You’re always the last one to know you have an eating disorder. It wasn’t until years after I’d beaten my own eating disorder that I realised I had one. At the time, friends and family always told me my eating was unhealthy.
“I think you could be anorexic.”
“How are you getting enough calories on that diet?”
“I’m worried about you. You look like you’re wasting away.”
I didn’t listen.
One time a friend told me:
“Ben, you’re so fucking bony. What’s your problem? You seriously need to eat more.”
I must have subconsciously known she was right because I lashed out in a state of denial:
“Yeah? Well you need to eat less.”
It was a crummy childish response. I knew it would hurt because, as well as knowing what it’s like to be underweight, I’ve also experienced what it’s like to be overweight (and how difficult it is to lose fat when you’re dependent on sugar).
I ended up hurting her feelings and having to apologise. I tried not to let people know how much that statement had hurt me, but the fact is it did hurt me deeply.
To be honest, my friend wasn’t even that overweight. She was definitely at a healthier weight for her size than I was.
And that bugged me because I was dieting my ass off under the false belief that I’d look better.
The more I strove to restrict my calories in pursuit of a model body, the skinnier, bonier, and more unhealthy I became.
The whole world was telling me one thing (that I was malnourishing myself), and I chose to be in denial.
10 Ways To Beat An Eating Disorder
My days of eating disorders and body dysmorphia are many years in the past now.
I’m at a big enough distance to be able to comment on the things that helped me start a healthier diet and impart some wisdom onto you.
I’m not a doctor and none of this is medical or legal advice. I’m just a dude looking to pass on what worked for him.
If you’re underweight or overweight, these tips might just help get you to a healthy equilibrium.
I wish I had some pictures of my underweight self to share with you. I’m definitely not shy about addressing embarrassing topics or showing awful pictures of myself (I’ve done it several times here). But I simply don’t have any photos from that time period.
You’ll have to take my word that I was badly underweight. My spine stuck out like anal beads and my hip bones were like blades pressing through tissue paper.
1 – Admit you have an eating disorder
This is the first stage in any program designed to help you overcome your problems.
In the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, the first step is admitting you have a drink problem.
When a drug addict comes home to see his family sitting in the living room ready to give them an intervention, the first aim is always to get them to admit they have a substance abuse problem.
When you go to anger management, the first step is always admitting you have an anger problem.
It’s the same with eating disorders.
This is the hardest step.
If you can’t completely admit you have a problem, at least start by entertaining the possibility you may have one.
- Do friends and family often comment negatively about your weight?
If the answer is ‘yes’, you might have an eating disorder.
In your mind, you may refuse to believe you have a problem. Everyone else is wrong, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and you’re right.
We’re blind to our own faults. It’s a way of preserving the ego. But we have to shed the ego and seriously consider that if many people are telling us something, there is a strong likelihood that there is a valid reason.
2 – De-brainwash / change your perspective on what’s beautiful
Erin Motz puts this perfectly:
The “perfect” body is simply the healthiest version of the body you already have.
Sounds like I’m contradicting myself, doesn’t it?
“Wait a minute. You’re basically saying it’s okay to have my current body?”
No. What I’m saying is it’s okay to have your body as long as it’s as healthy as it can be.
- If you’re eating 1,000 calories under maintenance for years…
- If you’re bingeing on chocolate cake, cookies, and ice cream every night…
- If you’re getting headaches and dizziness because you survive on Diet Coke and one child’s size chicken salad a day…
That’s not the healthiest version of the body you already have.
The de-brainwashing involves unlearning whatever got you into this situation in the first place.
For me, I became semi-anorexic because I followed a starvation diet in the hopes that I would look good with my shirt off.
I was so glycogen-depleted most of the time that my body never looked good enough to me.
So I’d push it. More cardio, more exercise, less food, more appetite suppressants.
Even if I did look “good” by anyone’s standard, was it worth it? Did I have the healthiest version of my body?
I got migraines every day. I snapped at people from irritability. Ten minutes into a martial arts class, I went blue and purple in the face, started shaking, and almost blacked out.
I was far from healthy.
De-brainwashing involves drilling this concept into your head:
If you eat healthy and exercise responsibly, your body will reflect that and be beautiful in a way unique to you.
When I finally undid the brainwashing, I bumped my calories up and started eating more healthy foods every day.
It was hard at first. When your body has been starved for a long period of time, you stop feeling hunger. So I had to force-feed myself.
But the result of taking healthy omega fats, lots of fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, healthy proteins, and cutting back on the bullshit appetite suppressants was that my skin finally shone, I filled out my clothes in a way that looked healthier, and I felt happier because I wasn’t starving myself all the time.
When you optimise your body for health – rather than a photoshoot/photoshopped-look – a lot of things fall into place. Ironically, you will actually start looking and feeling great.
