I wrote a book recently on neural rewiring. So if you want more, you can find it here.
If you have a restrictive eating disorder, you are likely scared of gaining weight — weirdly, this can still be true for those of us who dislike being thin and want to gain weight.
This fear of weight gain results in behaviours like weighing yourself on a regular basis, and other forms of body checking — for some of us daily or multiple times a day. It used to really annoy me, the constant weight checking. But not weight checking would lead to so much anxiety that I would do it just to quieten my brain. I felt like it was something I couldn’t control.
I was wrong. It was something I could control.
I used to weigh myself multiple times a day. If I saw a scale — in a shop, at another person’s house — I felt like I had to get on it. In my digs at uni I once snuck into a housemate’s bedroom as I had seen a scale in there and I wanted to check my weight on it and compare how much I weighed on her scale compared to my own. And she walked in. That was really awkward. In department stores I was the crazy skinny freak having to stand on all the different brands of scale. In the gym I weighed myself before and after exercise. At home I weighed myself before and after going to the loo.
Today, I can’t remember the last time I weighed myself. I know the nurse weighed me when I went to the doctor recently, and I know I saw the number, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. My brain didn’t retain the information. My brain doesn’t think that information is important enough to need to keep. In one ear and out the other. Just like algebra.
This is because I have taught my brain that my weight is not important.
If you are obsessed about your weight, currently, your brain believes that what you weigh is important information. Like all beliefs that you hold, this is something that your brain has been taught.
Take another belief. Say, for example, ff you are religious — these beliefs have been taught to you. Nobody comes out of the womb believing in God. It is learned. If you believe the world is round, this belief has been taught to you. Your political beliefs have been taught to you. Your spiritual beliefs are learned. Our brains, and our belief systems are a product of our experiences. Everything we think, and everything we do, teaches our brains something. All this learning and experience adds up to your current belief system. And it is all changeable. Yes, belief systems are changeable.
If your brain believes that your weight is important, it is because you (and your environment) have taught it that your weight is important.
Yes, knowingly or not, you have taught your brain that the information that the scale gives is crucial. Here’s how:
- Every time you have weighed yourself, you have taught your brain that your weight is important.
- Every time you have paid attention to people talking about weight, you have taught your brain that weight is important.
- Every time you have read something that is to do with weight loss, you have taught your brain that not gaining weight is important.
- etc etc
Every single action you take, gives your brain information. The things that you dedicate mental attention to, are the ones that ultimately your brain is going to think are of consequence. We teach our brain what we should pay attention to, by paying attention to things. Generally we don’t spend our precious time doing things for no reason. If you are weighing yourself, your brain will conclude that the information gathered from weighing yourself is important. If it wasn’t why would you do it?
So now consider, how many times you have weighed yourself over the past year or so. Every single time you have stepped on the scale, you have further confirmed to your brain that the information the scale gives you is vital. Think of it this way: every time you have weighed yourself, or thought about your weight, you have given your brain a data point that your weight is important. That’s a lot of data in favour of weight bias!
And I bet you are thinking “but I can’t help it.” I can’t help that I want to know what my weight is. I can’t help that I pay attention when people talk about their weight. I can’t help that my eyes gravitate towards ads about weight loss or articles about weight.
Bollocks. Yes you can. You trained your brain that your weight is important. You can train it the the contrary. You just have to be determined and consistent, and maybe a little obsessive. And luckily for you, if you have a restrictive eating disorder, determined and consistent (and obsessive) are probably things you are very good at.
If you want to your reality to be one where weight talk brushes over you, and you never even think about the scale, you have to create it. Here’s some starters:
- Blatantly obvious: DO NOT STEP ON THE FUCKING SCALE. No matter how much you want to. No matter how much your brain tries to convince you that information is needed. It isn’t. That information is not important. You do not need to know how much you weigh. If you do crack and get on the scale, every time you want to weigh yourself, eat something to counter the action. I’m not kidding. Trust your body to know what it needs to weigh and to get there without you micromanaging it.
- Don’t allow yourself to indulge in thoughts about your weight, or anyone else’s. When those thoughts come in, reject them. Push them out. Distract yourself. Think of weight thoughts as a bad habit you have picked up, and one you need to quash.
- Remember that as an adult you have the right not to know your weight. If treatment providers want to weigh you, you don’t have to look.
- When a weigh-loss ad pops up on social media scroll past really fast.
