Getting Ready for a New Year
Isn’t it the worst part of an eating disorder that a natural time to recommit to recovery, starting a new year, ends up being the most triggering and difficult time of the year to navigate resting and refeeding?
Why even bother with new year’s resolutions when we all invariably, by a huge margin, stop adhering to them within three to four weeks from the first of January?
And during those first few weeks of January, you are positively drowning in people and media talking about diets and exercise. But I thought it might be helpful to delve into goal setting and accomplishing goals because if you are mulling over the possibility of a recovery effort in January, I would like to try to put the odds in your favour.
According to a meta-analysis of goal setting and achievement, there are three reasons why people fail to accomplish their goals:
Failing to adequately determine why they want to attain those goals. Often people set goals to align with external reasons and social pressure, rather than assess whether the goal really aligns with personal values.
Structuring the goals poorly: setting too many goals, or goals that conflict with one another.
Failing to develop specific action plans: specifically, not just how they initiate the pursuit of the goal, but more importantly how to maintain pursuit in the face of distractions and obstacles. [1]
Self-Concordance
If you agree with this statement: “I want to pursue remission from my eating disorder this coming year.”
Then which of these reasons to agree with the statement resonate with you:
External
a) Somebody near and dear to me wants me to,
Introjected
b) I would feel anxious, guilty or ashamed if I didn’t,
Identified
c) Because I feel it’s an important goal to have,
Intrinsic
d) Because of the enjoyment and life fulfillment the goal will provide.
It is likely to be a mixture of all four of those, but the more that you rate option (c) and (d) as driving your reason to agree with the statement, the more likely it is you have self-concordance with your goal. Self-concordance means that you as a person and your goal are aligned.
I want to spend a bit of time on introjection before we move on to goal attainment. Being afraid of how the eating disorder is damaging your body sits under item (b). And that sucks because it does not contribute to the self-concordance you need to achieve your goal.
Being afraid that all the symptoms of ongoing restrictive eating/compensatory cycles are going to get worse if you don’t pursue remission is understandable; but it cannot be the leverage you use to leap into a practice of remission.
If you are in that space, then you can work on developing item (d). Can you envision:
the energy you will have when you’re in remission?
how good it will feel to never have your thoughts drilling down constantly on food because you are always well-fed and energized?
the sensation of being warm to your core?
being able to pursue other life goals (return to educational or work pursuits or career changes) because you are freed from the punishing and abusive inner check-again loops of need to restrict, earn calories, burn off calories, stay a certain size…?
You’re ready to structure the goal when the reasons skew towards identified and intrinsic rather than external and/or introjected.
Structure the Goal
There are a lot of moving pieces to a recovery effort to remission from an eating disorder, as you can likely sense from perhaps scrolling through the mounds and mounds of material on this site.
But the goal itself is to eat without restriction and not apply any restrictive behaviours meant to stop the pathway of food-to-body.
Beyond that, everything is the action plan to keep that goal in place.
Action Plan
Eating without restriction is utterly beyond the practice of anyone with an active eating disorder. It’s what the non-eating-disordered world does every single day when they’re not busy temporarily applying restriction and finding it too miserable to sustain.
Automating eating without restriction requires simulating it: a daily food intake plan that matches the intake of sex and age matched controls who don’t restrict intake. These next two papers explain how what you need as the minimum intake each and every 24 hours. The basic plan will help extreme hunger kick in. And that’s why the intake amount is a minimum. You have to eat to the hunger and that will take you way, way above the minimum intake. That’s normal in recovery because you need to restore an energy balance in the body that has been stolen from the entire body system due to restrictive behaviours and you have to repair damage on top of that as well (which requires even more energy).
Homeodynamic Recovery Method Guidelines Overview
Homeodynamic Recovery Method, Doubly-Labeled Water Method Trials and Temperament-Based Treatment
The Phases of Recovery series will help you get a handle on what the process of recovery looks like and the Symptoms and Challenges section on this site will address many of the common distractions and pitfalls that can have you falling off the pursuit of your goal.
You may not be able to predict all the obstacles and distractions that may arise, but you can have one rule in the action plan that can drastically reduce the chance that any obstacle or distraction results in you sitting there in February restricting food and compensating for any food you do take in with efforts to “burn it off,” do not delay eating the minute that the thought of food pops into your head.
The thought of food is hunger: The Experience of Hunger.
Whatever slip, or relapse you face (and everyone faces them), you just get back to eating now.
Happy New Year’s Resolutions!
Koestner R, Lekes N, Powers TA, Chicoine E. Attaining Personal Goals: Self-Concordance Plus Implementation Intentions Equals Success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2002;83(1):231-44.
ibid.