It's hard for so many people to understand why recovery can be so difficult. All you have to do is eat, or keep your head out of the toilet, or stop binge eating, or get off the damn treadmill already. It's one thing to know that this is what needs to be done. It's quite another to actually do it.
For one, the neuropsychological changes caused by eating disorder symptoms can make it difficult to interrupt the cycle (it can make it almost impossible to see that there's a cycle that needs to be interrupted, for that matter). For another, behavior change is complicated.
Very complicated.
I worked in public health for several years, and figuring out how to implement successful behavioral change--whether it's anti-tobacco messages or everyone's favorite current dead horse, obesity--was largely an exercise in futility. It's easy enough to tell people that smoking is bad and you should eat more veggies. It's also relatively easy to get people to absorb these messages. It's quite another to get someone to put down the cigarettes and start eating broccoli.
This is known as the
intention-behavior gap . That's the technical name for knowing what you need to do and not doing it.
It's been a frequent issue in my recovery. I can argue circles around myself to justify things, and come up with great reasons why it's to "hard" to eat lunch or take a break from exercise. Behavior change is
hard. No one is going to argue with that--at least, no one who's broken a nasty habit or changed a major behavior.
But as I've progressed in recovery, as I've slipped and come clean and
learned from my mistakes, I've learned that there are some general actions I could take so that my behaviors would match my intention of ongoing recovery.
I learned about batch cooking one summer when I was living in Baltimore and commuting into Washington DC every day. It was two hours each way. Getting home, wrung out and exhausted, at 8pm was not conducive to cooking dinner. That wasn't an eating disorder excuse, that was just reality. It would have been easy to turn that into a great reason to simply not eat, or to just nibble on some cereal before I passed out from exhaustion. A conversation with my dietitian reminded me about batch cooking. On Saturday or Sunday, I would cook all my meals for the week. That way, when I got home, all I had to do was shove something in the microwave. Easy peasy.
There were other things, like (when I was more in binge mode) not eating out of the box, packing my lunch the night before, or turning in my gym key to apartment management.
I've never been all that good at analyzing these things in the moment. Usually, "the moment" is about damage control and getting more stable. But looking back, I can generally (okay, with lots of help from my therapist) identify what went wrong.
What are some intention-behavior gaps in your recovery? How can you start to address them?
For one, the neuropsychological changes caused by eating disorder symptoms can make it difficult to interrupt the cycle (it can make it almost impossible to see that there's a cycle that needs to be interrupted, for that matter). For another, behavior change is complicated. Very complicated.
I worked in public health for several years, and figuring out how to implement successful behavioral change--whether it's anti-tobacco messages or everyone's favorite current dead horse, obesity--was largely an exercise in futility. It's easy enough to tell people that smoking is bad and you should eat more veggies. It's also relatively easy to get people to absorb these messages. It's quite another to get someone to put down the cigarettes and start eating broccoli.
This is known as the intention-behavior gap . That's the technical name for knowing what you need to do and not doing it.
It's been a frequent issue in my recovery. I can argue circles around myself to justify things, and come up with great reasons why it's to "hard" to eat lunch or take a break from exercise. Behavior change is hard. No one is going to argue with that--at least, no one who's broken a nasty habit or changed a major behavior.
But as I've progressed in recovery, as I've slipped and come clean and learned from my mistakes, I've learned that there are some general actions I could take so that my behaviors would match my intention of ongoing recovery.
I learned about batch cooking one summer when I was living in Baltimore and commuting into Washington DC every day. It was two hours each way. Getting home, wrung out and exhausted, at 8pm was not conducive to cooking dinner. That wasn't an eating disorder excuse, that was just reality. It would have been easy to turn that into a great reason to simply not eat, or to just nibble on some cereal before I passed out from exhaustion. A conversation with my dietitian reminded me about batch cooking. On Saturday or Sunday, I would cook all my meals for the week. That way, when I got home, all I had to do was shove something in the microwave. Easy peasy.
There were other things, like (when I was more in binge mode) not eating out of the box, packing my lunch the night before, or turning in my gym key to apartment management.
I've never been all that good at analyzing these things in the moment. Usually, "the moment" is about damage control and getting more stable. But looking back, I can generally (okay, with lots of help from my therapist) identify what went wrong.
What are some intention-behavior gaps in your recovery? How can you start to address them?