Telling someone with an eating disorder to embrace self-love is like telling the color blue to just be yellow. It goes against the entire infrastructure of the eating disorder. Creating a less hostile relationship with one’s body is also a fundamental piece of most individual’s recovery process.
When none of the books or Instagram posts out there on body image helped one Ramey Nutrition patient who had struggled with extreme body image issues for over 20 years, she created these five steps for healing your relationship with your body. We are sharing them with you here now.
1. Reframing Self-Love
Asking someone with an eating disorder to just start loving themselves is a monumentally huge ask. So big that most of the time it doesn’t really fall into the “things that are even possible” category. So reframing “self-love” can be extremely helpful in opening your mind to a new idea. A great reframe instead is self-acceptance. Acceptance of yourself is a way easier step from poor body image than trying to throw yourself into self-love. It helps to put what you’re wanting to achieve into a word or two to have as your goal or intention.
Reframing is a great first step into mending your relationship with yourself. Remember that recovery is a practice and it’s not always going to be easy, smooth, or seamless – and that’s perfect. You might not realize it but you’re gaining so much wisdom and stronger, healthier neural pathways every time you stumble along the way. The next steps we’ll discuss will help you along the way.
2. Mirror-Fasting
Your brain has been forced to conjure up some lie about the way you see your body in order to maintain your eating disorder. This is called body dysmorphia and it’s part of the reason why, for example, anorexic patients are able to maintain their disorders. You have a dissatisfying image of yourself in your mind, it’s what you see when you look at your reflection, and that serves as the reason, according to your brain, that you are restricting food. For this to work, self-love cannot have a place in the mind.
The first step in breaking down this hatred of your self image is to just stop looking. Do what you can to eliminate full-body reflection opportunities. Throw a blanket over your mirror, look the other way or at anything but your body when walking past store windows, just try to reduce it as much as you can. Keep your little face mirror, but try to ditch as much of the rest as possible.
This might seem a little crazy, like “Oh, so we’re just supposed to shun ourselves?” But this is actually a really effective trick to disrupt that self-loathing pattern in your brain. Take away one element of that feedback loop in your neural pathway and suddenly your brain has to start looking for something else, which brings us to step 3:
3. Find Something Else To Do
So now that your brain isn’t engaging as much with its toxic friend Self Hate, it needs something else to occupy its time. Find something (safe, please) that requires some type of physical skill. We’re not talking gymnastics or parkour here. Some great examples are yoga, skateboarding, learning tricks on a yo-yo, even knitting, anything that requires your attention and you can develop your ability with.
This is motor learning. When we learn a new skill that calls on any amount of physical coordination, we are creating new neural pathways in our brain, generating new connections between our nervous system and our muscle fibers (this is the first step in building muscle, by the way), and as we improve on our new skill we get excited about our progress which releases that dopamine rush we’re trying to get from our eating disorder! We get this through observation of our own achievements, which is step 4!
4. Observe
The human organism is an incredible thing. Just like all living things, we’re made of all different types of cells and molecules that all interact with each other in harmony to create a living, breathing structure capable of movement, intelligent thought, and emotion. If you want to nerd out on this topic check out this video.
Think about the last time you got a little scratch or a zit, something small you didn’t really think much of. Without you thinking about it, your body stitched itself back together, healed that spot where the zit was. It’s like they were never there. THAT is your ability to heal, and it works on the larger scale too. When you break a bone or have a surgery, sure you get a cast, stitches, and some antibiotics to help support your body against infection, but all that healing is YOUR BODY performing something outstanding.
Now look at your progress with your new-found skill you learned from Step 3. As you practice something, you naturally become more skilled at it, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but you will see incremental improvements in whatever it is you choose to practice. This is your body learning. Your muscles, your nerves and your brain are all coming together to create a new “program” for whatever you’re learning. And that program is smart! It keeps upgrading as the brain receives new information every time you practice.
This healing and learning is all the essential and fundamental parts of recovery. You are learning something new in a sense. Observe and appreciate and celebrate every little step you make toward your goals. Even your ability to Walk the Dog with your yo-yo is going to help your brain in the journey of recovery. A great tool for exploring these new things you’re learning is to journal about them.
5. Journaling
Go get the coolest journal. Spend some money on it to be the coolest journal because it’s going to contain all your thoughts, and your thoughts deserve such a beautiful book to be documented in.
Journal or write down how you feel about all these things we discussed here. Try them out and then write about how it’s going, what you think about it, how it makes you feel, and how you feel after practicing these steps for a couple weeks. Track all your new skill achievements! Those count too! Write about your experience trying out these new things and practicing things that are maybe uncomfortable because they might help you achieve a goal.
There is science to writing things down. When you take the time to write something, it gives it a little extra significance. The use of your motor function to document your thoughts helps you learn about yourself. You can literally observe your journey, your progress and your struggles and learn from them what’s working and what isn’t and what you might want to come back to later. Even if you don’t like journaling in the traditional sense, you can try bullet point journaling, sketching, just writing down words across the page that represent what you’re feeling, or any other journaling style you can find on Pinterest.
We invite you to try these steps if self-love seems too far-fetched and see if they are helpful to you. What works for some may not work for others and vice versa. These are the steps that a Ramey Nutrition patient came up with on her own which has led her to a harmonious and lasting relationship with her own body. If you have questions or would like to take our free assessment, call or text 206-910-8690 or email us!