Objectivity Frees a Client From Eating Jail

A client of mine came back from a trip last week, and about ten minutes into catching up, mentioned something quietly enough that I almost let it pass: her weight hadn't moved in months. No crazy jumps, either direction. I asked her to say more, because that's progress and I wanted to hear how she'd gotten there.

What she described next is the reason I'm writing this. She now had objectivity.

She's in recovery from anorexia, and the challenges she still faces are real, but smaller now, and they live mostly in her relationship to her changing body. Losing weight used to bring a strange kind of validation because being smaller was good. Gaining weight in recovery can bring a quiet shame, as it did for my client. She had absorbed the belief that only one direction of change is allowed. That belief is common enough that it rarely registers as a problem. It just feels like the water everyone swims in.

I asked whether she felt she was eating the right amount for her body. She said yes, and I believed her, because of what came next: no wild swings, and hunger and fullness cues she called "pretty well established." Her metabolism, she said, seemed to be working correctly again. "The way I move, my strength, all of that shows me my body feels comfortable at this weight," she said.

A Thought, Not a Directive

At one point I checked in about whether her inner critic was loud that day or quiet. She paused and said she could feel parts of it surfacing right then, lying down, noticing the soft places on her stomach. When I'd asked if she thought she'd be healthier at a higher weight, her inner critic answered before she could, and it said the opposite: that she'd be healthier weighing less. She saw this as a thought, however, not a directive for how she should eat in the coming days. She could tell it was a construct of her mind, even though constructs can disguise themselves as fact. That's the difference that gives people freedom from their eating behaviors. That's objectivity.

She hadn't always had objectivity. In the early months of recovery she went through a stretch of what's often called extreme hunger, not ordinary appetite but something closer to a primal alarm, where even mild hunger sent her whole body into emergency mode. She had to eat, she said, "like I was about to go into hibernation," and she couldn't think of anything else until she did. It scared her.

This is where I want to let her keep talking, because it's worth transmitting whole. Before recovery, she said, if she felt hungry she'd buy or make far more food than she needed and eat straight through fullness, because some part of her believed she might not be fed again. Now, when her body signals "done", she sets down her fork, and she no longer feels the pull to clear the plate, to "get it all in now" in case now is the only chance she gets. Her objectivity was growing along with the changes in her eating behaviors.

The Door That Opens and Shuts

I told her I used to think of permission to eat as a door. When you're bingeing, the door is open, and the part of you that knows what's coming says: get it all in before the door shuts again. Restriction is coming. This is a big reason people binge and it highlights why restriction and bingeing are two sides of the same coin. For people who have that door, the inner critic has been deciding when eating is permitted and when it is not. The body's natural hunger and fullness signals have not been in charge of that decision.

I asked if she still had that door. No, she said. That's when I knew she had listened to her body enough that it trusted her. It no longer had to "get it all in" because that door wasn't going to shut again and deprive her.

That's the moment I want you to sit with. The body that spent months treating every meal like it might be the last has learned, through permission to eat rather than persuasion not to eat, that food will come again. And in this system, there is a natural guardrail that tells a person when to stop eating: physical fullness. This client had enough experiences eating when she was hungry and stopping when she was full to give up that pattern of "Door open/Get it in while you can/Door shut." That pattern had jailed her in thoughts and behaviors that hurt her, and now she was becoming free.

Calories as Information, Not a Verdict

There was more objectivity about calories, too. Early in recovery she'd had a thought so certain it felt permanent, one she described as a thought she'd screenshotted in her mind: that she would never again be able to eat without calculating everything in it. She had believed it completely at the time, and now, almost surprised at her own sentence, she told me it's just not true for her anymore. She can still rattle off a calorie count if asked, but it floats in her mind instead of sparking panic and restrictive thinking. It's information, not a verdict. It doesn't decide what she eats, or how she feels about having eaten it.

Disordered eating is especially convincing because it takes over the mind, the heart and the body. It feels like a reality that is here to stay. I used to think I was a "lifer" and make a joke that "eating disorder" was my middle name. I would call myself, "Sheira Eating Problem Kahn". But the brain is plastic - it changes - and it's just not true that things are always going to be the way your brain says they are. When you start having different thoughts, emotions, and actions, you step out of that eating-disorder reality. Do that enough, and there's another reality you can step into. My client was getting free.

The Root: Self-Hatred and "It Will Always Be This Way"

Eventually we got to the root that led to her disordered eating. Deep down, the client had self-hatred. When the self-hatred combined with the belief that "it will always be this way", the feeling and the belief reinforced each other. Self-hatred often carries a companion belief about deserving, so another version of that thought is, "I deserve this suffering, and there's nothing I can do." That puts us in a position where we can't get better.

Putting a window into that belief, letting a new experience in, is crucial for change. The client shared that along with the belief that "it's never going to get better" was denial of what it really feels like. "We tell ourselves it's not that bad, I'm fine, I don't need help. You just put your head down and endure it," she said. She put it this way: you get so used to what it feels like that if someone else spent a day in your body and your mind, they'd bolt like a scared cat, but you've gone numb enough that it just registers as ordinary. It has to hurt enough to break the numbness before anything else can happen.

What broke the numbness? "The things I used to use to cover the pain just weren't working anymore. I was in so much pain, I was desperate. I felt torn between bingeing and restricting, and after my body had its run with it, the eating disorder spat me out somewhere entirely different, somewhere I understood I needed to begin my healing. The choice was my eating disorder or my life."

I asked what it felt like to see how far she'd come. "I notice a feeling of growth. A level of maturity. A feeling of pride. And overall, a sense of hope — not only for myself, but for people around me, or around the world, who are struggling with their own things. A hope that they can find their own truth, their own love, and that they won't feel stuck forever either."

If you're in your own recovery, see if you can tell which beliefs about your body or eating feel like established fact rather than opinion. Try out objectivity by just noticing them the way you'd notice weather: specific, changeable, and not the same thing as the sky itself.