Personal Connection is Necessary for Successful Eating Disorder Treatment

Understanding the complex nature of eating disorders is difficult. It’s not intuitive why someone would suddenly have difficulty eating food or start eating large quantities and throwing the food up. A person without an eating disorder approaches food and meals intuitively with little conscious thought. Even people concerned with food and weight but without an eating disorder have very automatic food behaviors. Similarly, eating disorder behaviors also become very automatic and thus difficult to change.

Recovery from an eating disorder involves paying conscious attention to change these ingrained behaviors. Although understanding eating disorders may can be hard, the methods that are effective in promoting recovery and changing behaviors tend to be very straightforward.

One tool is consistent connection between the person in recovery and people who support the process. The goal of these regular, daily contacts is to reinforce and usually reiterate the same recovery tropes to counter the constant disordered thoughts that dominate the mind of someone with an eating disorder.

The eating disorder says that food is not necessary, that the person is fat and must lose weight, that everyone else is wrong, that being alone and following the eating rules are paramount and the list goes on and on.

If there is a concurrent dialogue around recovery with people in one’s life, the eating disorder thoughts no longer have a captive audience. The statements to contradict the eating disorder are also pretty basic: food is necessary for survival; the body knows how to manage and handle food and weight; being alone with the eating disorder only leads to a small, meaningless life, and no your body is normal, not fat.

Hearing these healthy thoughts isn’t a magic fix, but the most successful therapy involves a consistent dose of these reminders throughout each day and week. A few appointments per week are no match for the relentlessness of the eating disorder. Regular reminders, usually many times per day, as a consistent part of any recovery are an important indicator of beneficial treatment.