Recovery, Control, and Living in a Diet Culture
Recovery in Context
If you’re considering recovery, you’ve likely noticed how your eating disorder has shaped both your internal attention and relationships with others. You may also find yourself wondering what life could look like without this burden. Recovery does not happen in isolation, it unfolds within a broader culture that continues to reinforce dieting, body surveillance, and self abandonment. In this context, recovery becomes less about behavior change alone, and more about gradually developing a different way of relating to yourself, your body, and the world around you.
Diet Culture and Meaning
The way we navigate our bodies connects to deeper emotional and relational themes in our lives. Depending on the messages you received throughout childhood and adolescence, your body size may become linked with experiences of safety, control, belonging, or worthiness. You may experience your body or your eating disorder as a way of securing achievement, acceptance, or a sense of coherence in relationships that otherwise felt uncertain or conditional. Our relationship to food also connects to these same emotional schemas– you may seek comfort or control through behaviors such as restriction, bingeing, or purging. Therapeutic treatment of eating disorders involves exploring what your body and relationship to food means to you, and how those internalized messages have impacted your life.
Internalized Messages
In the process of exploring internalized messages surrounding food and body, we will find ourselves asking several important questions. We will explore what you learned about bodies and belonging in your early relationships. For some people, these patterns feel very visible– they remember being put on diets as children or recall a parent harshly criticizing their own body. For others, it may be more subtle messages that you picked up on in childhood. We may ask who was praised or criticized based on their body or food choices. We may look at what you learned about hunger and the idea of taking up space.
Recovery as Loss
Some people in recovery may find themselves experiencing the process of healing their relationship to food and body as a loss or betrayal. You may need to grieve the identity you had tied up in your eating disorder or let go of a way of gaining approval from family or society at large. It is important to make space for ambivalence in recovery, including grief for the identity that may have formed around the eating disorder, or for the ways it once provided structure, protection, or connection.
Living in Diet Culture During Recovery
You may find that as you move through your recovery journey that the rest of the world has not caught up. People in recovery often become more aware of how diet culture shows up in their family, friendships, romantic relationships, workplaces, and broader society. It can be distressing to feel like you’re swimming against the current, when it feels like everyone around you is in a constant effort to become smaller or more optimized.
Health at Every Size (HAES)
In my therapeutic approach to eating disorder treatment, I use a Health At Every Size (HAES) framework as my North Star. HAES is a philosophy developed by the Association for Size Diversity and Health designed to address weight stigma that is so pervasive within the healthcare system. HAES is a weight neutral approach to health that challenges the assumption that body size is a proxy for health. HAES is a weight-inclusive philosophy that challenges the assumption that body size is a proxy for health.. HAES promotes intuitive eating, joyful movement, and body acceptance regardless of a person’s size. Over the course of your therapeutic treatment, we will discuss the natural variance of bodies and how recovery may involve body changes and weight gain. We will explore internalized weight stigma that you may be living with, and discuss what it would look like to navigate the world in a recovered body.
Learning to Tolerate Uncertainty
Many people find their recovery journey to be the process of learning to tolerate uncertainty. You will likely find yourself looking for reassurance that your recovered body will stay within a certain size range or that your hunger and fullness cues will follow a set pattern. Living in a recovered body means not knowing exactly what that body will do. Many people feel initially frustrated by their hunger cues as they learn to relate differently to their body’s intuitive signals.
We will find ourselves discussing different definitions of control. The control that you may be used to as part of your eating disorder is likely very conditional– you only feel in control if you adhere to a rigorous set of predetermined rules around food, body, and movement. While recovery will involve relinquishing this type of control, we seek an ultimately more stable form of control. This alternative type of control is more stable because it is based in self-trust. It develops over time through repeated experiences of responding to life’s challenges, triggers, and uncertainty with flexibility and kindness. The goal is not perfect control over your body, appetite, or emotions, but a greater capacity to remain connected to yourself in the face of uncertainty.
Shifting Your Relationship with Self and Others
Recovery is a journey towards a different relationship with yourself, but it also transforms your relationship to the world around you. Living with an eating disorder can isolate you in behaviors and perspectives that are out of alignment with your values. Eating disorders tend to pull our attention inward in a way that may be protective, but is also limiting. Over time, the rules and anxieties that organize your relationship with food and body leave little room for other forms of engagement in life– relationships, spontaneity, pleasure, and connection.This is the insidiousness of eating disorders– they don’t just narrow your behavior, but narrow what feels possible in your life. Throughout the recovery process, many people find that they can be more present in their relationships. In this way, recovery is a return to connection with our lives. By connecting more fully to food, our bodies, and other people, our lives become richer and more fulfilling.