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When in bulimia recovery, or after recovering from another eating disorder, someone may still be struggling to manage their body weight. Where is the line between disordered weight-focused behavior and stable weight maintenance? Practicing intuitive eating and paying attention to how your body feels when engaging in movement can help.
Eating is disordered when it interferes with daily functioning, causes psychological distress, and results in fluctuating weight, such as what is experienced in people with bulimia nervosa (BN).
The biggest motivating factors driving disordered eating include: (3)
If someone feels compelled to lose weight due to these factors, which is very common in our society, discussing them in counseling, learning about how diet culture influences our views of food, eating, and exercise, acknowledging distressing feelings, and practicing mindfulness and intuitive eating can help prevent falling into disordered eating.
A truly healthy approach to body weight entails unlearning our society’s harmful messaging that fat is bad, weight is an indicator of health and is to blame for many health problems, and losing weight will solve those problems. This approach entails learning about all the factors that can actually lead to weight gain and how weight is not a viable indicator of health. Educating yourself about concepts that include Health at Every Size® (HAES®), weight stigma, fatphobia, body positivity, and weight neutrality will help you understand how skewed our perception of health is and how biased we are against fat.
Body acceptance comes from a place of self-love, respect, and compassion. That’s hard to achieve in a culture that idealizes certain body types over others, teaches us to hate our bodies, and tells us we need to change our bodies to fit in–which leads to eating disorders. But there are things you can do to redirect your efforts to pay attention to what your body needs to function effectively and for you to feel good about yourself.
While disordered eating stems from negative emotions and feeling badly about yourself and your body, maintaining weight mindfully is a positive paradigm and honors the body’s innate cues for hunger, satiety–or feeling satisfied, and fullness. (4) Applying the principles of mindful eating can help you improve your relationship with food, eating, and your body and give your body what it needs to function properly. They include: (5)
Studies also show that group therapy, body scan-guided imagery, journaling, and art therapy can be highly beneficial and supportive to walking through the steps outlined above. (5)
People who have bulimia and other eating disorders often exercise excessively to compensate for food eaten. Exercise is considered extreme if you: (6)
When an unhealthy relationship with exercise develops, someone will feel emotionally distraught and guilty when they do not exercise. They may restrict eating to only on days when they can exercise or purge when they miss a workout. Injuries often occur due to nutritional deficiencies or over exertion. At the end of working out, instead of feeling accomplished, someone will feel relieved, or that they have permission to eat. They may compulsively track caloric intake and compare this with how many calories they’ve burned while exercising. (6)
Mindful exercise in bulimia recovery integrates mind and body and includes profound inward mental focus. Examples include yoga or tai chi, which focuses on non-judgemental inward focus, instead of compulsively targeting heart rate. Mind-body exercise incorporates these criteria: (6)
Disclaimer about "overeating": Within Health hesitatingly uses the word "overeating" because it is the term currently associated with this condition in society, however, we believe it inherently overlooks the various psychological aspects of this condition which are often interconnected with internalized diet culture, and a restrictive mindset about food. For the remainder of this piece, we will therefore be putting "overeating" in quotations to recognize that the diagnosis itself pathologizes behavior that is potentially hardwired and adaptive to a restrictive mindset.
Disclaimer about weight loss drugs: Within does not endorse the use of any weight loss drug or behavior and seeks to provide education on the insidious nature of diet culture. We understand the complex nature of disordered eating and eating disorders and strongly encourage anyone engaging in these behaviors to reach out for help as soon as possible. No statement should be taken as healthcare advice. All healthcare decisions should be made with your individual healthcare provider.
