Eating Disorder Recovery Remains Hard Even With New Advances

Despite numerous new avenues for eating disorder treatment, recovery remains challenging. It takes effort, perseverance and resilience to move through the process and get better.

I have written about the way new medications might be a useful tool, how concomitant medical diagnoses may inform treatment and how access to all forms of care can be beneficial. None of these changes affect the fundamental challenges in recovery.

Eating disorders reflect a profound change in eating behaviors from hunger and fullness cues to meal/snack structure to the underlying purpose of eating. Food is also a basic necessity for human survival, so much of the thoughts and behaviors around food are encoded deeply and unconsciously in our brain function. We delude ourselves into thinking we have conscious control of eating only to realize how much our bodies dictate how and when we eat.

Although new directions for treatment seem promising on the surface, none of them address the subconscious nature of how we eat. In order to change the embedded behaviors, we need to make consistent, conscious effort to change unconscious patterns.

For example, walking is largely an unconscious activity. One can change one’s gait in time but only with concerted effort to change every step until the new pattern becomes unconscious.

Much of eating disorder recovery is about similarly changing a deeply encoded pattern. The added issue is that the person needs to find motivation to do laborious work and forgo the very strong emotional benefits that come with behaviors.

Recovery demands the desire to find new ways to manage emotions, the effort to change eating patterns and the willingness to work on both of these endeavors day in day out until one becomes capable of managing emotions and food more comfortably.

No medication, medical diagnosis or program will replace the necessary steps to get better. Even though I continue to learn about all the ways someone with an eating disorder can recover, the fundamental path of recovery remains unchanged. People can get better and need to commit to the longterm process and know that they can be well on the other side.

What is the Place of Newer Treatments in Eating Disorder Recovery?

Eating disorder recovery is hard work. It’s the monotony of fighting to eat a meal plan and avoid disordered behaviors. It’s the struggle to ignore and fight disordered thoughts. It’s the pressure to create completely new patterns of eating. And it’s the challenge to find new ways to tolerate life without using the eating disorder.

The hardest part is that recovery just takes time. What feels most difficult changes over months and even years. The progress isn’t linear. There are ups and downs, and the down times make it challenging to remain steadfast and hopeful. Recovery takes patience, diligence and perseverance.

While one day I hope there are clear medical diagnoses and treatments that make recovery easier, those options don’t exist right now. Eating disorders remain under the purview of psychiatry as mental illnesses with some initial indications of medical diseases that may contribute to the disorder. For now, the treatment approaches—as ineffective, and sometimes harmful, as they can be—available are still the gold standard.

There is a current cultural focus on treating mental health while promising prescriptive cures either via medications or targeted therapies. Valuing our psychological stability is a welcome change, but the simplification of healing into a stepwise or time-limited process is very misleading, especially in the realm of eating disorder treatment.

Despite all the newer tools to help people get better, I don’t find recovery to be much different for my patients. The newer forms of treatment increase the likelihood of getting better and seem to mitigate some of the most painful parts of recovery, yet the longterm challenge throughout the process remains.

Consistently looking into and utilizing new ways to help recovery is important for the eating disorder field. Clinical teams need to work together to harness the newest means to help people get well. At the same time, we can’t promise a faster, easier recovery. The path is still long and arduous. It demands people in recovery find a way to trust others and a determination to push through difficult periods.

I don’t mean to make the process of recovery seem hopeless by any means. Instead, I want people to know clearly what it looks like to get better and to prepare for the steps ahead of them while taking advantage of all different kinds of support they need to get well. That path is lined with more ways to get better than ever. Hard work will help people with eating disorders get to a place of being well.

How the Eating Disorder Field can Adapt to the Changing Landscape

The eating disorder treatment field still lives in an old medical system which believes that information spreads primarily through clinicians, books and sanctioned websites. Acting as if these sources are the primary way patients learn about their illness is absurd and only does them a disservice.

We may want to live in an antiquated world with limited access to verified, absolute knowledge, but believing this lie forces patients to look elsewhere for guidance and to trust in the eating disorder field less and less.

The only people who still seem to believe the lumbering eating disorder system are parents who cling to an old way of following guidelines that no longer exists.

People with eating disorders are regularly frustrated and shamed by a system of poorly run treatment programs, unsubstantiated recovery guidelines,

rigid ideas about eating disorders and a willingness to blame the patient when things go wrong.

In addition, the reality of private equity companies running so many of the programs means that for profit entities guide much of the treatment available.

Reasonably, patients look elsewhere for guidance. TikTok is flooded with people with eating disorders sharing ideas about how to get better and about associated medical illnesses the field ignores. Reddit allows patients to discuss all of the knowledge they have amassed to give hope and direction for recovery. Patients use this information to find clinicians willing to help them be stable enough to opt out of a field willing to keep them stuck rather than find creative ways to help them get better.

