Nutrition Therapy for Eating Disorder Recovery: What You Need to Know
Nutrition counseling in California with a registered dietitian can help you learn how to eat again in your eating disorder recovery. But it is also about unlearning the idea that there is a “right” way to eat.
Making peace with food and knowing how to eat in a way that nourishes your body will get easier as you progress in eating disorder recovery. Your body knows what it needs, but your eating disorder has reprogrammed you with food rules, rituals, and behaviors that disconnect you from your body and ultimately make it impossible to trust it, your metabolism, and your natural functioning. Healing your body takes time and discipline in recovery.
In the early stages of eating disorder recovery, you might be following a meal plan to a T.
As you progress and learn how to listen to your body and make food choices that are not driven by the eating disorder, you will adapt your way of eating to your own schedule and preferences.
Nutrition therapy in California can seem daunting at first, and following your meal plan won’t always be easy. Resistance and discomfort are inevitable in the process. To help you understand more about how nutrition counseling works, here are some reminders and things you should know about working with a dietitian in eating disorder treatment.
There is No ‘Right’ Way to Eat
Many clients with rigid beliefs around food go into nutrition therapy in California believing there is a right way to eat. “Eat right” is a refrain we hear all the time, but what does it really mean? Diet companies will tell you they have all the answers about eating right, but every diet comes up with new rules. Even the Food Pyramid many of us grew up with (now My Plate) was/is heavily influenced by different food industries and is not a true reflection of what our bodies need. Your dietitian may give you guidance that is different from the media messages you have received about healthy eating.
Nutrition Therapy Has So Many Benefits
Your nutrition counseling sessions will give you guidelines and ideas for meals and snacks based on your individual nutrition needs and recovery goals. These guidelines are backed by nutrition science and come from an anti-diet perspective that recognizes that all foods have a place in a healthy lifestyle. A dietitian will never tell you specifically what to eat in terms of types of food or brands. How you eat is personal and will ideally vary from day today.
Recovery Meal Plans are Not Forever
Meal plans are necessary for eating disorder recovery whether you require weight restoration or not. But a meal plan is simply training wheels for recovery. Sometimes our eating disorder can get used to the meal plans we are prescribed and we feel safe eating within those guidelines. it is important to not get attached to any specific way of eating.
Sometimes Meal Plans are Helpful, While Other times, they are Detrimental
Adhering to your meal plan because it feels safe can lead to the same rigidity around food that your eating disorder may have led you to develop. Meal plans are designed to stabilize blood sugars and hunger/fullness cues, as well as create exposure opportunities that are the least overwhelming possible while also meeting the body’s needs.
However, our eating habits have to be flexible and it is normal for them to change over time. Your goal for eating disorder recovery is to eventually throw out all meal plans and rather than thinking about how you eat, reliably follow body cues that best aid in managing your body’s stable weight.
In transitioning toward Intuitive Eating in recovery, meal plans can transition as we make progress toward more flexibility.
The goal in recovery is to use a meal plan to build a foundation of normalized eating patterns with a balance of food groups that is adequate and satisfying. Once that is established, and hunger and fullness cues have returned and can be trusted again, the client can begin practicing listening to their bodies to determine what and when to eat, with guidance from their dietitian.
Never Say ‘Never’ to Any Food
At the beginning of eating disorder recovery, the idea of eating a food that you used to binge on or that you haven’t touched since you started restricting might bring up a lot of fear and anxiety. That is understandable, and when you first start working with a dietitian, you may stick to ‘safe foods’ for a while before reintroducing foods you previously banned or restricted. But unless there is a religious, moral, or allergy-related reason for avoiding something, all foods can have a place in your life.
Over the course of your eating disorder recovery, challenging yourself to eat ‘fear foods’ will help you repair your relationship with food. If you used to binge on tortilla chips, that does not mean tortilla chips will trigger a binge every time you eat them. Binge eating is not about the specific food, but about your behavior and feelings around it. Declaring certain foods as “off-limits” forever because they are triggering your eating disorder will not allow you to reach full recovery.
