Bites & Body Love (v)

11 Reasons Why You May be Stuck in Pseudo-Recovery!

• Jamie Magdic

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What if you're stuck in a cycle where you feel you're on the road to recovery, yet full freedom from disordered eating remains elusive? You're not alone! In this episode, we dive into common barriers that keep you from genuine healing.

  1. Waiting to Be Ready: Perfectionism can delay your progress—starting imperfectly can spark meaningful change.
  2. Ignoring Body Image: Recovery requires addressing body image issues to heal your relationship with food.
  3. Lacking Support: Professional guidance is crucial. Align with knowledgeable providers who understand your journey.
  4. Focusing Only on Behaviors: True recovery involves mental and emotional healing, not just changing food habits.
  5. Not Fully Trusting Your Body: Partial recovery can leave you doubting your body’s signals, hindering full freedom.
  6. Fixating on Weight: Embrace your body’s natural set point for complete healing.
  7. Negative Recovery Mindset: Fear limits your potential—focus on the joy and freedom recovery can bring.
  8. Settling for “Good Enough”: Don't pause your journey too soon; aim for full recovery to eliminate lingering issues.
  9. Keeping Food Rules: Breaking all food rules is essential for overcoming diet mentality.
  10. Ignoring Exercise Issues: Balance your relationship with movement; recovery includes addressing exercise addiction.
  11. Avoiding Discomfort: Facing discomfort is key to emotional resilience and transformative healing.

Join us as we unpack these barriers and learn how to break free from pseudo-recovery!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Bites and Body Love. I'm Jamie, a dietitian and body image specialist. Join me to liberate yourself from diets and body shame, embracing true freedom and confidence with food and body. Take your place at the table on this transformative journey towards a life of freedom and confidence. Let's discuss some of the reasons, some of the barriers why you may be stuck in pseudo-recovery, pseudo-recovery from disordered eating, eating disorders, body image, healing diets. There are some very common stuck points that I hear and I think it would be a wonderful thing to dive into these so you all can raise awareness and say is this me, is this this belief that is holding me back, is this a behavior that's holding me back? And understand these very common stuck points so that you can then choose and make the decision to have awareness now with that barrier, and still decide okay, now that I know this barrier, I can address it and move forward to full recovery. And I guess, before we dive in, it'd be helpful to speak on what do I mean by pseudo recovery, quasi recovery, halfway recovered, all of these interchangeable ways to describe a place where you are maybe doing better than you once were with your disordered eating, with your relationship with food and body, but you're not quite where you want to go. You know that this doesn't feel like full recovery. You're hoping there's more. Maybe you do believe this is where it ends, and that's one thing we're going to talk about. But what I like to call it is pseudo recovery, and it's a topic I love to talk about. I actually have another podcast on this, so go check it out. But it's something that I love to talk about because I'm very, very passionate about helping people to get to full recovery, to understand that full recovery is available for them, to understand that, to help motivate and hold hope for people who may believe that they can't get to full recovery, to help them to identify just the missing tools, the missing things that we need to work on, the missing support that might be needed to get to that full recovery and to never give up.

Speaker 1:

And that stems from a place of my own history where I was stuck in this. I definitely wasn't. It wasn't as bad, my eating disorder wasn't as bad as it used to be, but I was still very stressed out and confused and I absolutely didn't have trust with food or my body. And you know that aids in relapse, it takes away a lot of a lot from your life and that's enough to keep going. And I'm very glad I did to really get that unwavering trust with food in my body and that compassion so that I just follow my internal compass and I dove through everything I needed to really leave disordered eating and negative body image behind.

Speaker 1:

So I want that for everyone. I want everyone to get there. I believe everyone can get there and we work on that in my program to help people to get to full recovery. So if you're interested in that, I might speak to that a little bit more at the end, but the application is in the show notes. If you're interested in having a community, all the resources, internal hours and hours of video content and lessons, really to leave no stone unturned to get you to that full recovery place with the dietitian in your back pocket and that would be me so come join our community if you're interested. It is an application process because we want to make sure we are the best fit for you and you're the best fit for us, so excited to see those applications come through.

Speaker 1:

But enough with that, let's move into today's topic, reasons why we may be stuck in pseudo recovery. Again, just a reminder just because you are stuck does not mean that you will remain stuck. We're going to raise awareness because once you identify I mean awareness, gosh, it's just awareness is everything. If you can raise more awareness around your behaviors, your thoughts, your belief, your stuckness, the way you treat yourself, your relationship with yourself, your behaviors, your cycles man, your belief, your stuckness, the way you treat yourself, your relationship with yourself, your behaviors, your cycles man, your history, that is going to give you everything to help moving in, to help you to continue to move in the directions you need to be. So always be raising awareness and listening to this podcast is super helpful for that too to see how do I relate to that, how do I identify to that.

Speaker 1:

Is this me? Is this not me? Am I similar? What other maybe questions does this spark? Okay, so this may. Maybe none of this applies to you. Maybe all of the how many barriers are we going to chat through today? Maybe all of the 11, 11 stuck points are going to resonate with you. So yeah, so, let's see are going to resonate with you. So yeah, so let's see. Okay, let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

So the first barrier why I hear people say, or why people may be stuck is because they are waiting until they are quote unquote ready. They're waiting until they're totally ready to fully recover or totally ready to dive into work they know they should be doing or they know that will help them, until they are ready to give up behaviors. And this is ultimately going to keep you trapped, because the reality is recovery is uncomfortable. Recovery is uncomfortable and we're not necessarily ready to dive into discomfort. As humans, we want to remain comfortable and there's nothing that's going to give us this huge sign that says you're ready now. Now's the time. It's just, it's just not going to happen.

