Chapter Summary

This section discusses the importance of exploring your emotions.

Linking What I Eat and Drink to My Emotions

One of the realities of struggling with an eating disorder is that due to concerns about basic health needs, clinicians often start treatment with conversations about fluid and food intake, weight, day-to-day activities, and medications which may be triggering. It is important to not however, that this is a necessary part of your health that needs to be discussed as fluids and food provide our body with basic nutrients to keep organs like our brain, heart, lungs, skin, bowels and bladder  healthy and functioning (Escott-Stump, 2019).

Whether we like it or not, we may be asked to keep track of or self-monitor our food and fluid intake as well as our thoughts and beliefs about this intake (Carcieri, 2020; Province of British Columbia, 2018). During treatment, you may be provided with a food and fluid diary to   or be asked to use an app to track your food and fluid intake and your feelings about your food and fluid intake.

Talking about your truth and experience

One of the biggest challenges faced when undergoing eating disorder treatment is truth-telling. Truth telling ( in the context of eating disorder treatment) refers to our ability to honestly self-disclose about our relationship with foods and fluids to a health care professional.  Truth telling is a complicated and  uncomfortable part of self-care and healing. To practice truth-telling, we must be able to form a completely honest relationship with a clinician or health care professional. This may take several conversations and interactions as we may often worry about whether we can trust a person enough to talk to them or whether we feel we can show vulnerability and tell a person the truths of our experiences? (Le Fevre & Sawyer, 2012). But it is important to understand that this is a normal and common experience. Difficult and uncomfortable conversations are real, hard, may include tears, and take time.

Communicating honestly about your relationship with foods and fluids   is also very important as many of the ‘elements’ collected in these conversations help clinicians to learn how to support an individual living with an eating disorder. Expressing these thoughts and feelings in food journals is also important as it helps you and your clinician to find gaps in your diet and help individualize care. Although Food journals are a helpful tool. There are times when a food journal is not helpful ( e.g. if they become too triggering).

To understand my experiences with journals, I followed the guidelines outlined by Bowen (2009)  and conducted a document analysis of 12 formalized eating disorder records, or diaries. I sought to compile a list of all the items that eating disorder team members wanted me to record. Below is a list of what items health care professionals requested:

Creation Space

1. What do you think about recording your thoughts and beliefs and or intake of foods and fluids:
2. What do you think about truth-telling?
3. What feelings arise when you are eating with other people or when alone? Do you think this matters?

Why Care about Emotions?

Recognizing and expressing our emotions is a very important step in the direction of recovery. Below, Janet shares the importance of expressing emotions and finding support in family members and clinicians:

“In my journey, I mechanically kept track of what I drank and ate as requested by health care professionals. I was neat and orderly with each written diary entry. I was obedient. I meticulously recorded eating for some years, even as my health deteriorated. Yet, when I began to record emotions, I was not prepared for the flood of emotions and tears that ensued. Guilt, regret, hope, and fear all surfaced and flooded over me and at times I regressed feeling like I was suffocating. It took time, lots of time, to truly talk aloud about emotions. This was hard work. It was only alongside my family and trusted health care eating disorder specialists that I made any progress” – Janet

Creation Space

1. When you look at your journal(s) do you think of your feelings, thoughts, and emotions? Do you write about how you feel?
2. When you eat, do you pay attention to your surroundings?
3. Does it matter if you are alone or with people (e.g., feeling alone, judged, lonely, shame, ashamed)?

Our emotions often contribute to our relationship with food. In an attempt to suppress our feelings or avoid them altogether, we cope with our feelings by controlling our diet. Hannah writes: “Those around me become preoccupied with the number of calories I consumed. They don’t understand that it’s not about increasing my caloric intake, it’s about dealing with this cycle of guilt, shame, and emotional dishevel. I need to manage my emotions before I can manage my diet” – Hannah

Some eating disorders develop out of ineffective coping skills related to trauma, family dynamics, and stressors in life or other experiences we have had, for example: losing a good friend, changing jobs, moving homes, traumatic events, and or a death in the family. The behaviours that emerge from these stressful events create a cycle of guilt and shame. Thus, correcting the behaviour is not a matter of eating more or less, it is about dealing with the underlying mental health and wellness issue(s) that may have contributed to development of the disorder.

You Try

1. What am I thinking and feeling today about emotions and eating?

We can also associate food or fluids with emotional comfort, discomfort, grief, loss and pain. Avoidance of foods that generate negative emotions can result. Things that numb the pain or generate pleasure are often consumed and then followed by shame or guilt. The need to purge can result when emotions resurge.

Hannah writes: “I would feel numb when I ate, then the surge of guilt would wash over me, I would find myself bent over a toilet, purging myself of self-loathing, only to find that the cycle repeats itself each time I eat and binge. In time, I had to rewrite my story and get out of the endless cycle of binge and purging. I changed my story to one of acknowledgment of pain and suffering and then envisioned the person I wanted to become while embracing my imperfections”.

If you choose to tell your story, know that the ending is not foretold. You can process the trauma you have endured and change the ending of your story to hope and love.

Creation Space

1. Can you creatively draw how you connect your emotions to eating? Sketchpad – Draw, Create, Share!