Part of the reason this blog exists is due to irreconcilable differences between me, Sassy and other folks of influence in an eating disorder recovery community. Commentor JennyRose requested a post on one of the very topics that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and Sas such that we decided to strike out on our own and blog here and AngryGrayRainbows. So, let me start out with a big shout-out to JennyRose! Some of the best post topics are suggestions that come from friends and readers… and I think this is another example of the awesomeness that happens when folks collaborate, even if it’s just a quick email suggesting a post idea.
Today, I am talking about “weight recovery.” Weight recovery is the idea that someone who is not at a “normal” weight due to an eating disorder should restore their weight to a “normal” weight in order to complete the physical aspect of recovery. If you’re underweight, you must gain weight. If you’re overweight (and especially if you’ve got the deathfatz), you must lose weight. Morbidly obese people were told that if they didn’t accept that weight recovery at some point MUST happen to be truly recovered and healthy, then they were trying to hold onto their eating disorders. The logic went something like this: if your weight became morbidly obese or underweight because of an eating disorder that it made perfect sense to gain or lose weight to heal the eating disorder.
I have had much less experience with Anorexia, so I’m going to speak from a COE/BED or simply overweight point of view. I do understand that in dealing with someone who is starving a certain level of nourishment has to be reached before the person can even absorb the emotional/mental/spiritual work involved in eating disorder Recovery… however, that is all I’m saying about the Anorexia aspect, as I know little about it. What I do know about is the folks that were being told that they needed to lose weight and I’m going to talk about them…
Must a fat person recovering or recovered from an ED (eating disorder) lose weight at some point? If they don’t restrict to lose weight are they hanging onto the ED?
How can we even assume that it is POSSIBLE for all fat people (even the morbidly obese) to get down to a normal weight or even just something that falls into the overweight category on the chart?? Overwhelmingly, science disagrees with this idea that diets can work – no, not even when we call it “weight restoration.” What kind of recovery demands all “really fat” people do something that 99% of people cannot achieve? Sure, some people may lose weight, but is everyone gonna lose weight in ED recovery? No way, says Science! I suppose Science is somehow deluded and wants fat people to hold onto their eating disorders, eh?
My take on this from very early on is that some fat folks in the ED community don’t want to let go of their FOBT (fantasy of being thin). I’ve been there. The only way I could get myself to do anything on a ED Recovery vein at first was to assure myself that at the end I would finally be thin. Sure, I’d do the emotional work and go to therapy and even eat more… but I wasn’t gonna do anything if it wasn’t eventually gonna make me thin. I think a lot of people go through this in their ED recoveries. I was fortunate enough to, in the course of my recovery work, get over the FOBT. I accepted the radical idea that I may always be plus-size… and I realized that was okay and potentially optimally HEALTHY for me. At this point, I was usually told by the weight recoverers that I have never been fat enough to possibly understand how crucial weight recovery is for those who are “bone-crushingly huge.” I have learned that there is something wrong in a conversation, if I feel the need to qualify what I say or know with, “Oh… and I was 240 pounds on and off for a cumulative of who knows how many years of my life.” Trying to exclude someone from a conversation because they’re not fat enough is simply not cool. And, yes, you thin folks out there are more than welcome to participate in this blog or this post! Whatever I weigh now or have weighed in the past does not change the fact that diets don’t work. However fat or thin someone is doesn’t change the fact that what they say aligns with scientific findings. Sheesh.
Ironically, I think of those weight recoverers the same way they prolly think of me and Sas. I think they are using “weight recovery” as a way to hang into the FOBT and maybe even their ED. They think (as far as I can tell) that we use size-acceptance as a way to keep ourselves emotionally and mentally numbed-out on cupcakes, etc. *headdesk* As I’ve posted before, IE is nowhere near some kinda weight-loss cop-out…
ED physical recovery, to me, is learning to live a healthy life – in terms of IE and HAES. For some people, this will mean losing weight. Some people will stay the same. Some people may even lose. I believe it is none of our friggin’ business what our body size is… and it’s no one else’s business either. Our bodies know what weight is optimal for us. Here’s a radical idea – why not let our bodies decide what we will weigh!
What has been truly alarming to me was the fat folks in ED recovery who were seriously discussing weight loss surgery (WLS) as a means to physical recovery. The fact is that WLS is seriously dangerous. People die. Some people (*gasp* can you believe it!) would rather have stayed morbidly obese than be very thin and live with the medical complications that WLS has caused. And, somehow a procedure that causes so many problems for the people who have it is the answer to physical recovery? I think not. And, no, Weight Watchers isn’t the answer either.