Pursue health. Not some unrealistic, unachievable ideal.
When you’re healthy, beauty falls into place.
Your skin glows, you don’t have bags under your eyes, you sleep better, you’re not irritable, you have tons of energy, your fat levels drop, you increase muscle tightness, and you get stronger, and better conditioning.
Think of beauty in terms of what you put in and what you put out.
- Put in for beauty: vegetables, juicing, healthy proteins, healthy fats (fish oil), no simple sugars.
- Put out for beauty: daily exercise, long walks, jogs, biking, sports, outdoor activities, bodyweight exercises, weightlifting, yoga, swimming.
3 – Make logical dietary and exercise decisions based on health, not looks
I wanted to look “shredded”, so I made crappy dietary and exercise decisions to achieve that aim.
I didn’t care if my decisions led to health. All I cared was that I was making the right choice to look a certain way.
I was working out like an athlete. Hours of cardio a day (morning and night). Strength weightlifting routines every day. And starving myself eating only one small salad a day and a protein shake or two.
I beat my joints up. I had intense lethargy and brain fog all the time. And I frequently got ill.
The turning point was when I started making decisions based on the health of my body.
If something is good for longevity, you’re on the right tracks.
Listen to health advice from knowledgeable people:
When you make exercise decisions based on health, you start to attain a more well-rounded physicality.
When you think of someone who is physically healthy, what do you think of?
Do you think of someone who can run on a treadmill for hours, but nothing else?
Do you think of someone who can deadlift twice their body weight, but they have sciatica and shoulder pain?
Or do you think of someone who is flexible, agile, with cardiovascular fitness, strength, and explosive power?
When you make exercise decisions based on health, you start varying it up. You might take up a weekly yoga practice. You might find a team sport. You might drop the weightlifting to just twice a week and fill up your other days with hikes or hill sprints. You stretch, foam roll, take ice baths, and long walks with your dog.
Another way to improve your health is to learn healthy cooking techniques.
There are some great cooking courses online that will help you rediscover the joy of healthy delicious food:
- Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking (my review here)
- Thomas Keller Teaches Cooking (my review here)
- Wolfgang Puck Teaches Cooking (my review here)
- Alice Waters Teaches Cooking
If you have an eating disorder, you need to abandon the idea that you’re making food choices based on your emotions. You need to start making choices based on health.
4 – Evaluate your mood and energy with a mood/food diary to find patterns
Keeping a food diary helped me identify what foods were exacerbating my IBS (turns out it was dairy, garlic, and onion).
A food diary also helped me to track calories when I needed to become more conscious of how little I was eating and make an effort to bump the amount up.
When you’re trying to rectify an eating disorder, it helps to become more mindful of exactly what you’re putting into your body and what effect it’s having on your mental well-being.
It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but you don’t need to do it for long. Only until you’ve reached a healthier way of eating.
Again, we’re just trying to find the food choices that make us feel the healthiest.
For example, I know that an hour after taking a teaspoon of this fish oil, I feel extremely clear-headed, happy, and productive.
I also know that an hour after eating white bread, I’ll have an energy crash. But I don’t get the same crash from white rice.
These are individual differences and you’ll need to experiment to find what works with your body.
5 – Enlist the help and support of those around you
Beating an eating disorder is one of the hardest struggles a person can have.
If your first instinct is to scoff at that statement, you’ve proven the problem. If people don’t take it seriously, how are we supposed to successfully overcome this challenge?
I think this is one of the reasons why quitting smoking can be so difficult. Talk to any non-smoker about the difficulties of quitting smoking and they’ll all say the same thing:
“Just quit.”
Well, it’s not that easy when you’ve got yourself buried in a deep hole.
Beating an eating disorder is difficult. So enlist your friends and family to support you. If you can’t find support there (it happens, it sucks), then you can find support on the internet and meet people who are struggling to achieve the same thing as you.
6 – Systems – not goals
I have always been a goal-oriented person. Especially when it comes to fitness and anything body-image related.
But, while I always set ambitious goals, I was also miserable most of the time.
Every second not spent pursuing my goals felt like a waste of time.
As my goal deadlines approached, I became anxious if I wasn’t close to hitting them.
If I didn’t meet my deadlines, I became depressed, demotivated, deflated.
If I did hit my goals, the sensation was always underwhelming. A massive anti-climax. Like expecting to ejaculate like a fire hose and instead being greeted by a trickling third-world faucet.
So when Scott Adams asserted that ‘goals are for losers’, something just clicked.
Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Does that sound familiar?
If you’re a goal-oriented person, you are likely all too familiar with the constant sense of discomfort and dissatisfaction that permeates your existence.
But a system instead of a goal? Now that seems interesting.
Just so we’re clear, here are examples of goals:
- Lose 10 pounds by June
- Sell 10,000 copies of my debut ebook
And here are examples of systems:
- Be active every day
- Write every day
The goals are setting you up for disappointment if you don’t fulfil them. And if you do fulfil them, then what?