There are a few tips, now sit down and add to them. Devise yourself a plan to help you rewire your obsession with your weight. I wrote a blog recently about using your OCD traits to your advantage in recovery and this is a perfect example of somewhere to do just that. I became obsessive about not knowing my weight for a while. For a long while. Until I really didn’t care at all anymore. And now, now I could know my weight and that information wouldn’t torture me. In fact it is very unlikely I will even remember it 5 minutes later. Because my brain has things that it believes are more important to think about.
Thank you very much for the post! It really is the key, your brain is going to fix what you want it to be fixed. The problem I have is that I must weigh myself to prove that I gain weight because I am at a very low weight and I cannot afford not to gain weight. And I can’t leave this to anyone because I’m recovering alone, I don’t trust doctors or hospitals because the first time they made me gain a lot of weight on a low-calorie diet and I got scared of my hunger and my body. The number every week is torture and activates my fears even though I don’t want to be a skeleton and I want to have a healthy weight.
Is there any one in your life you could ask to help you? You could step on the scale without looking at the number, and they could tell you whether you are gaining!
I think this is fantastic! I’ve had anorexia for 36 years and NO ONE has made not worrying about your weight any clearer! I think doctors and therapists have tried everything possible with me yet the simplicity of this is great! Thank you!
Your point about not making the weight important is correct. However, when it comes to a child it’s a bit trickier. If I said that I wasn’t going to regularly weigh my child during recovery I would be branded a neglectful mother. It’s difficult to stand your ground as a parent in recovery and say that you know your child best. You are allowed to not weigh your child if you really don’t think it serves a purpose. Having said that, we weigh our child regularly to monitor recovery because we believe that at this stage we should. I recognised early on the importance of stepping on scales backwards to try and eliminate number stress. But when I have to say, “Your weight is down, so where do you think you can get more food in?” I know that I’m putting too much emphasis on the number. So I now try to balance this with talking about mental hunger at the same time, which I think is really helping and she is not left feeling a failure for not getting the number perfect. It’s very difficult to convince a young anorexic girl that what we are asking is not punitive nor judgemental, but rather part of caring and support for recovery. But as you have pointed out, retraining thoughts is key and parents can do this with their children too!
Thanks for your work Tabitha!
Weight is still important for me but I don’t feel it’s a bad thing. I’ve now done a slight overshoot and am trying to maintain my weight. Going onto maintenance was a relief for me because it was quite hard work eating enough to gain the last bit of weight. I’ve decided to decrease from fortnightly weighing and %body fat measuring to monthly. This is to check I’m holding my weight up. I have a physical job needing a lot of muscle so am aiming to stay above the range that’s healthy for most people. If my BMI drops below 25, I’ll try to gain weight again. If I lose any weight in the next month, I’ll increase how much I’m eating. If I hold my weight relatively stable across three monthly weigh ins, I’ll go on to trusting how my clothes fit and how well and fit I feel in general. You could say I’m weaning myself off it, but it’s a method that wont fray my nerves
I am terrified of putting on weight, so thank you very much for addressing it. It’s what holds me back from recovery the most.
I can’t own a scale and I don’t weigh myself otherwise. Now that I am a healthy weight I refuse to weigh at the doctors offices as well because even going on backwards bothers me. I think it is because I have had years of doctors and dieticians evaluating me based on that number. I guess that has played a huge roll in me believing that number is important. My mom was a nurse practitioner and she can’t understand that. She also has an eating disorder and I think weighs herself daily. Growing up a scale was in the entry way of our house. Now that I think of that it just seems so weird. My therapist made me weigh in with a doctor a few times at the beginning of recovery, but once I had gained enough she honored my request to stop this given I did not start losing weight. That being removed I realize how triggering it was.i would worry so much about gaining too fast or too much that it really messed with my head and my ability to eat unrestricted.
Surely weight does matter.For health our body weight needs to be in an optimum range. A very low BMI is dangerous but so is a very high BMI. I work in the NHS and frequently see people with BMI,s above 40. This terrifies me and makes me want to restrict more! Ellie
I used to weight myself almost on a daily basis till my family went with me on vacation, so i couldn’t weight myself anymore. At first I felt a lot anxious about but. However it helped my to stop weighing myself and i feel much better and less obsessed:)
My friends kidnapped my scales and made me write out a statement saying the scales will never be returned no matter how much I asked. I then had to sign and date it 😂. I don’t really miss them. It’s a bit of a relief not having them in the house