I read quite a bit about recovery and those who think they are fully recovered. But their recovery statements are peppered with:
“but I don’t eat this food”
“I eat only healthy foods”
“Of course I don’t eat anything with fat or sugar”
So are you recovered or not? There are food rules all over the place in your thinking and diet. Flexible and intituitive eating does not mean you have banned or bad foods.
There.are.no.bad.foods.
It’s how much you eat of certain foods that causes the problems. Your body needs fats. It needs carbs. You can’t say you have recovered from an eating disorder if the two main food groups needed to fuel a body are on your ‘rule’ list.
You CAN eat that cake (or whatever food it is) today and enjoy it. It won’t destroy your weight, it won’t destroy your life. The difference is you don’t do this every day or several times a day. Eat, enjoy, move on.
Saying you have definite ‘do’s’ or ‘don’ts’ about food is tricky. You need to carefully and honestly look at why you are forbidding certain foods. If they feed into food rules that are reminiscent of an eating disorder, you need to seriously challenge this thinking. Also by ‘putting out’ there in the public arena your ‘recovered diet’, you can cause someone else to stumble badly in their recovery. Eating disorders are brilliant at distorting any information about food and diet and your comment about ‘healthy food’ is someone elses’ trigger.
It can be very easy to slip into a ‘disordered eating’ pattern instead of an ‘eating disorder’. Disordered eating patterns are not a recovered position and they can also set you up for relapse later on.
Be so careful in recovery with your diet and food intake. Be careful you are not unknowingly compromising with the eating disorder. Our society is so blended into dieting and healthy super foods, that we all forget that there is no bad food and flexible eating means eating widely from all food groups.
I deliberately didn’t put a picture with this post. Most show a huge creamy cake on one side and a salad on the other (you get the idea). Life is NOT like that. Food is NOT like that. Again the media and diet/health culture makes us think in black and white. Black and white (or absolute thinking) is just what lands us in eating disorder territory.