Speaker 1:

So you can't wait until you're ready and it's. I like to explain it as almost as you think of it. If you think of recovery and full recovery and stopping some behaviors, if you think of it as jumping into ice cold water, you're never going to be ready to do that, like, yeah, let's go, let's go do this uncomfortable thing. No, it's uncomfortable, so you're never going to be ready to do it. And then, additionally, when you jump into the cold water, you're not going to be ready to sit in it either. So people might jump into the cold water but not sit long enough in that discomfort to see it all the way through. So you have to know you are never going to be ready and it's going to be very uncomfortable, okay. So waiting until you're ready, by expecting this right moment, is absolutely going to delay your process indefinitely.

Speaker 1:

You have to remember that recovery is not linear. There's no perfect time to begin and healing is going to happen in messy and imperfect and complex ways. We are never too busy to work toward recovery and when we think, well, let's wait until we're ready, by being less busy in our life or being in a different place in our career, or being more comfortable with something, what happens is when you actually start to build your recovery and work towards your recovery, that frees up time, energy, space, and so really you're investing in something that's going to give you all of that time back. And, yeah, so we really just have to take the leap. We have to take the leap there. It doesn't get much trying to expand on that, but there really is not much more to say and we shouldn't be overthinking it and say, well, when? When's the best time? There is no better time to take. Oh, that's serious talking to me. There's no better time to take care of yourself and prioritize yourself and prioritize your healing than now it starts. Now, the more you push it, the harder it's going to it's going to be, and the longer it's going to take and the longer you're delaying this wonderful outcome of full recovery that feels so freeing and so good.

Speaker 1:

Number two let's move on to the next one. So the next one is that people get stuck in their recovery because they skip the body image work, and oftentimes this is not. It can be conscious and intentional, but a lot of times it's not conscious and unintentional. Because body image work is really confusing and complicated. How you feel about your body and your relationship with your body is very it's a complex thing. It has a lot to do with your relationship with yourself and it's very entangled in your relationship with food. So you have to work with both together and you have to work with them completely to get all the way to the finish line with turning over every stone in both of those areas of food and body image. Because if you don't, it's, you don't understand it completely, you don't have full trust and you're going to likely slip back into some disordered behaviors.

Speaker 1:

And so skipping the body image work is something I see often and it's very confusing in our society because we hear all the wrong messages about what it means to have good body image or what it means to heal body image. There's a lot of misconceptions there and so and there's a lot of things actually taking us further and further into negative body image and disordered eating, and so we actually have to understand those messages we get and start to protect ourself around those societal messages while we're also doing the body image work. So it's very confusing and society leads us in the wrong way. So if you get the wrong support as well around what to do about body image, it's just going to get worse. And then, additionally, let's say, you do have a provider team of health at every size eating disorder providers Wonderful, depending on what level of care you're in, depending on where you're at, that body image work can be very misunderstood.

Speaker 1:

We where, when you are getting help, it is pushed off to hey, the next provider will take care of it, or your next phase of recovery. You're going to work with body image because it's, it's confusing, even for a lot of providers who are not, who don't have that education. So it's, it's pushed off, even though it's this huge elephant in the room that body image is impacting your relationship with food and your relationship with recovery and your safety and recovery and you wanting to move forward in your recovery and your relationship with yourself. There's a lot of education and work that needs to be done around body image. So if that's skipped but it's also your core issue, that is definitely going to be a problem because it plays a central role in your disordered eating.

Speaker 1:

Body image is essential to sustainable recovery. Healing your relationship with food hinges on your relationship with body image, and body image also, you know, has so much to do with your relationship with food and your relationship with yourself and that's why all of these tenants need to be addressed and I'm so, I'm so passionate about that because I see so many people getting close and I'm like close, but you're not quite there yet, because I know if you can say I feel like I'm solidly in recovery, if you can't say that and feel it and trust food a hundred percent and trust your body a hundred percent and understand where all this comes from and you're rooted in it comes from, and you're rooted in it and you haven't turned that corner where you're like, wow, nothing can sway me. No diet ad, no person, no hard thing that pops up in my life that I need coping for. We need to turn that corner where we're so grounded, where we are like, wow, I understand body image, food myself, my recovery so much and I've gotten so uncomfortable and done all of the things that now I know that I am not going backwards.

Speaker 1:

I do not want to, I don't want to go there, I don't even want to go there. It's kind of like, um, almost when you have a rough relationship and there's something you really don't like in that romantic relationship, right, or that friendship relationship, and you're like, how did I get into this relationship with this thing I'm so attracted, unattracted to? And then when you do the work for something that was so maybe you were so used to and it didn't understand, once you understand it, you may be like, well, I'm so clearly never getting into another relationship with that thing again because I am just not interested. It's just not something that's appealing. I do not want it. That's how it should feel. So you should turn that corner.

Speaker 1:

So skipping the body image work is absolutely important to your recovery and unresolved body image issues can lead to relapse if it's not worked on thoroughly and completely in your recovery. Okay, number three, the third reason why I see people are unable to get to full recovery, why I see people are unable to get to full recovery, that is because they're not getting the support or they are not getting the correct support for them. The specialized support, yeah, so it's not the right support. It might even be really harmful support. It is extremely, extremely, I don't want to say necessary, but almost necessary to get support with your relationship, with food and body, from someone who understands and someone who can hold that hope for you and help you to continue moving forward, because it gets very confusing when you're in the thick of it.