Pathway to Normal Eating

Here is the complete series of my Pathway posts, updated as I finish each post.

Overview

Welcome! I’m introducing a new series describing the path a person takes to create a permanent recovery from an eating disorder to normal or intuitive eating. Over the next several posts, I will describe each marker in more detail, highlighting the most important elements of each item.

1. Recognize that life can be different. Interrupt your current state long enough to see that your life is more than just diets or an eating disorder.
2. Learn from others how to start changing. There are 3 types of changes: Rational, Physical and Emotional.
   • Rational changes include coaching, therapy, discussion groups, or nutrition education
   • Physical changes are diets, surgery or exercise
   • Emotional changes include willpower, religious, body and self acceptance, emotion  management, self-esteem, self-confidence
3. Start making changes. Learn to ignore what is not useful to your situation. Most people choose just one type, like only dieting, and soon find out that one path is not enough. Additionally, they find that the paths often have competing desires, yet few programs really treat all three types of change.
4. Choose to do whatever it takes to recover. Real recovery starts when you choose to make changes in yourself, according to your own learnings and wisdom. Learn and accept that you will have to build your own recovery, one choice at a time. 
5. Study and practice new habits in all areas. Action is more important than theory here. Often it’s about making imperfect decisions. Understand that making choices means balancing your needs and fulfilling all as well as you can.  Acknowledge that you are making changes that will be permanent. Prove to yourself that all habits, in all areas, must be practiced to be improved. Generally the most important habit you develop is replacing your negative self-talk with positive.
6. Define what you want your final state to be. Be specific. Motivate yourself by creating a strong picture of your future state.
7. Start setting and achieving realistic goals. Use your future state description to choose new habits to develop, and set small goals to learn those habits. Reward yourself for reaching those goals. Celebrate all successes, regardless of size or importance.
8. Reach your own happy medium. You define your own happy medium, ignoring what the rest of the world says you should do. Accept that no habit will be perfect, and that you can compensate by balancing the competing desires.
9. Continue the journey, spreading your learnings to other areas of your life. Learn to stop striving for goals that you’ve already reached. Enjoy who you have become. One day you will notice that your former eating issues have taken a normal place in your life.

1. Recognize That Life Can Be Different 

A number of years ago I traveled to Chicago to teach some cell phone provider technicians how to use some new test equipment. After 3 days of riding around in their equipment truck, climbing ladders and going to the tops of shopping malls, I needed a break, so I went into town and visited an art museum. While I can sadly no longer remember which museum it was, one painting I have never forgotten. I almost passed it by, but it caught me by the corner of my eye.

A solid black canvas.

I shrugged, wondered if the real art was in getting someone to pay for a solid black canvas, then started on my way. But something stopped me. I turned, looked a little longer, then went to stand a few meters in front of the picture.

It wasn’t just black.

There were rectangles of black, separating the picture into 4 quadrants. How could I detect a difference between 4 black rectangles? Could it be in the brushstrokes? Gazing a few minutes longer, I saw it - each rectangle was a different shade of black: red-black, green-black, blue-black, or black-black.

My world changed. I had seen something I never thought could exist, something simple, beautiful, yet confounding.

So it was also with my discovery of intuitive eating. After a lifetime of compulsive eating, I learned that some people don’t do that. When presented with a myriad of delicious taste treats, they eat only til satisfied, then they stop. I devoured Geneen Roth books, and began to understand that it’s possible to recover and have a normal life. Even for me.

That’s all the first step is - one brief recognition that recovery is possible. You don’t have to know how, or have proof. You just have to give it a chance.

2. Learn From Others

People who recover from an eating disorder or otherwise make a large permanent change in their lives, always address three areas:

• their Rational being, or how they use their logic and knowledge
• their Physical being, or how they feed and move their bodies
• their Emotional being, or how they learn to work with their emotions

These changes don’t come easy, but successful people work all three areas until they have decided that they are recovered.

People with eating disorders (and many other people as well) are still developing the skill of merging the three areas together in harmony.

• Getting your rational mind in order means being able to link your choices of overeating or restricting food to rational physical consequences, like weight gain or heart failure.
• Getting your physical body in order means learning and practicing reasonable eating and exercise habits.
• Getting your emotional mind in order means learning to manage your emotions, when to respond to them, and when to choose other ways of getting through tough times.

Many times, people know what’s wrong, but they don’t know how to change it. So they begin searching. They buy books, talk to others, learn, learn, learn.

Where to learn more about making Rational changes:

• talk to your doctor
• go to a nutritionist
• join discussion groups
• join a diet program
• start therapy

Where to learn more about making Physical changes:

• join a gym
• buy a DVD
• buy home exercise equipment
• see a weight loss surgery doctor

Where to learn more about making Emotional changes:

• join a religious group
• discussion groups
• join a self-help group

All of the things can be successfully used to make at least temporary change. The problem with these approaches is they rarely match your personal needs. We’ll talk more about that in the next posts.

