Challenging the Food Police During Eating Disorder Recovery

Past blog posts have touched on various principles of intuitive eating, including respecting your body, practicing intuitive movement, and honoring your hunger. For today’s blog post, we want to dive into the importance of challenging the food police during eating disorder recovery.

We all have various rules that hold us back in our relationship with food. These rules, then, can swell into thought patterns, ultimately forming a belief system that controls our choices and becomes much harder to reprogram. 

The idea of challenging the food police involves recognizing these thought patterns and belief systems and finding solutions to combat them.

To begin, let’s consider three common thought patterns during eating disorder recovery.

1. Black or white thinking

“I either 100 percent follow my plan, or I completely fall off and feel out of control again.”

This thought pattern allows no room for mistakes or redirection. The way to resolve black or white thinking is to cultivate gray space. It’s important to admit that you’re most likely exaggerating by thinking in only extremes. Think through your recent choices and note which ones were aligned with your plan. Moreover, if you had an off day, remind yourself that tomorrow is a fresh start and a new opportunity to recommit to your values. You don’t have to erase all of your success thus far; instead, move past your mistake and build upon what you’ve already achieved. 

2. Catastrophic thinking

“I will never attract the ideal partner or get my ideal job if I look like this.”

Catastrophic thinking is the idea that everything in your life is going wrong — and that food is to blame. There are two ways to combat this thought pattern. First, ground yourself in the present moment and recognize that no single meal or action is going to have tangible bearing on your larger life goals, like a long-term relationship or steady career path. In other words, your next bite of food isn’t going to lead to the demise of your hopes and dreams! Reduce the grandiosity of your thinking and focus instead on smaller, present moments.

Second, it’s important to grant yourself a lot of self-compassion. No matter how you feel in your body, what you’re up against is one of life’s greatest challenges. Finding your soulmate? That’s a really tall order regardless of your body size! Remind yourself, too, that people of diverse body sizes achieve these same goals each and every day.

3. Pessimistic thinking

“I cannot do anything right. I didn’t exercise enough. I ate wrong. I’m making all the wrong choices, and I’m a complete failure.”

This thought pattern centers around the idea that, if everything I’m doing is wrong, why should I even bother? Here, it’s imperative to celebrate small wins. On a day where you feel like everything went awry, look back and identify moments where you showed up for yourself, resisted temptation, and/or anchored in your values. These instances may feel minute and insubstantial, but they add up to a bigger moment.

These thought patterns are three of many examples of what we think of as the food police.

Use the solutions above to counteract these ways of thinking and help yourself move forward in your eating disorder recovery.

Next month, we’ll dig even deeper into perfectionism in disordered eating. To talk to a professional about eating disorder treatment, please reach out to our staff or schedule an appointment at The Kahm Clinic today.