I find it really strange that the folks who disagreed with me and Sas spouted over and over again that obesity (and morbid obesity) was a danger to health was a “MEDICAL FACT.” Well, no. Scientific fact doesn’t state such a thing, actually. However, it does have a lot to say about the pointlessness of dieting and the danger of WLS. Weird that no one was throwing that medical fact around other than me, Sas and some other folks who, like us, were of the IE persuasion. Ah well, I suppose folks who misstate “medical fact” can’t be expected to go further and research other arguments and actually repeat those study findings in any kind of intellectually honest way. I just hate to see people suffer… which, is why it pains me to see people holding onto their FOBTs and contemplating diets and WLS.
The fact is that studies show that it is healthier to remain fat than to diet and then regain weight. Since 99% of diets don’t work, you can bet that your diet will cause weight regain and the health problems associated with weight cycling and yo-yo dieting. Even if I were to believe that (though, most of the health problems blamed on fat have more to do with genetics and the normal aging process than anything to do with fat) a person’s fat is causing them some problem, the high risk that a diet will cause them to ultimately weigh even more is worth considering.
What do I think physical recovery is? I think it is learning to love your body wherever it is right now. I think it is exercising and eating well and resting and all that good stuff. If you lose weight, fine. If you don’t lose weight, fine. This is what Health at Every Size is about and what I believe works.
Are there folks out there who use being overweight, obese or morbidly obese as an excuse to not live a healthy life? Sure. Guess what? There are thin people who do the SAME THING. Whatever a person’s size, I believe in a lovely, healthy life full of all sorts of good things. This does not include over-exercising or never eating chocolate again. Having fun can be exercise. Eating real butter is alright! Eating veggies is alright! Eating what your BODY truly wants is a lovely guideline for a healthy body… though, learning to understand what a body truly wants is a skill that takes some time to learn, but the lesson is worth the effort! And, if you think your body wants to live on sweets or whatever all the time, you don’t know how to listen to your body yet.
With that last bit, I think a post on the intricacies of listening to the body is in order some time soon… 😀
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
WOW. I think I know what recovery community you are talking about, and I have stopped posting there for this same reason – so glad to know I was not the only one! It was really shocking to me to see that kind of assbackwards thinking at a place I had previously found very supportive and reality-based.
I do clinicial work with EDs, and I don’t recommend it as a supportive space for patients anymore because I now don’t know what the heck people are going to see there!
It really just made my night knowing that I am not the only one who was impacted negatively by that new attitude.
1.) I completely agree with you that weight “restoration” should not be a mandatory part of BED/COE recovery. In fact, I very much agree that people who say you are not truly recovered if you haven’t lost weight are still very deep in eating disordered territory. (Actually, I myself still have thoughts of having/ wanting to lose weight – I have BED, though it is subclinical by now – and those thoughts are what really fuels the disorder.)
I also don’t get the kind of logic that dieting can be part of ED recovery. A diet is often the starting point for BED in the first place, how could it possibly be a tool in recovery? Plus, there are loads of studies on “restrictive eaters” and how harmful restrictive eating is. From my own experience BED goes hand in hand with restrictive eating (at least for me). Dieting is a great way to maintain restrictive eating patterns.
And weight loss surgery as part of ED recovery? You got to be kidding me. How can surgically altering you body be part of recovering from a disorder in which loating your body plays a huge part?
2.) I think part of the problem is that many people think of BED as kind of the opposite of anorexia – therefore, they reason that if you have to gain weight to recover from anorexia you have to lose weight to recover from BED. Well, anorexia is not the opposite of BED. First of all, people with BED generally don’t think they are too thin and therefore continue to gain weight. They are most of the time not even delusional about having a mental health problem. In fact, all the people I have heard talking about BED were very ashamed of being fat, and very ashamed of binge-eating. Letting that shame go is part of recovery (and something I still haven’t managed). Actually, if BED people have body-dysmorphia than the kind of dysmorphia is connected with being “fat and ugly” not with being feeling “too thin”.
3.) I just bought a book for therapists on how to treat BED. The author states that normalization of body image and eating behavior have to happen before attempting weight loss. I was quite happy about that message (and the message itself makes clear that BED is very different from anorexia). What made me angry, though, is that she still kept weightloss as a part of recovery, even though she herself stated a) people often develop BED after a diet and b) people who have recovered from BED and lost weight weight usually gain it back even though there eating behavior stays normal. I cannot wrap my head around the lack of logic in this. If people will most likely gain back the weight even if they maintain normal eating patterns, wouldn’t be the best thing not to focus on weight loss in BED treatment at all (not even as a second step) but encourage people to love and accept their bodies as they are?
