Guide to Fighting Back With Your Healthy Self

If you have read my post last week, Lies My Eating Disorder Made Me Tell, you learned a bit about how the Eating Disorder can cause otherwise honest people to begin to be deceitful and dishonest. If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to do so prior to reading this post. The link for this post is down below. Once you have read it, come back here for a guide to help you foster your healthy self and battle this unhealthy, Eating Disorder self.

• Recognize and Distinguish your Eating Disorder self: Recognize the part of you that is causing you to be dishonest. Ask yourself questions like have you lied often prior to your Eating Disorder? When did the dishonesty begin? Did it coincide with the onset or worsening of your Eating Disorder? What types of lies do you tell? What is the purpose of those lies? If you’re finding that your answers suggest a relationship between your dishonesty and your Eating Disorder, and that the purpose of the lies tend to protect your Eating Disorder, sounds like the lies are part of your Eating Disorder self.

Ways lying may protect your Eating Disorder:
Lie: “I already ate.”
Protection: This lie is likely one you tell to loved ones when they try to offer you food. Instead of getting an interrogation or telling them the truth and facing push-back, it’s easier to lie and say you already ate, even though you didn’t.
Lie: “I don’t know why there is that many charges for fast food.”
​Protection: For those that may be suffering from binge eating, admitting that you spent a lot of money on fast food may get someone angry at you (if they’re the bill-payer) or it may make you feel shameful of your behaviors. It’s easier to lie than to face the shame or other negative emotions that may present itself if you told the truth.

• Be honest with yourself: It may not only be the lies that you’re telling other people that may be hard to admit, but also admitting the lies to yourself. You may try to disguise the Eating Disorder as your healthy self, even to yourself. How might you do this? Perhaps you tell yourself that you’ve already eaten enough for the day when you know deep down, you didn’t eat nearly as much as your body needs. Or maybe you convince yourself that you are too exhausted from a rough day to cook anything, so you decide to make multiple fast food runs instead. It’s important to ask yourself if you are being honest to yourself. Are the things that you’re telling yourself helping to foster your Eating Disorder or is it genuinely your healthy-self talking? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell. An Eating Disorder therapist can help you to decipher this.
• Strengthen your healthy-self: It didn’t take one night to make your Eating Disorder self as strong as it is. Be patient with the time it may take to strengthen your healthy-self enough to have a fair shot in the fight against your Eating Disorder. Work with your therapist about strengthening the healthy self. Identify when you are having an internal battle between your Eating Disorder and healthy self. Try to elongate the conversation between the two for as long as you can. Ideally, you want to end the conversation with the healthy self. However, if you still end with the Eating Disorder winning, don’t be so down on yourself. The longer you can keep your healthy-self fighting, the stronger it is getting!

• Be honest with your treatment team: Your treatment team that specializes in Eating Disorders understands that dishonesty comes with the territory. You may have lied to your team in the past, don’t feel like you have to continue that lie. If you find that you want to be honest, even if that goes against a lie you have told or asserted in the past, be honest. Your treatment team will not be disappointed in you or feel as though you are a liar. They will understand and appreciate the honesty. In fact, it shows that the healthy self is getting stronger, and they will celebrate that with you. Do not feel you are stuck in a lie.
• Let it fuel you: Most of my clients hate that they have to be dishonest in any part of their life to protect the Eating Disorder. In fact, they typically find it disturbing since it usually goes against their value system. Do not let that hurt you and be a source of self-deprecating judgment, let it fuel you. Let the anger toward the Eating Disorder for dishonoring your values fuel you to fuel your healthy self.

The takeaway: Eating Disorders tend to make people who were ordinarily honest people become dishonest. It is a means of protecting itself. Do not let the Eating Disorder cause you to judge yourself negatively, because that will fuel the unhealthy self. Allow it to fuel and motivate you to do the work to get better.

I hope you found this post helpful! Please share with anyone who could benefit from it. If you have any questions, concerns or requests for future posts, please leave a comment or message me privately using the “Contact Me” page.

I wish you honesty on your journey to finding your State of Balance!

Last week’s post:
Lies My Eating Disorder Made Me Tell

You may also find these posts helpful:
BATTLE: Eating Disorder Self vs. Healthy Self
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
The Pendulum