6 Steps To Recover From An Eating Disorder

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Step 4

For a full mental recovery it’s es-sential to reprogram your brain. For months, years or decades you spent in eating disorder you have developed some pretty strong auto-matic unconscious thought batters and behaviours. And you created them by constant repetition until they became habits. This is why the ED thoughts are so ingrained in your mind it seems almost impossible to stop them. And this is why eating disorder feels like it’s ‘you’ thinking, saying and feeling those things. It becomes part of you because it’s deep in your subconscious and to recover we need to root it out and change your brain!

The thing with your brain is that it’s very plas-tic, you can make yourself believe and be-have in almost any way you want if you re-peat some thoughts and behaviours over and over again. It becomes your second nature, it becomes automatic and easy to follow, it becomes a habit. To recover from an eating disorder you have to essentially un-brain-wash the eating disorder habits and repro-gram your brain in a healthy way!

Reprogram your brain

Step 4:Brain Fights ChangeOur brain loves patterns and habits because it requires the least amount of effort to fol-low them. It essentially had a good purpose to serve you, to make you very efficient as a human, to help you survive and thrive. This is your brains comfort zone and it loves to stay there. But the downside here is that it works with the same efficiency for creating either good or bad habits – your brain doesn’t know the difference!

The body’s control centre, the hypothalamus in your brain, wants to stay in homeostasis no matter what, to keep you safe. But with an eating disorder, your brain has learned to misinterpret food as threat. So as soon as you attempt some major change and try to recov-er, you start to eat enough, eat the foods you previously avoided and so forth, your brain gets a signal that something has gone terribly wrong and wants to eliminate the threat. The brain tries to do whatever it takes to force you back into the old habits.

You may start to experience fear, anxiety and negative thoughts about change. You will find numerous reasons, excuses, and ‘proof’ why recovery is not safe. You will forget why you started your recovery in the first place or how bad you feel each time you relapse – you start to self-sabotage your own recovery!

The rational and conscious part of you is try-ing to recover but the unconscious old ED habits try to push you back into the old fa-miliar pattern – the safe comfort zone of your brain! And this is why many people relapse over and over again, and why most find it almost impossible to overcome the fear of change. They misinterpret change (for exam-ple the common recovery symptoms such as weight gain, bloating, extreme hunger…) as a legitimate threat.

Follow the Intuition

Follow the Intuition

This happens because creating new habits and behaviours is very stressful for your brain due to the fact that it now has to create all these new neural connections, it has to do some serious work! Your brain is simply so conditioned to perform a certain behaviour that it doesn’t even want to change. This is why when you try to recover from your eating disorder you may experience some incredible resistance. Your subconscious brain doesn’t know what behaviour is “good or bad”, re-member, it knows only what it has learned to know by years of repetition.

I hope you understand now, in a most ba-sic level, why your brain seems to force you back to eating disorder each time you try to change. But now you also know that your brain is very plastic and you can change it in any way you want! And this is also how you can recover and reprogram your brain!

How To Change Your Brain

The previous explanation is the reason why using your bare willpower doesn’t work if you try to recover. You must get into your subcon-scious brain and change the old ED habits and patterns for a full and lasting recovery.

There are numerous ways to go about chang-ing your ED habits, it really depends on what is your specific problems and patterns you want to change in your eating disorder.

For example:

v Some feel an unstoppable urge to go and exercise 2 hours a day, if they don’t do it they feel extremely uncomfortable and guilty.

v Some have their brain conditioned to purge even when they eat a seemingly nor-mal amounts of foods.

v Some have formed rituals around eat ing that they feel must be performed in a sim-ilar way each time.

v Some have a pattern of negative-self talk that stops them from taking action to-wards recovery.

v Some experience a flush of fear and anxiety even when thinking about eating some of their “fear foods”.

v and so on and on…

So that’s why no recovery is the exact same. This is why we need a more individual ap-proach to each recovery. And this is why in this course I can only give general advice. But the thing is that once you understand the concept of how to change your habits in your brain you can use the same basic mecha-nism to stop almost any ED pattern.

Example Of OverexercisingAs I already told you in the Step 1 video it’s important to stop any caloric compensation in recovery. This includes exercising because it will only further stress out your body and prolong the healing process. Some find it easy to stop but for some people exercise has become a strong habit. If they try to quit they feel this incredible resistance, fear and anxiety.

If you have repeated one type of behaviour over and over again it can become a habit. Maybe for the past 2 years you have been exercising 2 hours every day. It’s part of your ED ritual. When you skip a day you feel this incredible amount of discomfort, guilt and anxiety. You may even have the irrational thoughts pop up in your head that says “If you don’t exercise you will lose all your mus-cle” or “If you skip your morning run you will

Follow the Intuition

not set off your metabolism for the day and you will store more fat”. These are, of course, all a total nonsense but nevertheless the fears you experience.