This weight recovery idea is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard and what I’ve heard in this context especially, takes some beating.
I too have experience of CE, although that is not a satisfactory name for it, I refuse to call it COE, until the term ‘overeating’ is a fact not a judgement and no more pejorative than being drunk or ‘overdrinking’.
This is not just an attempt to hang on to their eating disorder, it is their eating disorder talking through them, puppeteering them, as eating disorders do when they get a good hold on you and start to snuff the person you are yourself, out.
The key is to recover from your eating disorder, although I don’t agree with the whole intuitive eating as a way of life, I do think it can be necessary to start off a process of recovery. The weight will do what it wants to, as a result of that, including anorexics.
It may be possible that full and normal eating for an anorexic means they weigh 70 lbs or whatever, but somehow, I doubt it. Their weight should go up at least a little, as long as the eating has recovered sufficiently.
Thank you for posting and tackling something so complex. I spent 5 years in therapy and 2 years in OA trying to “recover” from disordered eating. I experienced both compulsive eating & non-purging bulimia.
My experience with OA was always frustrating. When I would go to a meeting, inevitably, I would hear a chorus of “I just need to get strict with myself and . . . ” usually in reference to losing weight. There was always talk of cutting out “addictive” foods like sugar/flour/wheat and most people kept the CEA-HOW program in their back pocket as the “last ditch getting strict to lose weight program”. For those unfamiliar CEA-HOW requires 3 meals weighed and measured each day – no sugar/flour/wheat and food must be called in to a sponsor and committed daily and any deviations from what you called in must be reported immediately. The “Food plan” (HELLO JUST CALL IT THE DAMN DIET THAT IT IS!!) provides about 1,100 to 1,200 calories a day.
I spent 6 months working the CEA-HOW program and going to meetings. You were given chips for days “abstinent” and you had to start at square 1 again if you had the slightest miss step. (I once “lost” 30 days of abstinence because I broke and ate an oatmeal cookie with peanut butter on it). I of course lost weight during this program and people cheered at what a success I was (I WAS INSANE!).
After a while it all became to much. I was driving 70 miles each way to get to the “Required” meetings, the food plan was expensive and I became neurotic about going anywhere because I didn’t know if I could get the food I needed to stay on plan. My husband was supportive – but exasperated and my never ending obsession/crankyness.
I went back to just regular OA meetings only to become even more distressed each time I heard “I just need to get strict with my food and blah blah blah”. It finally dawned on my that this really was a diet group. You had a food plan, you had friends who supported your desire to lose weight, and a place to come and cry over your fatness and how unacceptable you are.
Now I’m not saying ALL OA meetings are this way, and I realize they work for some people. This is just my experience. So when I finally decided to quit OA all together people looked at me like I was dead. Literally – you could see them planning my funeral in their head. I was told over and over again how I “just wasn’t willing to go to any length” to recover. I was furious with this. For 2 years I had driven over 60 minutes each way to come to a lousy meeting about dieting. I gave up time with my family, punished my body, spent money and yet somehow I was uncommitted.
Both of my closest friends who I had met in program dumped me. I somehow became dangerous to their lifestyle when I decided to accept HAES and my body. Mind you I wasn’t preaching the virtues of HAES to them or anything – I simply stopped dieting and talking diet talk. But to them – I was embracing my disease and surrendering to a life of misery and fatness. I tried to explain to my friend (an ex-anorexic with 3 years of recovery) that I felt I had found recovery. My sanity was returning and my life was improving and so was my health. . .but she just looked at me and my fat with disbelief. I finally asked her “Is your recovery contingent on being thin? What if you had the recovery you had now but you weighed 50lbs more?”. She didn’t have an answer for me.
So what my life has come to today? I finally went to a doctor (after much online research on how to find a Fat friendly Doctor) and was diagnosed with Hypothyroidism. Not a surprise since that usually goes hand in hand with the PCOS diagnosis I had from 10 years ago. I also found out I had incredibly low levels of Vitamin D (which contributes to depression). Since going on medication I have found my depression improved and I resumed joyful activity by going to a water aerobics class. And I’m still fat. But my husband says I am happier – and our marriage is better now that I am not consumed with “my disease” of eating.