Sure, clinicians can lament the changes in information dissemination along with technological innovation and change, but to what end? The changes are here, and people with eating disorders need clinicians willing to adapt to our changing world and not pretend we live in an old media universe. What is to be done?

First, acknowledge that social media provides a useful resource for all of us to learn more about our these illnesses. It’s not like eating disorder treatment is wildly successful or else people would accept the help that is offered. Respecting all different experiences can help us find more success in recovery.

Accept that creative approaches to treatment are needed. We need to consider and address medical issues that may be part of or even the cause of an eating disorder. The myth of an eating disorder as chronic stems from our ignorance rather than the idea of an untreatable illness.

Take into account the various financial incentives of bad actors in a field in which so little understood. The combination of capitalism and health care means that rich people take advantage of confusing and ineffective medical care by creating systems that make money off of treatment. The success of the treatment is often at odds with profit. Clinicians need to be mindful of their recommendations to any patent by staying informed.

Educate oneself about new medications and be open to their utility in eating disorder recovery.

Let’s work together to stay on top of an ever-changing system. These changes are neither positive or negative. They are the reality. Acceptance allows for any clinician to use valuable knowledge to improve care and outcomes.

How Someone with an Eating Disorder Can Feel Seen

So many people with eating disorders don’t feel seen and heard in their lives. Eating disorder symptoms provide relief by numbing, comforting and validating parts of themselves. The end result is that the eating disorder can assuage the emotional pain that results from feeling so invisible.

Although this experience is not universal for people with eating disorders, many people feel terribly alone.

I have written many times how the eating disorder can be a salve against this emotional pain and can be a means to feel companionship and reliability as well.

The path to recovery needs to include meal plans, external factors that matter to the person and a team of clinicians who the person trust and who cares for them. But eating disorder recovery needs something more fundamentally human than that too.

People with eating disorders struggle so much with the balance between a professional and personal relationship in therapy. For people who have felt so unloved, they have a hard time balancing what they actually need with the circumscribed, limited therapy relationship. As real as the connection is, it’s hard not to feel even more heartbreak and loneliness as a reaction to the boundaries imposed by the therapy relationship.

Yet the connection and care of the therapy relationship are critical to any true recovery. To do such incredibly hard work, the person needs to know that they matter to someone.

Granted, it’s easy for the therapist to envision the therapy relationship as a springboard to find that kind of love in a relationship without limitations. That’s easier for the therapist to lean on and potentially more satisfying for the patient too.

But that’s just an easy out. The therapy relationship still is meaningful, very real and ultimately the catalyst that leads the way to get better. The limitations and emotional pain that ensue also need to be addressed since this experience in therapy highlights much of what led to the eating disorder in the first place.

The answer isn’t clear. Even if the boundaries exist, the relationship for someone who has never mattered before is a transformative experience and invaluable. Plus, this is an intensely personal relationship. There is no clear advice that makes it any easier. The goal is to find one’s way, value how much the relationship brings and find gratitude to have found a relationship that makes it possible to live in this new way, one where the eating disorder isn’t dominating everything in life. Moreover, hope for the future can pave the way forward.

Eating Disorder Recovery and the Impossible Magic Cures

Eating disorder treatment involves two central pillars to recovery. The first step is regulating meals with a structured meal plan that can stabilize the digestive system and also calibrate hunger and fullness cues. The second step is to identify emotions and then work on ways to experience, validate and manage those feelings without using the eating disorder.

These two parts of eating disorder treatment don’t, and for the foreseeable future won’t, change.

The complex interplay of the psychological and physiological cues that regulate our eating patterns are largely innate and outside the purview of conscious thought and intent. Eating enough food for survival is an ingrained primal urge we share with all living beings. When we have enough food, the hunger drive is weak enough that we can delude ourselves into thinking we control how we eat. That changes quickly when our bodies are starved.

In the modern world, access to so many foods designed to be addictive combined with the powerful food industry leaves us vulnerable to a system intended to make us associate food with emotion and comfort. The fat phobic culture adds to the lure of food by demonizing being fat and eating “unhealthy” foods, thereby creating a way for children and adolescents to work out their negative feelings through food.

We are pressured to connect food and emotion both through industry and through cultural fat phobia. The result is a high likelihood that people will have disordered thoughts and behaviors around food and, largely based on genetic predisposition or less fortunate circumstances, an eating disorder.

Recovery needs to undo the psychological and behavioral patterns and rewrite the myths about food and weight drilled into people when they’re young. This work is hard and needs repetition but can be successful. People do get better from eating disorders all the time. I have written many posts in this blog that explain the path to get well.

There are also capitalist drives intended to take advantage of people desperate to get help. These industries promise an easy but ultimately unsuccessful fix that only demoralize and even re-traumatize people already suffering with an eating disorder.