Based on the current research on nutrition therapy…
Current trends suggest that if a person is exposed to a stressor 8 times, it significantly attenuates their response to it. In the case of fear foods, while you might take one bite and cry the first time you engage with it, by the eighth time, you are able to comfortably eat more of the food with minimal emotional response, and find the ability to enjoy this food again in a balanced way that is appropriate for your body. This is similar to aversive foods; if initially, the food creates significant revulsion, in the beginning, the taste/texture/appearance is at least significantly more tolerable by the final exposure. No more big gatherings where the presence of food may send you into a tailspin!
Intuitive Eating in Eating Disorder Recovery and Nutrition Therapy
Your dietitian may bring up the concept of intuitive eating in nutrition counseling in California. If it sounds overwhelming and impossible at first, don’t panic. You will not be expected to be able to eat intuitively right away. In your eating disorder, you may have grown used to ignoring what your body needs. Relearning to eat based on body cues doesn’t happen overnight.
Before you can eat intuitively, your hunger and fullness cues need to return. Once those body cues are back, it will take some time to learn to listen to and trust them.
Intuitive eating does not require calculations or measurements.
Your eating disorder behaviors and any kind of dieting are the opposite of intuitive eating because they involve overthinking, control, and planning. Intuitive eating is what many people would call “normal” eating, but it looks different for everyone. Your goal is to be able to eat intuitively as a recovered person, but understand that while you are in the process of recovery, intuitive eating may be challenging. There are a number of factors that contribute to barriers in returning to Intuitive Eating including how long someone has had an eating disorder, history of dieting behaviors, and family food dynamics, to name a few. It’s important to recognize that each person's journey to Intuitive Eating will look different and there is no time limit.
Here are the 10 principles of intuitive eating, as written on the official website:
1. Reject the Diet Mentality
Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you the false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the diet culture that promotes weight loss and the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet or food plan might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.
2. Honor Your Hunger
Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.
3. Make Peace with Food
Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.
4. Challenge the Food Police
Scream a loud no to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The food police monitor the unreasonable rules that diet culture has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.
5. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our compulsion to comply with diet culture, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes just the right amount of food for you to decide you’ve had “enough.”
6. Feel Your Fullness
In order to honor your fullness, you need to trust that you will give yourself the foods that you desire. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current hunger level is.
7. Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness
First, recognize that food restriction, both physically and mentally, can, in and of itself, trigger loss of control, which can feel like emotional eating. Find kind ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort in the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger may only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
8. Respect Your Body
Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally futile (and uncomfortable) to have a similar expectation about body size. But mostly, respect your body so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical of your body size or shape. All bodies deserve dignity.
9. Movement—Feel the Difference
Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie-burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as being energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm.
10. Honor Your Health—Gentle Nutrition
Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat perfectly to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or become unhealthy, from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.
You Can’t Plan Your Life Around Your Food. If You Need Support, Try Nutrition Therapy in California!
Some goals of online nutrition counseling in California are balance and flexibility. In your eating disorder, you might have planned much of your days around how you were eating. Maybe you said yes or no to different activities depending on whether or not you would have to eat in a restaurant or in front of others. Your life was not your own because your eating disorder always took precedence.
The goal is to plan what you eat around what makes sense for your life. If a meal plan is not working for you because of your schedule, the food that is accessible to you, etc. present these concerns to your dietitian.
We have many experienced dietitians and nutrition therapists here at Kindful Body in California who can help you on your path through recovery. To begin working with an eating disorder dietitian for nutrition counseling, contact us for a consultation.
Kindful Body Counseling can support you with eating disorder treatment and more.
You can continue to be stuck in the daily battle against yourself... or you can take your next step towards healing and loving yourself. There is hope — full recovery is possible. If you’re looking for additional support in online therapy practice in California, we offer other services. This includes eating disorder treatment for students and adolescents, eating disorder treatment, brainspotting for eating disorders, trauma therapy, anxiety treatment and stress therapy, therapy for binge eating, low self-esteem issues, emotional eating recovery, body image therapy, and nutrition counseling, and relationship therapy. When you’re ready, we are here to see you for eating disorder treatment in Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland/Berkeley, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, Orange County, CA, and statewide through online therapy in California.