Right now I am trying to find a balance between the old restrictive eating thoughts and the knowledge that PCOS & hypothyroidism are both helped by eating a balanced diet low in refined carbs. If anyone has had an experience of applying HAES to medical issues that are helped by dietary changes I would love to see a post or hear about that experience.
I realize this is a super long comment – thank you so much to anyone who has read it. I was just so excited to see other people who had experience Recovery as a way to bolster the FOBT.
Awesome post! So many people stay stuck in their ED because they believe that something is wrong with them when their weight doesn’t fall into the “normal” zone. We need to explode the myth that a healthier relationship with food will necessarily get fat people thin.
If you haven’t found your way over to the HAES Community Resources (www.HAESCommunity.Org), I hope you will.
Linda Bacon
The “Food plan” (HELLO JUST CALL IT THE DAMN DIET THAT IT IS!!) provides about 1,100 to 1,200 calories a day.
So OA suggests that participants eat less than the Geneva Convention prescribes for prisoners of war? Less than the World Health Organization describes as “life-sustaining daily nutrition levels”?
Holy crap.
I just can’t understand how they can tell someone with an eating disorder that they can’t recover until they “accept” that their body is “wrong” and needs to be “fixed”. Isn’t that what triggers the ED in the first place? What’s worse is that it sounds like their “cure” involves essentially mimicking an eating disorder on the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’re fat and have an ED, you need to act like an anorexic. If you’re thin and have an ED you need to act like a binge eater. Oy vey the logic!
Is my co-author a blogging fool or what? I am sometimes in awe of her thought processes but am so grateful that she almost always sees things the way I do and can articulate so beautifully.
When I first stopped in to check out our blog this morning (my computer at home is fried so I only have my work computer now), the first thing I noticed was that Linda Bacon had posted a response. OMG! L-I-N-D-A B-A-C-O-N!!! The founder and author of “Health at Every Size”. What a wonderful affirmation for us that she thinks we are in tune with what she is trying to convey! Such a wonder compliment.
After I saw the name “Linda Bacon” THEN I started reading what AGR had written. OMG! Can I say I love this woman? I truly love what she wrote. I felt so heard and understood.
The “support” site (and I use that term loosely now) that we were active in was very supportive in the beginning. It seemed, to me, that the more recovered a person got, the more the administration was there to push you back down….to make you doubt your recovery. This led me to believe that, in fact, the person running the site was not as fully recovered as she claimed to be and that’s what ultimately led me to leaving the site.
Her insistence that I must lose weight to be recovered was fought for by her tooth and nail. She truly believes that a person can not be healthy and happy and be fat. I think it would be safe to say that, to her, if she looked at someone who was fat, she would automatically assume that that person had an eating disorder because fat = unrecovered and unhealthy to her. I wonder sometimes if she doesn’t go to the mall, sit down in the eating area and watch people saying, “recovered. Not recovered. Hmm, borderline, could be recovered. Oh, so not recovered!” based purely on how the passers by look?
Now, I don’t know about you guys but I know plenty of fat people who are happy and healthy. Who can tell by the size of someone’s body how emotionally, spiritually or even physically healthy someone is? It’s such a personal thing, a highly personal thing and for someone to judge someone on their size is horrible!
I loved all the responses and want to thank you all. Each response I read made me feel more understood and less alone. It made me feel “normal”, as opposed to the horrible feelings of being “less than” that I felt on my old support site. Thank you for that. I do plan to come back and make more comments but I have a meeting I must attend.
~sas
Goodness! I would’ve commented back sooner… but I spent all of yesterday happily squealing about LINDA BACON!!! Whoooooooooo hoooooooooooooooooooo!!! Thank you so much for stopping by, Linda. Getting an “awesome post” from you is so very validating of the HAES stuff I do write. I will definitely check out your site. 🙂
Sassy – you are too kind. Way too kind. If it wasn’t for you, there wouldn’t even be a blog. Don’t forget that fact, eh?
Now I’m just going to comment on some things that stuck in my mind from the other comments…
It is AWESOME to hear from someone who prolly left the same community for the same reasons me and Sas did. It sucks to feel like we’re the only two who actually got fed-up enough to leave. It is just validating that we’re not the only ones… especially as we saw so many of our friends who we thought wouldn’t put-up with the changes on that board stay behind and start buying into stuff that really doesn’t feel right to me.
