Success by Mary Anne Cohen, Director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders

Definition of Success

For most people with an eating disorder, success means getting thin and staying thin at all costs. 

But what if getting thin and staying thin causes a person ongoing strain, anxiety and never-ending vigilance? Is that real success? And what about those people described by Hilde Bruch as “thin/fat people” who continue to suffer the agony of feeling fat even after reaching their goal weight. 

Successfully declaring peace with emotional eating has little to do with thinness or fatness. True success has to do with one’s inner state of mind.

Recipe for Recovery

Successful recovery from an eating disorder entails the following steps: (Note that only two involve eating!)                      

• Eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Restrictive diets set people up for bingeing.

• View food as a friend and ally, something to be enjoyed and not feared.

• Identify your feelings - anger, sadness, resentment, disappointment, sexual feelings, envy - without detouring them through food.

• Express  your feelings directly.

• Learn to grieve, cry, and mourn the losses in your life.

• Tolerate the discomfort of anxiety, loneliness, fear, and boredom knowing the discomfort will pass whether or not you eat over it.

• Bring into your awareness the people, places, situations that cause you to turn to food and plan alternative strategies.

• Enjoy your sexuality and communicate to a partner without shame.

• Appreciate and accept your body no matter what your current size.

• Develop relationships with others in which you feel safe enough to be your real and genuine self.

• Comfort and soothe yourself in other ways than food. (non-food nurturance).

• Ask for help when in distress.

Fear of Success

In my 32 years as a therapist in eating disorders, I have found that people often fail to resolve their eating disorders because they harbor a secret fear of success. This fear causes them to sabotage themselves just as they begin to improve their destructive eating patterns.  What is so dangerous about getting better? 

Most of us experience any change -- even change for the better -- as stressful and disquieting. For people with eating problems, resolving their bingeing, starving, or purging can feel like a dramatic upheaval and lead to a fear of disconnection and rupture in their relationship with themselves and in their relationship with others. Fearful of this rupture, the eating disorder may appear like a safe and familiar harbor.

For many people trusting food is safer than trusting people; loving food is safer than loving people. Food never leaves you, never dies, never abuses you, never criticizes you, never abandons you. Food is the only relationship where we get to say when, where, and how much. No other relationship complies with our needs so absolutely.  So it can be terrifying to resolve an eating problem and move away from such a constant and dependable source of comfort.

Fear of Loss

Besides fears of change, fears of loss may cause people to undo their success. Some of these are: 

            1. losing a sense of one’s identity 

            2. losing the status quo in a relationship

            3. losing a sense of sexual protection

            4. losing other women’s approval

            5. losing physical protection

            6. losing the power to spite someone

1. Losing a Sense of Identity:

Most emotional eaters spend a substantial amount of their thoughts and energy worrying about eating and weight—what they just ate, what they should have eaten instead, what they will eat tomorrow to make up for it. These thoughts and worries become second nature and in this way, provide a sense of identity and security. After all, to a great extent, we are what we think about. I often tell my patients that there will be a vacuum in their life as they are negotiating this transition from eating disordered to non-eating disordered living. The ability to tolerate this transition period and work through it is a vital key to sustained recovery. And discovering how to find passion in life beyond the consuming passion of eating is the key to recovery.

2. Losing the Status Quo in Relationships:

Sometimes, weight issues are an integral factor in the balance of power, trust, and dependency in relationships. Sometimes resolving an eating disorder can feel like you’re being disloyal to your family. Removing that issue means having to find new ways of relating to others. Power struggles between husbands and wives about weight are frequent. A patient of mine, Miriam, was instructed by her psychologist husband to go to therapy to deal with her fat and her hidden anger. When Miriam came to therapy with me and started working on the emotional issues that fueled her binging, she began losing some weight. Her husband, suddenly worried that he could not control her, presented her with a box of chocolates to celebrate her weight loss!

3. Losing a Sense of Sexual Protection:

Forty to sixty percent of the eating disordered women clients (men and women) in my practice have a history of sexual abuse and have tried to manipulate the size of their bodies to protect themselves externally from the internal unresolved issues of the abuse.  Staying overweight or even emaciated can feel like protection against unwanted sexual feelings. To lose that “protection” can feel dangerous, vulnerable and scary.

4. Losing Other Women’s Approval:

Fear of alienating other women and losing their support is an undercurrent for many women who begin to gain healthier bodies and feel more attractive. Being overweight, or even substantially underweight, can be a way of reassuring other women: “I am not a threat.” “You don’t have to worry about my being prettier than you or stealing all the attention.” When a woman succeeds in feeling more in harmony with her body, she fears putting herself back in competition with other women and may undo her success.

5. Losing the Power to Spite Someone:

There are some people who sabotage their success in resolving their eating problems because they have an investment in trying to spite someone, usually a controlling parent. “Since I was a little girl,” Alice said, “ my mother measured out my food and weighed me weekly. I hated scales. I hated measuring cups. I hated her! Whenever her back was turned, I would sneak candy and cookies. Keeping myself fat was perfect revenge, and even though I am now 25, my mother is still trying to control my weight and marital status—and I’m still reacting! Even though I’d like to have normal eating habits, another part of me enjoys getting back at my mother more than getting my life together.”

Overcoming Self-Sabotage

Knowing that growth is often two steps forward, one step back will empower us to stay the course in the midst of uncertainty and anxiety. To truly resolve an eating disorder we need to first identify our own particular fears of change and loss and bring these fears out into the clear light of day. In this way, these fears will begin to lose their grip and power over us and cease to undermine our best efforts. 

Let’s sink our teeth into LIFE, not into our relationship with food!

Mary Anne Cohen is director of  The New York Center for Eating Disorders. This article is adapted from her book, French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and are presented without editing. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of EDReferral.com, and no official endorsement by EDReferral.com of the opinions expressed herein should be inferred.

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