Indecision
One time in recovery, I spent 30 minutes in the candy aisle.
Thirty minutes standing, crouching, reading labels, and feeling completely lost. My husband, Glenn, left to complete our entire grocery list, only to come back and find me exactly how he’d left me: empty handed.
Indecision in eating disorder recovery can be a seriously frustrating hurdle to jump, yet so many people find themselves paralyzed by it.
So what gives??
Here’s the thing:
It doesn’t help that there are options GALORE in most grocery stores in developed countries. But the plethora of options alone aren’t the problem.
The problem is: you’re still functioning out of disordered habits.
During an eating disorder, food choices are governed by the rules you made about them. How good or bad something landed on your scale, and what threat it posed to your anxiety levels are what determined what you purchased to eat. And so, for however long you were functioning that way…
You never had to make that decision for yourself.
In recovery, food choices become more about how desirable something is. The more palatable, the more likely you are to choose it. Or, at least, that’s how it should be.
The trouble comes when you aren’t able to fully give in to your desires. And when you’ve convinced yourself for however long that you don’t like something because it was off-limits, it can be super confusing to begin eating it again.
The reason this happens is because your brain has been trained to send out the fear signal when you’re around those foods. Now that you’re in recovery, it’s like you’re trying to swim upstream. And while your brain is sending alert signals to warn you of the perceived danger, it becomes more of a battle of trying to figure out what your desires actually are.
There’s an old French fable known as Buridan’s Ass. In a nutshell, the tale is about a hungry donkey who stands between two bales of hay, and how he eventually starves to death. Moral of the story: indecision kills the ass.
My point? Don’t be the ass.
🌾🐴🌾
But how in the heck do you do that??
The good news is: your food indecision is entirely fixable. And the key to fixing indecision…
Is to CHOOSE!
I know, I know. If you could choose, you wouldn’t be indecisive in the first place, right!? But hear me out. If you’re having trouble deciding what to eat, allow me to let you in on a secret:
Food doesn’t have to be perfect to eat it.
No matter what your eating disorder says, this isn’t your one shot to eat candy, chips, or whatever it is you’re indecisive about. You don’t have to be in the perfect place, at the perfect time to eat something. It doesn’t have to be delicious to be “worth it.” And if you don’t like something? You can try a different one next time.
Food can be mediocre. It can be really good, and it can be kind of bad. It can be boring. You can eat it in a car. You can eat it watching TV. And you can just grab food because it’s the easiest option at the time. The important thing is that you’re just eating.
Here’s why this works:
The more you give in to hesitation and analysis paralysis, the more you confirm to your brain:
“Yes, you’re right. Food is a threat - we must tread carefully.”
In just picking anything to eat and not looking back, you’re teaching your brain to rewrite those habits and warning signals. By deescalating and choosing whatever, without a doubt: your brain will begin to learn that food is not a threat, and that you don’t need to spend 30 minutes in the cereal aisle any more. I promise you.
So, to put this into practice:
When you’re out shopping for food, make a game of it: see how quickly you can make it through the store. Grab something, and throw it in your carriage. And once it’s in your carriage, don’t second guess it. Just keep going. Because in the end, the most important lesson you can teach yourself in recovery is this:
Food is just food. And there’s no reason to be afraid of that.
So, next time you’re grocery shopping…
Just grab something.
Eat it.
Done.
You can do this,
Maria