Regarding OA… I am no fan of it in. Meh. Been there, done that… it made me triggered and my behaviors with food and alcohol GOT WORSE via the twelve-steps, not better… and I was going to meetings for years and trying all sorts of groups. I never found one that didn’t make my skin crawl. Anyway… I remember this old pamphlet that was titled “OA is not a diet club.” Hah. Almost anything I ever heard at OA were people beating themselves down for not using “clean behaviors” or eating a snack early or gaining half a pound one week. No one seemed to want to do emotional work or change their thinking on anything…except they wanted to think differently about food. As far as I know, recovery doesn’t work in such a compartmental manner. But, in most meetings I ever went too, the way to get sure-fire applause was to say you’d been flour/sugar-free for XYZ days/weeks/months/years. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing something about my thoughts on OA, but I’ve dreaded to take on the “sacred cow.” I am so sick of sacred cows though… I think it’s time to put something together.
I love that comment about calling COE – CE instead. I am going to start doing that myself. I like the logic behind it and I agree!
I agree with the commentor who said there is a lack of logic around fat and weight loss… I have yet to see a mainstream news article that says that diets don’t work without some ending paragraph mentioning that people should still diet anyway, cuz teh fatz is BAD, BAD, BAD!
Where does the 99% figure come from? I don’t even believe the 95% figure, truthfully. I’ve seen too many people succeed, but they don’t claim that it’s easy.
The high percentage comes from the number of people who can maintain their weightloss long-term. Depending on where you get your stats, 95 – 99% of people cannot maintain their weightloss beyond 5 years. Most folks gain all the weight back… I dunno what percentage of folks gain back more than they lost, but in my experience, it is the majority.
This is a great post, and a great blog.
I wish I had more to say, but my brain is mush at the moment. Just that your thoughts about “weight recovery” are in line with something I’ve been thinking about recently. More needs to be written about this.
I’m a bit late commenting, but I just wanted to say that I too left an online ED community because of its rabidly anti-fat acceptance attutude. It’s such a shame because with the support of the community and the book Overcoming Overeating, I started to recover from BED for the first time in over 20 years of various eating disorders.
I tried to avoid all talk of weight restoration but no longer felt a part of the community.
Happily, a year on and I’m still improving every day through IE and learning to accept my fat body (with the help of FA blogs such as yours).
i like this post. i have the opposite background though and suffer from anorexia. i got my head on straight last year and recovered myself.
i liked this quote: I believe it is none of our friggin’ business what our body size is… and it’s no one else’s business either. Our bodies know what weight is optimal for us. Here’s a radical idea – why not let our bodies decide what we will weigh!
haha so true. to me though, i am amazed time and again by the human body. having almost died 4 times, i am incredibly adamant to learn more and more about the human body, the brain, howeverything functions to keep running, its amazing.
i think obesity and anorexia are one in the same disease. both are results of malnutrition, both are ‘fixed’ with correct nutrition. theres not really another way to look at it
I’m glad you you liked the post! 🙂
It sounds like you have been through a lot with your ED and I hope you’re having success in your Recovery. If you’re visiting a fatosphere blog (ie: mine), I think your openness to body acceptance is a very good sign!
When I was deep down in my ED, I was so sure that the body was just this very simplistic machine (calories in – calories out and all that bunk) and it has been an amazing journey for me to realize that the human body is an astoundingly complex system that we hardly understand at all – especially in terms of metabolism and the mind. Besides, life is just way too short to waste it focusing on the thin obsession rather than getting out and living life and achieving real and sustainable happiness.
Note: eating disorders that are more than just a disease of the body, but also a mental illness that generally requires a mental health professional (or even a team) to fully recover and address the underlying issues that started the ED in the first place (in case anyone could read your comment as ED recovery being solely a matter of nutrition).
I am so glad this post popped up again. I too am recovering from an ED and am making a lot of progress at this point. I too got into recovery to loose weight. I couldn’t stay on a diet past 11 in the morning.
I too once believed that “I was only as fat as I was sick.” I created that horrible phrase while in OA I believed in cal in/cal out and if I could just stop bingeing and overeating I would be thin which by the way is the natural state for everyone (NOT!).
Overcoming Overeating and an excellent FA therapist have been instrumental in my recovery. I no longer resent that I gained weight after restricting.
I like the idea of CE vs COE but I am not sure if it is right for me. As a bulimic, I could eat super-human amounts of food. More than I could physically handle now. I think my eating doesn’t cross the border to compulsive now unless I eat when I am not hungry or eat past full at a meal.
Anyway, I am so glad to see this post. It means a lot to me.
Wow… you put it so well:
It’s been so long… I forgot how great that post is. Rereading it a few times this morning brought back many memories and lessons to mind. Thanks to Malpaz for bringing it up again!