Recently I was speaking at an inpatient training day for nurses working with patients in recovery from eating disorders at a local hospital. Amongst the questions I was asked about my recovery was one I thought would be worth taking the time to delve a little deeper into here because it’s not an uncommon one.
At this training I shared some of my experience living with and recovering from anorexia nervosa.
I shared that I lived with and was attempting to recover from this illness for 15years of my life (by the time I recovered I had spent more of my life sick than I had well).
The question that was asked was along the lines of…
“Do you think you didn’t recover earlier because you never reached full weight restoration?”
The answer to this question is simple.
No.
Why?
First and foremost because eating disorders are not illnesses of weight.
But Let’s Dive Deeper
First off, I did reach a “healthy weight” (by BMI or any other standard you want to use).
What I didn’t share was that it’s quite possible there were times during the years I lived with anorexia nervosa where I weighed more than I do now (I don’t know what I weight now and I didn’t know what I weighed a lot of the time back then so I can’t say this with 100% certainty but I think it’s true).
I reached a “healthy” weight.
Again, and again.
I lost it.
Again, and again.
If reaching a “healthy weight” was all it took to magically no longer have an eating disorder my story would have been very different.
Many people’s stories would be very different because my story aside the stats clearly tell us that only a small percentage of people living with eating disorders are underweight.
Most people living with eating disorders are in the healthy, overweight or obese weight range.
This includes anorexia nervosa.
Eating disorders are not illnesses of weight.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses.
The Truth
One of the hardest things I found in my recovery and something that I truly feel prevented my recovery during all the years I was trying to recover was the misguided understanding I had that weight gain equalled recovered.
The sad thing is it wasn’t an understanding I came to all on my own.
This is what I was told.
This is what I was told both overtly and covertly.
This is what I was told repeatedly by numerous health professionals and genuinely people who looking back I feel truly should have known better.
There was recognition of the importance of seeing a psychologist sure but there was no recognition or direction as to why exactly beyond helping to eat more to gain weight to suddenly become recovered…
During the years I struggled to recover I gained (lost, regained and lost) weight more times than I could possibly count.
I didn’t gain weight knowing things would change.
I did it in utter desperation that thing would change.
That I would change.
I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.
I didn’t have any better information.
I really thought that the rest would kind of just fall into place.
I didn’t even really know what the “rest” was.
There was just a general sense of being different.
Of being inadequate and broken.
Weight gain was supposed to fix that.
It didn’t.
No matter how many times I tried.
It makes me sad to look back on that lost and confused past version of myself and think about how hard she tried.
How hard she tried and how she genuinely succeeded with the information that was given to her.
It makes me sad to know that there are people working in eating disorder treatment who still believe that weight gain is the cure.
That recovery from an eating disorder is just about getting people to eat more and regain weight and that’s it job done.
Weight gain is undeniably and unavoidably a crucial part. This we also irrefutably know to be true. There is no health to be found in being underweight.
Weight gain is necessary in recovery from an eating disorder. Often even if the person isn’t even what we’d label as “underweight”.
But it is not going to “fix everything” and I think people in recovery are being done a massive disservice by acting as though it is.
We’re only setting them up for failure.
And there are only so many of those failures you can endure before you start to feel that it’s something wrong with you and that you cannot change.
That this might work for everyone else, but you are different.
There’s only so much of that you take before you lose hope and give up.
We know better.
I talk with people from all over the world daily who are trying to recover from anorexia nervosa who have gained weight in the past and not been able to sustain this. I also hear from people who are “weight restored” now and who are confused as to why they are as lost as ever.
They have achieved what they thought was the hard part only to be left mentally suffering just the same and often more so because they now appear physically “healthy” and feel they have to be ok or “aren’t sick enough” or can’t ask for help.
Often, they don’t even know what help they would like to ask for.
After all, they’ve done it.
They’ve regained the weight and they’ve been told that’s what recovery is but they’re far from recovered and there’s nowhere left to go and nothing left to do.
Summary
Eating disorders are not illnesses of weight.
They are illnesses of genetics and I also believe a lack of abilities to be free to be yourself and exist in a world that is hard (wonderful, exciting and spectacular at the same time but undeniably hard).
Therefore, if we focus on weight gain at the expense of helping people develop themselves in terms of self-trust as well as the real-life abilities they need to function in a world that is hard we are setting people up for failure.
And it breaks my heart.
We know recovery is about more than weight restoration.
We know this.
We know this.
We know this.
If we listen to any person who has ever recovered from an eating disorder they will say it took more than regaining weight.
If we want to change the success of eating disorder recovery we need to use this knowledge in practice.
We need to provide people with solid and tangible options not only to achieve weight recovered but also to achieve mentally recovered.
If we aren’t quite sure what this is that is then we need to learn.
We need to fill our own knowledge gaps so we can provide people in recovery with options.
To me the options are something that involves working with the unconscious mind, our habits, routines, beliefs and so on. This includes clinical hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming.
Yes, treatment must include helping them regain weight.
And it also must include helping them live at a weight that their body is healthy at and this requires helping them develop the abilities to function at their best at this weight and therefore simply be able to live their amazing, incredible, wonderful, exciting and hard life.
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
