieter, I could actually address the process of overeating. That started with learning to sense hunger and fullness. As the critical voice was replaced with a voice of my best friend, I saw that it is possible to move away from the overeating. Then I had to take a courageous step: choosing to go without food more often and deliberately trying to find hunger more often.

Once finding hunger was started, I decided to start choosing to stop before very full or overfull. Sometimes it was just one bite less, but I practiced nonetheless. After doing this for a while, I gained the confidence to try an actual diet. First I added things to my current diet, like veggies, and then I dared to start eating less of meals in which I had a preconceived notion of how much would be right. Instead of a whole bagel, it became a half, then only the good half, then sometimes just a quarter. There’s no way to do this fast, as far as I know. When I pushed this too much, my critical voice came back and I would inevitably overeat again. But as long as I stay focused on tasting the food, choosing to stop and keeping the critical voice quiet, it stays in balance.