Recover Your Perspective: A Guide to Understanding Your Eating Disorder and Creating Recovery Using CBT, DBT, and ACT by Janean Anderson

Author:Janean Anderson [Anderson, Janean]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Poplar Press
Published: 2018-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

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Self

In the previous section, you learned how your eating disorder uses mindlessness and disconnection to prevent you from connecting with your needs regarding food. In this section, you will learn how your eating disorder uses mindlessness and disconnection to detach you from needs that are not related to food, such as emotional needs.

When you’re mindful of your needs, you discover that often, what you need isn’t actually food, though your eating disorder would like you to believe food or eating disordered behaviors will solve all problems. Your eating disorder would like you to stay stuck in a pattern of using food and behaviors as a blanket solution for meeting all of your needs.

We have physical needs that are not related to food. Your eating disorder doesn’t want you to realize this. It doesn’t want you to be mindfully aware so you can directly address your needs. It just wants you to continue to use eating disorder behaviors for everything, even when those aren’t the appropriate responses.

Disconnection prevents you from accurately feeling how energized or how tired you are. Sleep is one of the best examples of a physical need that is unrelated to food. Your eating disorder wants to reduce your awareness around your need for sleep and rest. When you are physically tired, you are more vulnerable to using eating disorder behaviors. You don’t have as much energy to use skills—rather than eating disorder behaviors—to cope. Further, sleep deprivation triggers increase the desire to eat past fullness, setting off the eating disorder vicious cycle.

When you are mindful, you are present in the moment with your body, able to notice if you need a nap or a full night’s worth of sleep or if you feel restored and ready to take on your day. Sleep and rest are important needs for your eating disorder to distort. Getting enough rest ensures you’re running at full capacity and that you have the most resources possible available to you. When you are fatigued, you are weakened. Your eating disorder loves how vulnerable you are when you are tired or exhausted. It makes it harder for you to fight off its advances and easier to resign yourself to using eating disorder behaviors.

For example, you work additional hours at your job, working upward of 10 or 12 hours per day. All day, day after day, you fight the fatigue. You try to ignore it, telling yourself to “power through” or to “suck it up and drink another cup of coffee.” You come home late, around 8 p.m. and still need to make dinner for yourself. Instead of making a meal with all the foods your body is asking for at that moment, you order takeout instead and continue working through the night only to wake up the next morning and repeat the whole cycle.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against takeout or ordering takeout on a night when you’re exhausted. But, if this is the result of habitually ignoring your need for rest that sets you up for emotional or binge eating, it is your eating disorder manipulating you.

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