01/24/2022
On Jan. 17, I received two different newsletter emails from two different professional who work in the field of recovery from eating issues, specifically overeating, promoting events they were offering. I was deeply dismayed by both: one was giving a seminar on stopping eating sugar, the other referred to overeating as an addiction, and cited data describing the correlation between obesity and Covid death rates, to say that this particular addiction is no less deadly than any other.
I was dismayed because these professionals are supporting beliefs and conveying messages that are part and parcel of what enables disordered attitudes about bodies, weight, food, and health to continue to circulate.
What I and my colleagues who work with eating disorders have come to know is that eliminating any class of food simply increases desire for that type of food. Limiting food intake to amounts below however much is necessary to support a person’s own natural weight will only create hunger for more.
I learned this the hard way. I spent years (about 25 of them) in a 12-Step program for overeating, starting in 1977. While this was much better than the alternative (dieting— I’d spent years on innumerable diets, unable to stick to any for long), and while I gained inestimable support from and connection to others who were also committed to recovery (as I knew it then), and tools for navigating life without using food for self-regulation, I had to unlearn a lot as I discovered that full recovery could happen and what it could be.
There were several periods during my time in this program during which I eliminated sugar, sometimes all forms of added sugars as well as other refined carbohydrates. And in this program, weight loss and maintenance were considered a sign of recovery. How much weight someone was keeping off, along with how long they'd been abstinent from overeating, was shared and celebrated at meetings. We were told that, just like alcoholics, who could never drink again, we could never eat normally, but we could abstain from overeating and maintain a "normal" weight by working the program. We could never recover, would always be recovering.
But my path took me beyond this program and these ideas, to the freedom that came from the very hard work of learning to trust my body and its hunger and satiety cues. To get there, I had to decide that there were no foods that were off-limits, and to accept whatever weight, shape and size my body turned out to be as I did this. I had to learn how to eat sweets and snacks and trust that, when my body and brain really knew that I wasn't going to take them away again, I would only want as much as I needed.
I learned that I had an eating disorder that had not always had a name-- Binge Eating Disorder-- and discovered that this path led to a wonderful place: full recovery. As in, I don’t have anything to abstain from. My relationship with food is relaxed and satisfying, and does not include guilt, anxiety or shame. My relationship with my body is just fine, and I take good care of it to support its health and well-being, not to change or control its shape or size.
My journey is large part of why I am passionate about the Health At Every Size philosophy and Intuitive Eating approach to a relationship with food. I know intimately the process of living in fraught relationship to food and body, in both the disorder of an active eating disorder, and of ostensible recovery that is a different version of the disorder. And I know what non-disorder, what true recovery, is.