3. Start Making Changes

As a kid and a teenager, I never really knew that there were psychological issues behind my ED. Our family dynamics were such that I barely knew that diets existed, much less believed that people were successful on them.

Once I got out into the real world, or as real as college can be, I lost weight - 75 pounds in 4 months. This came from being active and being out of a house where eating was the focus.

This was fine and felt wonderful, until I settled out and couldn’t go any lower. Then I really started learning about diets, and popular body image, and peer pressure.

Over the course of the next years I tried a number of diets, none of which worked very well. Wishing was my primary motivator.

Moving to Europe brought another level of activity and I learned some things about discipline, which enabled me to lose more. Towards the end of that time I met and married DH, and we moved to the US.

Going back to my original location brought back old painful memories, and I suffered a lot, blaming everything on my size. Eventually I entered a commercial weight loss program and lost down to 177 pounds before getting pregnant.

Motherhood brought back family issues, for which I chose my usual medication: food. It was only about 10 years ago that I had that flash of recognition that life could be different, and that I would not have to suffer with this for the rest of my life.

I began walking down the Intuitive Eating path, but fell at first into the trap of thinking I could do this without consciously managing my eating. I legalized for 8 years without ever getting the IE “stop” signal to stop eating.

A couple of years ago I recognized that I didn’t understand something, and started therapy. One year of therapy was enough to help me recognize that I was in charge of my own recovery, and started me down the path of the balanced recovery you are observing in these pages.

Just for fun, here are all of the programs, tools and concepts I can remember I used in the 20+ years before finding what is really working for me:

Portion control; calorie counting; low-carb; Atkins; Physician’s Weight Loss; Weight Watchers; exercise; grapefruit diet; Geneen Roth; Overcoming Overeating; banana diet; Intuitive Eating; Fat is a Feminist Issue; The Zone; South Beach; jogging; Oprah; Cambridge Diet; Glycemic Index; High Protein; Shangri-La; Sonoma Diet; Body for life; Apple Cider vinegar; Heart Foundation; bulimia; juice fast; Slimfast; Seven Day Diet; Sparkpeople; food pyramid

4a. Choose to Do Whatever It Takes

It’s thrilling to start a new diet, give up all dieting, start changing your life. The attraction of “change your shape, change your life” is enormous. Who doesn’t get a thrill of thinking, “If I can just get to the right weight, I’ll be so much better off?”

This is just another version of the Cinderella story: the “Prince” (the diet) whisks you off to a world in which you are not only beautiful, but also loved, popular and perfect. With beautiful clothes on top of all that.

A pretty dream, but Not True.

One of the first reality checks we get come when we realize that the diet or the intuitive eating philosophy isn’t perfect and it’s quite easy to cheat or fight it. But it’s not the imperfection of the system that fails us, because we all know that nothing’s perfect. It’s a false hope that the diet or non-diet will fix things, and we slowly learn that we are responsible for converting the false hopes into real goals.

We must acknowledge that diets and WLS can be cheated on. We must acknowledge that no therapist can force recovery on us, only we can recover. Only we are responsible.

It helps to know that true permanent recovery happens when we recover in 3 areas:

• our thinking
• our physical activity
• our emotions

None of the commercial diets, or the surgeries, or the IE philosophies is perfect, and none of them can mix recovery in all three areas that is perfect for you. Only you can do that. And you CAN do that.

For someone like me, who went far into the compulsive eating disorder, or like friends of mine who have gone far into bulimia or anorexia, it’s a long way out of the disorder, but it’s possible. It’s more than possible - it happens, and when you learn to persevere, you will go all the way.

Perseverance means to keep going, even when it’s hard. Even when you fail. Even when you fail big. Even when you want to give up. Even when you give up for a while. Perseverance means that you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and choose to try again.

Perseverance means doing whatever it takes to recover. It’s a choice, not a magic potion, not a person, not a tool.

You can do it. One choice at a time.

4b. Choose to Do Whatever It Takes Redux

Whatever it takes? How can you define that?

For me, whatever it takes is whatever it takes, short of violating my primary values. For example, I won’t kill to be thin and free of the ED.

Doing whatever it takes means the following:

1. Doing what you think you need to be doing
2. Assess the efficacy of your choices and actions
3. Repeat until you get the results you want

This is hard, no doubt about it. At its worst, you will experience frustration, feelings of ineffectiveness, and want to give up. At best, you’ll discover strengths you never knew you had, the joy of success, and strong motivation.

My biggest personal frustration has been around actually losing weight after recovering. I am thrilled with my progress in stopping binging and self-talk, even in exercise. But finding the right amount and type of eating that meets all 3 needs (emotional, physical and rational) is difficult. Now I am beginning to perceive myself as an ED-recovered person in a body still carrying the burden of the ED. I feel like I’m truly me now, and just have some excess energy (OK, a LOT of excess energy) to burn off to let my body catch up with the rest of me.