And plus, over the years you have maybe searched online, read articles and watched videos, about why exercise is important if you want to maintain your health or lose weight. All of these resources have further assured you that you absolutely must exercise if you don’t want to be overweight and unhealthy. You have absolutely convinced yourself that not exercising equals with a major setback, failure, a decline in your health and physical appearance. You have brainwashed yourself to believe that not exercising is very very bad. And this is why it’s very hard to stop.

You must unbrainwash yourself

But to come out of the belief that exercising is in any way healthy in recovery you must unbrainwash yourself from your previous be-liefs. You must understand why exercising is unhealthy for you when you have an eating disorder and why it will only keep you stuck. You have to start reading articles and listen to people who tell their experience with exer-cise and how they needed to stop and how they did it. You must educate yourself of the dangers of overexercising and why you need rest in recovery. You must know how exercise actually has no impact on your weight loss efforts and how it can actually further shut down your hormones and metabolism if you have this very unhealthy relationship with it.

When you don’t understand why you need to stop, you will likely give up as soon as things get uncomfortable! Because, remember what we talked about in the previous video – your brain will try to fight the change and push you back into the old habit! It will send you fear, excuses and ‘proof’ to make you go back. This is why people who have a strong habit of exercising in their eating disorder feel so

much anxiety when they try to stop. They think the uncomfortable feeling is a real sign that something is wrong and they MUST go and exercise, but actually, this is only the old habit that is slowly dying.

Uncomfortable is good!The key to stop the exercise habit is to stay very consistent with recovery and sitting through the uncomfortable feelings, the un-pleasant urge to go and exercise, the ED thoughts, and letting it pass. Waiting it out! The uncomfortable feeling will go away even-tually! So if you feel like you MUST go and ex-ercise to release the anxiety you must realise it’s simply the old habit and wait it out.

This new behaviour of ‘waiting it out’ will re-program your brain. If you repeat it over and over again it will form a new neurological con-nection in your brain, a new pattern, and in time it will become easier and easier until it forms a new healthy habit. You will override the exercise habit by not acting on it. In time you will not even remember why you felt like you needed to exercise so much. You have reprogrammed your brain! This kind of mech-anism can work with changing ALL of your ED habits!

Visualise Your RecoveryOne of the best first steps to start repro-gramming your brain from eating disorder is to create your Ideal Vision of Recovery. You can write a long chapter, describe every detail of your full recovery or write a short recovery statement. I wrote down a long vision of my recovery but also a short mantra I could easily remember and repeat every day.

I will write an example below and then I will explain exactly how and why I formulated it that way so you can create your own.

Follow the Intuition

“I am so happy and so grateful of my full re-covery. I am now a normal eater. I eat when hungry, stop when full and feel complete free-dom around foods!”

Tips:

v I wrote it in present tense, like it’s al-ready true. When you write it like that and imagine it already happened your brain does whatever it takes to make it a reality. Your brain doesn’t understand if a truth is an actu-al truth or only self-imposed truth. This is how you brainwash yourself in a positive way to believe whatever you want. Once you have a strong inner belief it’s only a matter of time for it to become reality.

v I put an emotion to it. When you read it, it has to make you feel amazing! Our brain reacts very strongly to emotions. This is why your favourite romantic movie can bring you to tears even though it’s not real – it has so strong emotion that you completely sink into the movie, like it’s happening right now, it be-comes so realistic that it has a physical im-pact on you! By giving your vision a strong positive feeling it’s much easier to reprogram your beliefs and therefore change your brain.

v I only focus on what I WANT, not what I don’t want…For example, I you write down and imagine “I don’t want to binge, I don’t want to gain weight, I don’t want to feel fat…” Do you think your brain now knows what to do? No! It’s like ordering from a restaurant and saying “I don’t want a soup, I don’t want a dessert, and I definitely don’t want bread…” Do you think that the waiter now knows that you want a baked potato in mushroom gravy, sprinkled with some cheese? Most certainly not! So only say things you WANT so your brain knows where to look and what to get.

v Being grateful. If you are grateful of your full recovery, even before it happens, you make it much easier for your brain to be-lieve it’s true. Normally, we are grateful for the things we already have in our life, right? And this is how our brain is wired. Plus, it makes a positive impact that increases your vibra-tion to attract more positive experiences. Remember, what you focus on is what you attract! This is the baseline why you have to be grateful of your full recovery right now!

Repeat it every day!When you now write down your own Ide-al Recovery Vision I want you to repeat it to yourself every day. Best is right before you fall asleep and right after you wake up – our sub-conscious mind is most open and acceptive at those times. Visualise it with intense emo-tion. Put many details to it, make it as real as possible. Even if you find it hard to visualise or believe it at first just know that the more you do it, the more you repeat it, eventually you will feel the shift in your brain and you will start to believe it as well. Just be persistent!

In the next chapter I will talk more about men-tal recovery from an eating disorder – the ED thoughts and how to change them, triggers, body image and self-acceptance. See you in the next video!

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