970x125
In the first three parts of this post (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we’ve explored the many reasons why using target weights in recovery from eating disorders is a bad, misguided idea—one founded on the fundamental untruth that anyone can say where anyone else’s (or their own) recovery will ultimately bring their body weight to. But having goals around weight can also be a good, honest, powerful contributor to the process of leaving an eating disorder behind. How? Well, the crucial factor that in my view turns the use of body weight in recovery from bad to good is the question of whether body weight targets are being used as outcome goals or process goals.
As I’ve explored elsewhere (for example, in my post on “12 reasons to use a meal plan in recovery from anorexia”), it’s often unrealistic to drop the fixation on the numerical early on in recovery, expecting instincts to jump in and reliably take over where they’ve been so long suppressed and dismissed in favour of counting. This is why it often helps to turn the counting on its head, using it to eat countably more, exercise countably less, and gradually increase/reduce those amounts until the numbers stop acting as constraints on desire and thus can fall away altogether. I’ve previously discussed ways of “rendering your limits irrelevant”—which can include turning your calorie maximum into a minimum, but can also proceed by simply upping your limits, gradually taking your maximum so high you can’t actually reach it.
Body weight monitoring and targets can contribute to such ways of using numbers to divest from the numbers. In my post “To weigh or not to weigh?”, I surveyed reasons for and against and came down on the side of “it’s better to be able to know”—both during the recovery process and after it’s complete. This should, like everything else, be a personal choice, but in general as a coach, I find that being completely ignorant of one’s weight is the best way to cultivate apocalyptic imaginings about it, and most individuals I work with conclude at some point along the way that knowing, and being able to know, what they weigh is important enough to offset the potential risks of knowing.
For most people, at some point in the process, there’s something valuable gained from truly trying to put on weight. There are various ways that adopting this attitude can help recovery go better and faster:
- Using body weight targets is a way of channelling the countercultural aspects of recovery (which, as I investigate in “Who wants to be normal?”, are always significant). This is doing the overt opposite of the tediously prevalent desire for weight loss by making weight gain a totally explicit personal intention.
- Using body weight targets is a way of shifting one’s attitude from something subtly but significantly avoidant like “I’m doing the actions but I really hope they won’t make my weight go up too much” to something where reality is being looked straight in the eye, like “I’m aiming to make my weight go up because I know that having this aim will liberate me to do the things I need to do to get better”. This shift is implicit in some of the tactics I suggested in “26 ways to be happy about getting fatter”, and it can help bodily change transform from something grudgingly accepted to something welcomed with gratitude and relief.
- Using body weight targets can help us take a dispassionately curious stance on this highly personal transformation, letting us feel like systematic scientists performing an open-eyed experiment complete with the relevant data-gathering. You can distance yourself further from your own weight chart by treating it like rainfall data, or at least someone else’s weight data.
- Using body weight targets can help us bridge the insight-action gap (see “Closing the gap between insight and action”) by turning the vagueness of “I know I’m too thin” or “I really need to gain some weight”, which are unlikely to inspire much of anything practical, into an intention at the level of specificity that has a chance of generating some good solid day-to-day decisions and deeds, like “I’m going to try to gain 2 kilos this month” or “by my birthday I’d like to get to x lb”.
- Using body weight targets is a way of honestly gauging the extent to which you are, in fact, doing the necessary things. It’s terribly easy to kid yourself that you’re eating more than you are, moving less than you are, being more concerted about this whole thing than you are. Having body weight targets and meeting them, or not, is one way to keep yourself clear-eyed and honest through a process where dishonesty often flows from fear.
- Using body weight targets can even be a core part of some simple “if… then…” rules to guide a crucial phase of a recovery process. For example: “If I’ve gained no weight for three consecutive weeks, I’ll add in another 500 calories” or “If I lose weight twice in a row, I’ll cut down my walking by an hour”. Like any kind of plan-making, this takes the thinking and decision-making away from the in-the-throes-of-it moments where it’ll be harder, and front-loads it to a reflectively strategic time, so that all that’s needed later is the follow-through.
In ways like this, body weight targets can be a force for good in recovery.
Thinking back to my own experience, there’s a particular moment in recovery that encapsulates many of these benefits at once. For me, in the olden days where BMI thresholds were an explicit part of the diagnostic criteria, getting to EDNOS status was a celebratory moment I emailed the whole family about, and my email had a body weight target wrapped into it: “as of today, since my BMI is over 17.5, i officially no longer have anorexia. my BMI is now 17.7—more than 10 kilos above the low point, only 4 months ago in July. instead i now have an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified! thank you all for bearing with me through all of this. my goal now is to reach a BMI of 20 by my birthday.”
It’s clear in these words that I was finding real potency in working out the size of the increase I’d already managed, and using that as a run-up to the next big gain: another 6.25 kg in 3 months. And I got there, a few weeks ahead of schedule. Not without some fear at a particularly enormous weekly jump in weight that got me there, and not without turning to the dangerous reassurance of my therapist’s advice to shift to “maintenance” now, advice that I initially followed and then had to walk my way back—and forwards—from.
But this monitoring was, for the most part, joyfully countercultural (not least counter my own deadening past culture), it was defiant (again, of my past self and so much else), it was pleasingly systematic, it was motivating, and it was honesty in action. It was, in other words, everything anorexia was not. I still feel proud when I look at those charts.
When weight increases are aimed for as milestones along the way, then they don’t involve pretending we can see the future, or making everything about the numbers, or encouraging restriction after they’ve been reached. Weight targets used as process goals have none of the multiple dishonesties of target weights as outcome goals. Instead, they can be simple, cheat-proof ways of keeping ourselves doing the things that are needed to stop caring about this and all other numbers.
