(Transcript for this podcast is available if you scroll down! Thanks toMarie for transcribing it!)
In this podcast Tabitha talks to the fabulous Carrie Arnold about the problems associated with setting target weight too long:
Topics covered:
– Body diversity
– What happens in patients minds when target weight are set too low
– Anorexia in larger bodies
– Overshoot vs. recovery weight
About Carrie Arnold
Carrie Arnold is an award winning blogger, freelance science writer, and author living in Virginia. She writes on a variety of topics from microbiology to evolution. Carrie is in recovery from anorexia, and is very active in the eating disorder community as an advocate for better research and treatments.
The Eating Disorder Recovery Podcast Recovery Stories: Allow for Body Diversity when Setting Target Weights Tabitha and Carrie Arnold Hello there, welcome to this weeks podcast, in this podcast you're going to hear a pretty short conversation that I had with Carrie Arnold.. Carrie has been on this podcast before, I'll link to our previous conversation. We had a talk about eating disorders and OCD. Last year now, quite a long time ago. So she's been on the podcast before, Carrie is a freelance writer and she's in Virginia. She's in recovery from an eating disorder. Today we are going to talk about, the topic of the moment, target weights and a couple of reasons why setting target weights too low can really have pretty troublesome effects on the person in recovery. Here's Carrie C: The first target weight that I got, right when I was first diagnosed and I had already lost a huge amount of weight. They gave me a target weight that was only 4 or 5 pounds more than I currently weighed. I remember being on the one hand happy because it was not that I had any intention of even gaining that little amount of weight but I just remember thinking like....What the hell?!! you know, these people.. .I don't think I would have been able to trust them. T: Right. Wasn't there any kind of thoughts around, Oh if they're saying that I should only be this weight that's so much less than I was previously, then I was right to lose weight? C: Yeah, and I remember there were a couple of incidences, the first treatment centre asked me what I wanted my target weight to be. T: OK (laughs) did you say what it is now?! C: Basically. And when I was at Renfrew in the fall of 2001, they measured me at 5'4.5. So my target weight, I shit you not was 122.5lbs. Down to the half pound and I just remember being like, you do realise that a bottle of water drank is going to either put me over or under. When your target weight depends on a glass of water before your weigh in, then there's something wrong. T: Oh my gosh, but even that's then the message that humans have to be that accurate about their weight. C: Yes. We survived for millions of years without scales. Like, I don't think we need to be that accurate. T: No and I think humans and any one person has a range that varies from day to day anyway. So then it just kind of colludes with this idea that we have to be completely exact and calculating about every thing that we eat. And that it even makes a difference and therefore about the weight as well. So, in your treatment history, you've had target weights been basically set at just about what your underweight is, you've had scrutinized accuracy down to the half pound. C: And I've also ended up with a really good treatment team that's like, they took a look at my weight history and everything and kind of, all those were full of crap and my nutritionist started by saying, well we're going to get you up to at least this amount and then we're going to re-evaluate and see how things are going. She said, we'll know when we're getting closer because the rate of gain will slow down dramatically because your metabolism will really kick in. Eventually you will start being less obsessed with food and everything. It's probably, it's definitely going to be higher than you weighed in the past. She said, I'm not going to lie and tell you a lower weight range to get you in the door..because a lot of the time people give a lower range because they're afraid of scaring you. But she said she had a lot of faith in her patients. She said, I want you to trust me and I can't do that if I tell you one thing and know that it's not right. T: Right, I like this person. C: Yeah and she said, she's had to tell overweight patients that were anorexic and had lost their period that they needed to gain weight. She said that was a hard sell! But she's not afraid of doing that at all. So, that really helped. I think my weight even went higher than they might have anticipated but they got my old growth charts and then they were like no that was exactly what we would have expected you to have weighed. T: Right, that's your you. C: Yes and looking at my family they're Eastern European. They're short and stocky. They're not tall and thin. No one is. I'm just a little under 5'5 and I'm the tallest female on either side of my family. That's just, tall is never going to happen either! T: Yes, it's in your genetic, it's you. Can you remember that conversation and when she told you that your weight is likely going to end up being higher than say you wanted it to be or whatever. Do you remember did you either go 'Oh god I don't want to work with this person' or did you go 'Oh OK' C: It was a bit of both honestly. It was, at that point I had probably been sick for 10 years but probably more like 15 look back. It was terror and anxiety but I think it was also relief that someone was giving it to me straight and that I had been fighting for so long to keep my weight artificially down because I didn't think it should be that high. That it was sort of relief that someone was giving it to me straight and that maybe I had been given permission to stop fighting my own biology. T: Right and so that had been I guess until then. Were you ever in the situation where you reached the target weight that someone had set, a low target weight that someone had given you and they had said, 'OK you're done, bye' C: No, because I never really stayed with anyone long enough to kind of get to that point. I had a doctor that I had at one point where I gained over my target weight and I was seeing a decent team at the time and they hadn't told me not to keep gaining anything and I'd gone off to grad school and I went to my first appointment at the new eating disorder clinic and the doctor made some comment like 'we certainly don't want you to gain any more weight' and it turns out that what ended up being my target range was 10 or 20 pounds over that. So that's the comment that's really stuck with me the longest. And it's been the hardest to shake. T: Understandably C: Yes it was said in that 'we certainly don't want you to gain any more' I went to a doctor at a relapse and explained that I had an eating disorder and she looked me up and down and said 'well that's certainly not a problem any more' and I'm like fuck you. T: Those kind of things sting and they stay. Did you notice improvements when you allowed yourself to stop fighting your natural body weight C: I don't think I had ever allowed myself to stay there long enough to really notice the sustained improvement. It was like I'd gotten there long enough to noticed the increased craziness and then I immediately started restricting again. T: Yes, because