Eating disorder treatment programs offer the illusion of a cure but provide a stopgap measure of stability, at best. The services are run primarily by inexperienced clinicians with misleading if not cruel messages that eating disorders are the patient’s fault. In addition, they offer no plan for continued recovery after discharge.

The diet industry benefits from the numerous studies that show that diets don’t work. The business model is that their services never work. People will always come back since the companies know that what they offer is never a cure and often only worsens the eating behaviors. Similarly, GLP-1’s offer a seeming cure for all eating woes. In addition, they are now available to anyone who wants them without medical supervision. There are enough stories online to convince people with eating disorders that these medications will cure them. Despite all the benefits of these new medications, they don’t cure eating disorders.

The path to recovery remains as possible as ever. People do get better. The steps still involve a meal plan, consistent support through a treatment team and resiliency. Many industries know how desperate people are to find a solution to their eating woes, body image thoughts and eating disorders and how susceptible they all are to supposed cures. I advise people to avoid any seemingly miraculous cure. The path towards recovery has not changed.

The Ongoing Need to Eradicate Blame from Eating Disorder Treatment

In recent decades, eating disorder treatment opened up access to care and improved the initial diagnosis by primary care doctors and pediatricians. Awareness has clearly increased, and doctors who see people with an eating disorders have resources for referrals. That’s a great improvement.

What has not changed is the overall mindset and morality about the diagnosis and towards patients, even among health care professionals.

Since the advent of the eating disorder diagnosis in the early 1970’s, clinicians remain perplexed about the cause and persistence of eating disorder behaviors. For people with little familiarity with these illnesses, it’s unthinkable to struggle with restriction, binging or purging, especially after months or years of treatment.

Incredulous as to what motivates people to continue the symptoms, clinicians and laypeople fixate on the myth that people are to blame for their illness. In this line of reasoning, eating disorders expose weakness or a lack of willpower in the individual—still the most used trope in recovery. Any failure to get better is the fault of the patient. Any medical symptom is caused by the eating disorder. The emotional and physical pain wrought by the disorder deserves no compassion and only further blame, insult on top of injury.

Blaming patients for their illness is a convenient way for clinicians to absolve themselves of any responsibility to help people get well. There is no need to think outside the box or consider other possible directions in treatment or to posit new ideas for causes of the illness.

The current business model for treating eating disorders is successful and lucrative. The philosophy is buoyed by a culture used to forging a connection between weight and self-reproach. The population with eating disorders are more likely to opt out of destructive treatment than fight back against an ineffective and often destructive system.

Creative options for care exist, and I have been writing about them in recent months. There is little appetite within the eating disorder field to look outside the current guidelines for treatment and care. Medical diagnoses that may be related to eating disorders don’t get any attention from a psychologically oriented community. The people who don’t get better are labeled chronic without much thought given to improving treatment for them.

In time, I suspect many eating disorders are likely to be seen as medical in nature. Research into the hormonal balance of gastrointestinal and metabolic functioning, a haywire allergy/immune system and misfiring of hunger cues likely will change the landscape of eating disorder treatment.

There will certainly be a psychological component to almost everyone’s eating disorder, but medical knowledge and interventions will help with diagnosis and a higher rate of successful treatment. Blame has no place in eating disorder treatment, and time will prove that to be true. 

Taking a Step Back: the Reality of Eating Disorder Recovery

Reviewing this blog from the past year, I wrote a lot about new avenues in the treatment of eating disorders. The new medications that affect our gastrointestinal system and the confluence of medical syndromes in eating disorder patients that doctors know little about dominated my thoughts.

The purpose of these alternate ideas is to improve treatment success for people with eating disorders. Even with adequate care, too many people still don’t get better. Many do, but the goal is recovery for all.

In that vein, I have started to look elsewhere, not for a new magical cure but for adjunctive treatment options that might increase the success and well being for people seeking help.

However, I do believe I left out the crux of treatment, or at least implied that the hard work is avoidable, if these other therapies are appropriate. The hard work actually remains the centerpiece of any true recovery.

The process of finding a committed, knowledgeable and well-suited treatment team is still paramount.

The struggle to eat one’s meal plan day in day out still is crucial for anyone to get better.

The daily obsessive thinking about body image will still be a very challenging and necessary part of the process of getting well.

And the healing of one’s body as it becomes accustomed to regular nutrition and improved health needs to be a top priority.

No new medication, no alternate diagnosis, no change in metabolism is a magical fix for eating disorder treatment. No matter the initial cause of the eating disorder—be it a general inflammatory syndrome, dysfunction in the gastrointestinal hormonal system, longstanding trauma or any of the myriad causes—recovery takes the same course. A thorough diagnosis and treatment plan may take these other issues into account, but recovery is still a challenging process. There are no shortcuts.

As I enter the new year working to expand treatment options for people with eating disorders, it must be clear that recovery is still a hard, long road. I just want the end of that road to be as successful as possible for everyone.