heavyweightheart

look i get this type of disordered reasoning but you’re not eating a whole head of lettuce bc you’re bingeing for emotional reasons and the lettuce can somehow mitigate it, you’re bingeing bc you eat whole heads of lettuce. you will continue to binge until you start giving your body the foods it demands, on a regular basis, without attempts to trick it into restriction. your body knows the difference between water/fiber bulk and actual energy intake and if you don’t want to be so strongly compelled to eat that you’re ingesting things humans find unpalatable and frankly sickening (your poor digestive system!), then you’re gonna have to give it food w calories

heavyweightheart

So many people claim they “overeat” or are otherwise unjustified in being hungry all the time when a significant proportion of their diet is high-volume, low-density foods.

Try not even counting vegetables and fruits in your daily intake total (unless in oil or butter, breaded, fried, etc)—really, knock them off the list of things you ate today. You had a salad with dressing and seeds? It was just x ounces of dressing and seeds, which is a tiny amount of food. This isn’t an ontological claim lol it’s just a tool, and a useful one if you regularly find yourself full but not satiated, or eating consistently but hungry again right after eating.

Feeling full doesn’t mean energy balanced. Density > volume for people with eating issues. The lower the caloric density of the foods you eat, the more volume you’ll have to eat (good luck with vegetables 🥲), and the inverse is also true—higher density foods will meet energy needs with far less volume.

heavyweightheart

flavorwaves asked:

hi, i hope this finds you well. you have such an incredible skill for articulating the complexities of eating disorders in a way that is very compassionate and gentle but also driven by facts and research. you present these concepts in a way that's really easy to understand, too. i'm struggling with how to talk about my eating disorder with my boyfriend, but i don't want it to be a secret anymore. i want to guide him to a place of understanding, not scare him with the ugly details of my disorder. but it's so difficult to talk about. most people have a passive understanding of EDs, one that is often incomplete or just plain wrong. so in the process of telling my story, i also have to undo whatever he has come to believe about EDs. it isn't going well so far. i get frustrated or triggered or sad and just shut down because he'll try to give me advice about diet and exercise and i'm like....this isn't what i want. do you have any resources for people with EDs on how to talk to loved ones? i just don't even know where to begin. :/

heavyweightheart answered:

asker pls lmk if u prefer I repost w/o your ask! but this is coming up a lot

kelpforestdwellers

Okay so you’re reading one of my many posts saying that if you feel sugar or any other food item is “like a drug”, you’re not eating enough, and you think to yourself and then write it my notes “but I’ve tried eating more and that doesn’t help.” Welcome to the most frequent reaction to these claims! Not only are you not the exception, you’re giving the textbook disordered response.

These are our next steps when we’re here with disordered eaters: first, we want some 24-hour recalls of what gets eaten on average days, so we can assess where they are roughly in terms of adequacy and consistency. I can tell you that when people are tending to binge or experience what they call “food addiction”, I rarely find the 24-hr recalls to show adequacy and consistency. There’s usually an overall deficiency in calories as well as too much time between meals and snacks (breakfast is a common culprit). Restrict-binge cycling is ofc very common as well.

Another issue is that people think rectifying an energy deficit is a short-term effort, and anyone who’s recovered from an ED can tell you how laughably and cry-ably wrong this is. In the most aggressive clinical refeeding, I have never seen the process take less than several months… and that’s closely monitored high-calorie intake day in and day out with no lapses. Most people who are doing this on their own are extremely inconsistent when trying to refeed. Consistent refeeding can actually feel quite brutal when you’re used to restrictive patterns. If you’re doing it casually, you may not be doing it at all.

You’re not uniquely broken when it comes to food—that’s a lie of diet culture and eating disorders. But coming out of your inadequate, inconsistent, or cyclical eating patterns takes work and commitment. It’s hard. If you’re still in the “food is a drug” mode after you made an effort to eat more, your restriction may be too serious for you to address alone, or without educated and sustained effort at the very least.

heavyweightheart

Listen, if you’re craving sugar to the point where it feels like a “drug addiction” (and even drug addiction is complex & widely misunderstood), then you’re too hungry. You’re too hungry!

The pleasurability of sugar and the reward that sugar creates in the brain is much more pronounced in what the literature calls “restrained eaters” than it is in intuitive eaters. Sugar is usually pleasurable for most people, but in non-restrained eaters its appeal will be highest at our hungriest and decrease significantly with satiety. Restrictive eaters don’t experience satiety, because they constantly maintain an energy deficit, and that’s why sugar feels like a “drug.” Dietary sugar is fast, efficient energy for a deprived body, and our smart bodies drive us to it powerfully for that reason, to rectify the energy deficit.

Dietary sugar is great. It’s not a threat. It doesn’t cause disease. It’s not a drug. It’s a healthy part of a pleasurable diet. But if it feels to you like you’re completely out of control around it because of the intensity of its pleasurability, you need to be eating more calories, period.

heavyweightheart

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.