The systems, however, make it easy to be a winner every day whilst still pushing you in the direction of your desires.
If your goal is to drop a pants size in a month, you’re going to feel like a failure if you don’t hit that.
But if your system is to simply put your gym clothes on at a designated exercise time each day (like Scott Adams suggests) or to simply ‘be active’, you are a lot more likely to feel like a success.
‘Be active’ is easier to fulfil than a specific workout plan. Too sore for weightlifting today? Well, if your system is to simply be active, a slow walk with your dog will fulfil that and leave you feeling a success.
The result of good systems as opposed to goals is that you feel great each day and you feel motivated because small success inspire you and boost your energy.
This is why, although entertaining, I hate those The Biggest Loser-type TV shows. Goals to lose dramatic amounts of weight in a short period of time will only lead to misery and rebound weight gain.
What’s a better goal for an anorexic?
Eat 2,500 calories a day?
Or have a system of eating three healthy meals a day and chasing each one with a spoonful of fish oil/coconut oil?
Choose the one that has the least pain, is the easiest to do, and will leave you feeling a success.
7 – Set up easy wins
Here are two easy wins you can do for improving your diet right now:
- Go through your cupboard and bin all the junk food
- Do your food shopping when you’re already full
“I mustn’t eat cookies” becomes A LOT easier if you don’t have cookies in the house.
Ordering healthy foods (fresh fruits and vegetables, Greek yoghurt, sweet potato, fish) becomes A LOT easier if you’ve already had a big satisfying meal first.
Other easy wins include:
- Knowing what your breakfast is going to be every day and having the ingredients ready in the morning.
- Having a protein powder and yogurt waiting for you just in case you’re late for work and haven’t got time to cook eggs.
- Packing your gym bag in your car when you go to work (so you go to the gym before going home).
If you ever find yourself getting stressed out about your diet or exercise plans, always ask yourself:
How can I make this easy?
The answer is your plan of action.
8 – Identify negative influences
When I was at my unhealthiest weight, I was reading some pretty bad advice on certain “health and fitness” blogs.
When I realised this advice had got inside my head and was doing me no good, I was able to make the decision not to visit them any more.
Think long and hard about how your environment is influential your condition.
- It could be your family.
- It could be your friends.
- It could be TV shows your watching.
Putting your finger on what’s triggering your behaviours is the hard part. But deciding to remove them completely can be even harder. That’s a talk for another time though.
9 – Anchor your habits
When I was severely underweight, I had this bad habit of weighing myself every morning and evening.
I’d brush my teeth, then step on the scales.
Then I’d spend the whole day or night obsessing about my weight (I know this isn’t normal for a guy).
I had anchored this bad habit of weighing myself twice a day to a preexisting habit of brushing my teeth.
So I thought if anchoring could work for bad habits, surely it could work for good habits too.
I got rid of those bathroom scales and decided to anchor a different habit to my teeth-brushing time:
Affirmations.
I would repeat to myself over and over again that I had a healthy body, I was in great shape, and I made healthy food choices every day.
That’s one option that might work for you.
You might choose a different habit that you wish to anchor to another habit.
If you have to lose weight, you might, for example, anchor the habit of chewing gum after meals. Instead of a big desert of cake, you’ll have a pack of mint gum ready to chew, which will signal to your mind that you’re full.
10 – Set short-term challenges rather than life-long goals
Anyone can stick to a 2-week challenge.
Or maybe it’s a 1-month challenge.
Or an 8-week challenge.
Whatever time period you choose, make sure you don’t implement changes thinking they’re going to be permanent or for life.
When I first started flossing, I hated the idea that I’d have to do something tedious, painful, and kind of gross for the rest of my life.
So I changed my mindset.
I committed to flossing just a couple of teeth a day (one tooth was an acceptable minimum) for just 2 weeks.
At the end of the 2 weeks, flossing had already become a habit and I didn’t mind doing it at all.
It’s the same with dieting and exercise and trying to combat an eating disorder.
So you’re 1,500 calories under maintenance?
Do you start by adding 1,500 calories into your diet?
You could, but that’s freaking difficult for someone who has been starving themselves for so long.
Instead, you can add the small goal of adding one extra food to your breakfast.
Maybe you eat a banana.
Already eating a banana?
Okay, throw an egg in there.
Then a couple weeks later, you might throw another egg in there. Or maybe a healthy plant-based protein powder on top.
You run these little experiments with short time-frames. If you don’t mind them or you actually enjoy them when the time’s up, you keep them.
Those are the tips that helped me beat my own eating disorder
Maybe some of these work for you. Maybe only one works for you. If you try them all out and even one works for you, I’d consider that a success.
Let me know how you get on with these tips and if they helped you!