So I’m using the phrase “whatever it takes” as my mantra this week. I repeat this phrase a hundred times or more a day, each time I encounter a choice. “I want to do whatever it takes,” I whisper to myself, “What will it take right now, this very minute?”

 5. Study and practice new habits in all areas

Action is more important than theory here. It’s also the place where most programs fail you. Programs that claim differentiation by being a diet or a non-diet or an exercise program tend to focus in just one area, but your recovery is holistic and needs to take care in all areas. Before you think I’m being too hard on the programs, consider this: program are subservient to commercial interests. This subservience may stem from good motives, but they still have to serve many many people. You get to focus on yourself, and take what’s best from each and create your own program.

Changing your thinking, eating and activity habits will take time and patience. Rather than looking at mistakes as failure, regard them instead as data points that teach you to try something different. Most importantly, don’t give up. This is gargantuan change and will take time.

Neither your decisions nor your practice will be perfect. Making choices means balancing your needs and fulfilling all as well as you can.  You are making changes that will be permanent. Prove to yourself that all habits, in all areas, can be improved. 

6. Define what you want your final state to be

My final state is described in my mission statement.

… permanently change to a moderate range of Emotional, Physical and Social behaviors 

That may sound odd or ambiguous to you, but it’s extremely clear to me. As a compulsive eater who never learned good social or emotional skills, resolving those issues is what I describe as becoming normal.

In school, I often had teachers and counselors try to help. “Count to 10 before you cry,” or some other form of advice that might have helped someone far less screwed up than I was. They were simply helpless in face of my problems, which were overwhelming. 40 years ago, it was rare for a school to intervene in a family life. Might have been better for me if someone had, but that’s all in the past now.

One of the most basic social skills I lacked was personal hygiene. It wasn’t pretty, 6 people sharing a 900 square foot house with parents who never cleaned. Cockroaches were part of daily life. So was washing just the dishes you needed to eat with, ignoring the dishes and pans piled everywhere. The rest of the house was the same. Clothes were not washed, they lay mildewing on the bathroom floor next to the washer and dryer. Eventually the bathroom floor rotted through. It was impossible for me to even recognize that I stank.

My future state includes being able to easily clean up after myself without guilt or shame. I can go out in the company of others without worrying about my smell or physical presentation. I have all of that past shame so far in the past that it does not affect current conversation.  I can deal with everyday hard emotions without going overboard. I can move with ease and strength, free from the difficulties significant extra weight brings. This picture becomes more clear for me every day.

Define what you want your final state to be. Be specific. Motivate yourself by creating a strong picture of your future state. Let that future state guide your choices today.

7. Start Setting and Achieving Realistic Goals

Setting goals can be intimidating for an ED person. For me, any kind of food limiting goal was impossible. Diets were simply one big long cheat, pretending to want to diet away my fat, yet almost never eating according to the plan. The one time I lost on a diet program, I lost over 100 pounds, getting down to 177. The diet ended because I became pregnant, and the “counselor” at the center was apparently so angry that she’d lost a paying customer that she accused my husband of controlling everything I did. Bizarre, freaky woman. <yes, dear, you want another beer? I’m on my way. I love the visit to Stepford we made a while back. I feel so satisfied, and you’re so hot.>

This year I really learned to set and work toward goals. Just click on the category goals in this blog, and you’ll see how a person can turn a food obsession into a goal obsession.

Set goals that work for you, the smaller the better when you start out. Don’t give up a food category forever, if that’s your wish. Instead, start by skipping that food at a single meal. Repeat when it feels right, and keep working at it. Many of my good habits started with doing it once, then not again for months. But slowly, I started building them until I reached the level of “good enough.”

 8. Reach Your Own Happy Medium 

The single most important principle about non-normal eaters is: if your eating has been not normal for a long time, it will require a long time to correct. Therefore, the most important things to practice are patience and persistence.

Never giving up is the only way to make a permanent change. Even though I’d dearly love it to be different, there’s no A-Ha moment that will cause an instant change that will last.

Additionally, mistakes will become your friends. As you learn to stop beating yourself up about mistakes, you will gradually learn to turn the mistakes into advantage, building up knowledge that eventually becomes food wisdom.

The single activity you can do to speed you along is to keep acknowledging and rewarding positive behavior (it helps to define your desired goals beforehand). Most of the best rewards are free. Keep telling yourself the things you are doing well, and there is ALWAYS something to congratulate yourself for every day. This positive feedback is like gasoline on a fire - it will increase your learning and your success.

 8. Continue the Journey 

Change up frequently. Keep trying new things. There are so many things to learn on your journey, it’s useless to perfect anything before going on to the next.

Keep it fun, find ways to laugh at yourself and the world. Enjoy the food, enjoy the learning, enjoy the exercise, enjoy the journey.

It’s your life. Take it back. Make it what you want it to be, free of compulsion and sadness.