What Do Disordered Thoughts Mean About Your Recovery?
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Welcome back to Food Psych Weekly! Every week in this newsletter, I answer your questions about intuitive eating, Health At Every Size, disordered-eating recovery, and other anti-diet topics.
This week’s question is from a reader named Michelle, who writes:
Hi! I just read your book and it was life changing for me. I have battled with a restrictive eating disorder for the past 6+ years, and I still struggle with restriction now (even though it would be considered atypical since I am no longer thin). I have deemed myself to be in quasi-recovery because although I have come a long way, I still struggle so much with diet culture and disordered eating. I was reading an article recently and it stated that “if you still have constant ED thoughts, you still have an ED. Even if you are not doing the actions.” Is this true? I have ED thoughts daily and have realized that I have found “quirky” ways to disguise my restriction (so much so that I didn’t even fully realize that I was doing so). Now I feel deeply insecure about my recovery and if I will ever fully move past this stage in my life, especially since I am now fat AND know that my habits will never result in the thinness I so desperately want. Am I still deeply in my ED? Or would this be considered quasi-recovery, or even as good as a recovery that I’ll ever get?
Thanks for this great question, Michelle, and before I answer, just my standard disclaimer:
These answers are for informational and educational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.
First, I want to send you so much compassion for everything you’ve gone through in your relationship with food and your body. It sounds like you really have come a long way in recovery, but you also know that you still have much farther to go, and it can be hard having to hold those two conflicting truths.
In my experience, though, framing it that way is much more helpful than looking at it in stark terms like “if you still have constant ED thoughts, you still have an ED.” Of course I don’t know the full context here, and maybe the article as a whole was far more nuanced than that one sentence; but just going by what you shared, I think that’s a pretty black-and-white take on recovery, and it sounds like it wasn’t especially helpful to you. That black-and-white view minimizes all the progress you’ve made, and it also flattens the complexities of the messy in-between phase you’re in. It lumps your current situation together with your past experience, when you weren’t even trying to fight the restrictive thoughts or resist the behaviors—and those are fundamentally different points in recovery. If you still have constant ED thoughts but you’re not acting on them (or not acting on them as often), that is tremendous growth! And yes, of course you still have work to do in recovery in order to further reduce the disordered behaviors and decrease the hold those thoughts have on you, but that doesn’t mean you’re back at square one, or that this is “as good as it will ever get.” The truth is so much more hopeful than that.
Also, to me there’s a bigger cultural issue at play here than just this one article and how it landed for you, and maybe this will be helpful to consider: Social media and online platforms in general have an unfortunate way of amplifying black-and-white messages and burying more complex ones. This is by design: platform algorithms are engineered to promote engagement and keep people liking, clicking, and sharing on the platforms, and guess which kind of content performs best in that setting? Content that provokes anger and disgust, uses moral-emotional language, and/or introduces seemingly novel information. On a broad scale, this facilitates the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories; at the level of individual content creators, it can make people write and speak in ways that are much more blunt and lacking in nuance, because that’s what tends to attract the most likes, comments, and shares. I’ve had to learn to recognize and push back against this tendency in my own work, too, despite the fact that I started my journalism career before social media even existed—it’s disturbing how quickly we’re conditioned to play the algorithmic game.
Today when I’m reading online, I often find it helpful to notice how particular messaging affects my mental health and overall well-being, and use that to help decide whether to continue engaging with the source of that messaging.That means noticing any physical sensations that come up when I read or hear a given message—does my heart start racing? Do I break out in a sweat? Does my breathing get shallow? Is there tightness in my chest, jaw, shoulders, or any other body part? What happens to my mental state, and where do my thoughts go? Do I feel open, reflective, and maybe even excited to engage with a new idea, or triggered/activated* and stuck in a loop of repetitive, self-negating thoughts?
And some important follow-up questions to these: could this activated/triggered feeling be a sign that I’m coming up against some of my own internal biases or unhealed places? Or conversely, might it be a sign that harmful dynamics are afoot, and I’d do well to disengage with this source of information? What are my body and my brain trying to tell me with these reactions? It often takes time and quiet reflection in order to discern the answers here, which I know is even harder to do when you’re struggling with an eating disorder or other mental-health issues.
So Michelle, to the extent that it’s possible for you, I’d invite you to consider those questions whenever you’re reading online—whether about ED recovery or other topics. In this case, I’d look at the reaction you had—“now I feel deeply insecure about my recovery and if I will ever fully move past this stage in my life”—and try to discern whether that concern is coming from a grounded, wise place within you, or whether you got activated by the black-and-white statement you took from the article (or maybe a little bit of both). If it’s mostly coming from a triggered place, how might you re-ground yourself and reconnect with your recovery?
As for your question of whether you’re still deeply in your ED or whether this would be considered quasi-recovery, I can’t answer that without really knowing you and your individual situation, but I’d invite you to consider whether it might be a situation of both-and rather than either-or. You mention that you’ve found “quirky” ways to disguise your restriction so that you didn’t even fully realize you were restricting, and becoming aware of that fact actually sounds like a huge breakthrough, even as it points to the need for more work on your recovery. How can you hold both of those things with compassion?
Regarding your last question, “is this as good as recovery will ever get for me?”: No one can predict the future, so I can’t tell you for sure, and these kinds of questions often strike me as the eating disorder trying to justify itself (because if the answer was yes, then the ED could tell you to just give up on recovery). But going by what you’ve shared here, I’d say it’s likely that this is NOT as good as recovery will ever get for you, and that you’ll go much farther and deeper than you ever imagined. I say that because you’re clearly immersing yourself in recovery-oriented content and thinking critically enough about your ED to have breakthroughs about the sneaky ways that restriction is showing up for you, which is a sign that you’re already deepening your recovery. That gives me a lot of hope for your future—and I hope it can do the same for you.
Finally, it sounds like you may already be working with an ED treatment team, but if not then I would definitely prioritize finding one. Check out my provider list for folks who are versed in ED recovery as well as Health At Every Size, many of whom offer sliding scales or scholarships for folks in need.
Thanks again, Michelle, for that great question, and I hope it helps you think about your recovery with more self-compassion.
Ask your own question for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.
* Some people don’t love the word “triggered,” but for me, as someone with PTSD and anxiety as well as an ED history, the term really captures what goes on in my body and brain when my nervous system suddenly goes on high alert—it’s the same feeling I get when I hear a gunshot or other explosion, which might be why the word has a particular resonance in my mind.
Podcast Archives
In Episode 221 of Food Psych, Anti Diet Riot Club founder Becky Young joined me to discuss how diet culture intersects with other forms of oppression, how to respond to people who push back against the anti-diet message, why anger is important in eating-disorder recovery, how unconditional permission to eat can free your mind to focus on things other than food, and so much more.
Plus, I answered a listener question about the definition of the term "people in larger bodies.”
Check it out right here, and be sure to subscribe to the pod so that you get weekly reposts of fan-favorite episodes while we’re on hiatus, and new episodes once we return.
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Here’s to approaching recovery—and life—with a lot more room for complexity,
Christy