When the Honeymoon Phase is Over
Not a lot of us like admitting to this, but…
The beginning of recovery can be kind of… fun.
When you’re super hungry, food is super good, no matter what you’re eating. The fact of the matter is: nothing will ever taste as good as it does when you’re on the brink of death by starvation. And having an insatiable appetite makes eating lots of food a lot easier.
Problem is: starvation doesn’t last forever. At some point along recovery, you stop starving. But ironically, this can pose a roadblock that keeps you stuck in a never-ending loop of semi-recovery.
Let’s break it down:
Part of the reason semi-recovery is so hard is because you’re no longer physiologically driven to blindly eat copious amounts of food. You body is no longer urgently demanding “FOOD!,” and your brain is nourished enough to start weighing in on what you consume a little more. This combo leads to the semi-recovery purgatory I was talking about. But I’m here to throw you a safety line.
Remember this:
Just because your body is healed, doesn’t mean your disorder is.
As recovery goes on, once your hunger isn’t quite as ravenous, it can be hard to keep the momentum going. Your disorder can deceive you into thinking this is a sign to start restricting food again, but it’s so crucial to remember this one thing:
Your eating disorder is a mental illness, not a physical one.
Eating disorders are healed by doing the mental work of eradicating all disordered thoughts. Although your disorder would have you focus on the physical symptoms of recovery, the bottom line is that recovery is not determined by physical measurements.
In other words:
While the improvement of your physical health is a consequent of recovery, it’s not the focus.
So, if you’re caught in a phase of recovery where your hunger cues have calmed down, but your eating disorder is still very much thriving, the way to move past this and closer to remission is by recognizing that your illness is a mental one, and is therefore healed by doing the mental work. And number one on the agenda is confronting this truth:
Starvation can become your safety blanket.
To a disordered mind, eating fear foods feels a lot more justifiable so long as you’re insatiably hungry. And while extreme physical hunger cues can help get you over the hump from disordered into recovery, it’s really only a short-term bandaid: a physical drive to force the body to overcome an illness that is, by definition, mental. And so, extreme hunger turns into a permission slip. So what do you do when extreme hunger morphs into more, well… normal hunger?
Recovery is all about adapting as you get closer to remission. Otherwise, you face stalling your efforts (AKA: a life of semi-recovery), and that’s a place that nobody wants to be stuck in. So, what do you do when the initial honeymoon of starvation fades away?
If you’ve read my ebook, you already know there’s a wide range of different signs of hunger. And the physical sensation of hunger? That’s only one amongst them. When you rely on the physical sensation of hunger as a sort of Eating Gatekeeper in recovery, your recovery efforts will stall when your hunger inevitably shifts away from survival-mode as you progress toward remission.
When you first begin your recovery effort, the physical drive to eat more and more food is absolutely voracious. You can have compulsions to eat food, regardless of whether you’re physically full from having just eaten a meal. That initial hunger is a reliable, dependable need that helps you continue getting food into a system that requires loads of repair from disordered eating. As such, it’s natural to use these very strong physical symptoms as a way to quell the initial anxiety of beginning to eat food.
When your body shifts from trying to survive into wanting to thrive, hunger changes into more of a gentle reminder than a screaming urge. And this can cause some confusion.
What’s going on? Do I really need to eat if I’m not that hungry?
These are the thoughts that can trap you in years of semi-recovery if you don’t recognize them for what they are. Your eating disorder can be a really tricky illness, and when your body’s no longer giving you extreme hunger cues, it can often materialize again in more subtle ways. We easily begin to tell ourselves something more toxic:
You’re not starving, which means you’re not hungry enough to deserve food. You don’t need to eat X, Y, Z any more - those were only for when you really needed to eat food. You don’t have to eat yet - just wait a little longer.
These are all lies we tell ourselves that keep us trapped in semi-recovery. But here’s the truth:
Your body still needs food.
You are still recovering. And just because you aren’t absolutely starving any more, doesn’t mean you can now slip into disordered behaviors and thinking patterns. You might not be on the brink of starvation any more, but you still need lots of food for two reasons:
You still need to mentally recover, and the only way to do this is by eating more food than you mentally feel “safe” eating. And;
You are still alive, and invariably all living creatures need plenty of food to continue living.
For every phase of recovery, there is a challenge presented to the recoverer. Along every step of the way, you have a choice: you can either fall back on your disorder, ignore the challenge and get stuck in semi-recovery, or face the challenge head-on and progress toward remission. Recovery is more like a game of breaking rules. For every rule the eating disordered part of your mind makes, you must break it without remorse until the rule no longer exists. And at this particular phase, the challenge becomes:
Learning to eat without physical starvation prompting you.
The more your coddle to your anxiety by not eating, the further your eating disorder digs its heels in. So naturally, in order to move past this phase of semi-recovery, you have to push through. And we do this by - you guessed it - eating. Plain and simple:
In order to recover fully, you must eat your way to remission.
The only way to recover is by:
Breaking the rules, and;
Eating lots and lots of food.
Everyone in remission has done it, and now you will, too. To keep moving forward in your recovery effort, you need to learn to speak the language of hunger apart from the starvation compulsions you were getting at the start of recovery.
In short: just because your body isn’t screaming at you to eat past the point of comfort all day long, doesn’t mean you get to ignore your hunger. So, to move forward with recovery, you need to learn your hunger cues.
Here’s my question for you:
What are your hunger cues?
Only you can answer this question, but here’s a few ideas to get you started:
Do you feel…
…Anxious?
…Irritable?
…Restless?
…Tired?
…Unable to focus?
And most importantly:
Do these symptoms go away when you eat?
If so, we can safely deduce that these symptoms are hunger cues. File these away and learn to listen for when your body brings them up again. Then, respond by eating! Here’s the catch:
It’s easy to overthink it.
And when you’re recovering from a mental illness that prompts you to overthink food, that’s a hard habit to kick. So remember this: these symptoms are really just things to get you thinking about eating and remembering to feed yourself. In truth, hunger isn’t something that can be neatly labeled and filed away. Oftentimes, we forget the most important hunger cue:
Simply wanting to eat signifies hunger.
Just having an interest in food alone is enough to warrant eating. You don’t have to be starving to eat. In fact, you shouldn’t be anywhere near starving by the time you allow yourself food.
Bottom line:
In order to move forward once the honeymoon phase of hunger is over… all you have to do is:
Keep eating.
Believing in you always,
Maria