it gets worse before it gets better. C: Yeah and I didn't really, it wasn't until later that I really had the support to force me to stay there and get through it and realise that the world wasn't ending because I weighed more than a BMI chart said I should, or I thought I should, or society thought I should. It was helpful when the team didn't brush off my concerns either. Sometimes it would be 'well that's just the eating disorder talking' and that drove me absolutely bonkers. Because yes, of course there were times when I was completely in anorexic mode and freaking out and no that's not an appropriate time to have a conversation but by expressing my discomfort with this weight gain and in my new body it's not necessarily the eating disorder talking. So having a team that could really validate how hard it was and address the cultural issues around body weight, not so much as the causes of this disorder but as barriers in getting better. T: Yes, so they were probably working with you not just at you. C: Yes, yes. I've noticed when I first got to my healthy weight I thought that I was the only person with anorexia that would ever weigh this much. That I was some weird freak of nature because you see most of the before and after pictures and the people in the recovery community and a lot of them are very thin. And there's nothing wrong with that, I know there are plenty of people with that as there natural body shape. But when I'm looking at that and looking at myself it was like there was this big disconnect. I'm not even that particularly large. I'm still well within average weight for women of my age and so I'm not trying to say I know what it's like to be someone who's a lot larger and has an eating disorder but it was looking at myself compared to a lot of these images is, I thought I was the heaviest person who ever had anorexia ever in the history of all humankind amen! And you know, realising now is that there are a lot more people out there who's bodies don't conform to the traditional narrative either of people with anorexia being inherently thin even in recovery and also the broader cultural narratives around what a 'good body' is. I am far from the only person and there are a lot of people out there, they just might not be talking about their history or we might not be looking at them as having an eating disorder because the don't fit those criteria that we are used and it's not that weird at all. T: I think that will help a lot of people who are there right now. C: The only other thing is, I know a lot of people when they talk about overshooting target weight and on the one hand I do think that does happen to a lot of people, but I also think that at least 90% of the time we hear target weights are set too low and that you're thinking you overshot but really it was the target weight that was too low not that your current is too high. It's that idea that it's your weight that's the problem not the actual target setting. That took a long time for me to really mentally get my head around. T: Overshoot can definitely be troublesome because then people can be like, I hope I'm in overshoot, and it's going to go back down. C: For me too, then I'd start restricting because it was like, well if it's overshoot it will come back down and it wasn't coming back down and then I was like, well I'll make it come back down. T: Right and then even the term overshoot implies that you went over something and that you got it wrong, which I don't particularly like. It could be that you got it just right actually C: Exactly. T: Big thank you for Carrie for coming and talking to me about target weights. Probably a difficult subject for a lot of people, it's also I guess a scary subject for a lot of people. It's an important subject, it's important because I think treatment providers need to understand what happens when you set a persons target weight too low. With most people, what happens is they get to that weight and if that weight is too low the anorexia response is not turned off and so they still have that anorexia response still going on that fear of weight gain and fear of eating and all of the obsessions that go with it but they are just in a larger body. And that's hell and that's not OK. It's not a nice place to put somebody. If somebody is allowed, if their body is allowed to get to the weight that it should naturally be at then the anorexia response should start to turn off and then everything gets easier for that person. But when the target weight is set too low then they never get to that point and then there's the things that Carrie talked around just the effects of hearing a target weight that's too low has on the individual in recovery. If that target weight is a couple of pounds more than your underweight weight that's scary. If that target weight is higher and accurate. That's scary too. Because our bodies don't work like that. Our bodies are organisms their not machines. Their weight varies. The same persons body weight will vary throughout the day let alone be an exact .5 of a lb. Oh my god shouldn't laugh, it's so fucked up. Anorexia is this response that makes most of us hyper aware, super obsessed especially around numbers and we get really kind of worked up around it and it all has to be absolutely accurate and then you go into a treatment setting and the treatment providers are telling you that the numbers have to be absolutely accurate and you have to eat your body weight up to .5 of a lb to be the right weight. How is that helpful? That is like taking somebody who has contamination OCD and giving them a s crubbing brush and telling them that they have to make their bathroom cleaner or something. That is so messed up. OK, you might have a story that you want to share as well. If you do, get in touch. I'm all about sharing recovery stories good and bad. You can get in touch by email. My email is: info@tabithafarrar.com or twitter: @love_fat_ Cheers, until next time. Cheerio.
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Love this! My sense is that treatment professionals often underestimate target weight not just because of the cultural stigma of a larger body, but also because of those awful height weight tables. And furthermore, that insurance goes by those tables in determining whether or not a person is “weight restored” and done with treatment. Even a forward thinking treatment team could calculate an awesome target weight based on one’s individual growth charts but if insurance pulls the plug well before that weight is reached, what’s the point? I don’t know how to go about changing this!
This is excellent as Carrie’s experience and comments about clinicians setting weights too low is what keeps most forever in ED purgatory. It is true that insurance looks at the BMI chart to avoid IP or other high cost treatment, but it is really the OP clinicians who need to support someone’s natural set point weight based on their history, early growth charts and being able to eat fully without restriction and EDO behaviors. Many adults are normally in the higher end of a BMI chart naturally and certainly someone with long term anorexia and weight suppression should never have a clinician keeping their client weight suppressed and malnourished. I love Carrie’s comments about overshoot because the reality is that many are naturally a higher set point weight and it isn’t overshoot at all.