Terrified of Weight Gain in Recovery? Here’s Exactly What to Do.

In this video, I talk about the fear of weight gain in recovery and why so many people approach it the wrong way. I share practical guidance on how to face this fear, allow weight gain, and move forward in recovery without letting this anxiety take over and sabotage our recovery.

If this resonates, you can explore more support, courses, and resources on healing your relationship with food and your body on my website.

My website: https://www.jamiethedietitian.com/

My Instagram: @jamieRD_

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Chapters

• 0:00 Fear Won’t Disappear On Its Own
• 0:46 Exposure Overthinking: Dating And Spiders
• 3:48 Behavior Change Plus Deep Inner Work
• 4:51 Personal Recovery And Body Image Growth
• 6:41 From Tolerance To Confidence And Respect

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

If you're waiting for weight gain to not be scary or to not fear weight gain, you're going to be waiting forever because it's it's going to remain scary. And what I see with all of my clients, all who are afraid of weight gain, is that they avoid these hard truths and it keeps them stuck in a place that they don't need to be stuck. So when we think about fear and how we approach fear, it's not through thinking our way out of the fear, right? It's not through thinking in a way to get to this place where we finally in our minds accept waking. It is facing that fear and allowing waking to happen. So let's first use an analogy. Let's use a different kind of fear. So if you are fearing putting yourself out there with dating, um then you can't you can't really think yourself out of that fear. You need to do exposure work. You need to come into contact with dating. You need to do some dating so that you can start to decrease the fear and build your window of tolerance for the ability to date by going on that date and seeing that you survived it. Maybe it was a miserable date, but you survived it, and then you might want to go on another one. Maybe it's a little less miserable, but you see you survived it until it transforms, and maybe then dating can become fun. And then maybe you find your lifelong partner if that's a value to you, right? And you see you're able to face that fear and see what it provides and how um and only through doing and going on those dates are you going to be less fearful. Kind of the same thing with exposure of like if you're afraid of spiders, like having a spider in the same room and then on you, like the more you do that, the less fearful you're gonna be about spiders. Um so that's the same thing when that's the same thing that applies to weight gain. Being afraid of weight gain, we just need to start experiencing it to and hold space for it being scary. So by no means when people start working through through recovery with me, do they just all of a sudden not fear weight gain, but we hold that space for it and navigate it together to allow weight gain while we um hold that fear and reduce that fear and also do the deep work around the fear. So, like I said, it's behavioral, it's not just thinking your way out of the fear, it is it's going to be taking action and doing things. But there's also a lot to understand as we're taking action. So, again, going back to that metaphor with dating, when you come home from that miserable first date and you might say, I don't ever want to date again, we might have to work through, okay, well, you're you're thinking about how it was just miserable. You're thinking, you know, you're projecting into what that means about, you know, you maybe never finding someone that you like or um there not being anyone available out there for you, um, not enough fish in the sea to, you know, just not whatever it might be. Might have to work through how you are black and white thinking it or catastrophizing it or using that one solo experience and bring you back to like the deep work around, well, what are your values? Why are you dating in the first place? And um what scares you about dating, what makes you think these things. And we have to get to like the roots of that and some of the self-maybe conf self-confidence, the the fears, all those things that like make up your fears around dating, right? Going deep into dating when I want to be going deep into um body image and fear of weight gain, but it's very similar to fear of weight gain. While we are changing our behaviors and working toward more allowing our bodies to gain weight and practicing body respect and all of that, we also need to be navigating and understanding those fears because it's very different for everyone based on their own experiences, their own relationship with it, and those deep-rooted um issues, um, things that we need to address to fully heal. Um, because it's not just about allowing weight gain, right? Because even though that's really important for behaviorally, there's many people who allow weight gain or go to treatment centers and they have to gain weight and they come back from the treatment center and they lose all the weight again and get back into the disordered eating. So we really have to understand the roots of where that comes from and heal it by doing that that deep work, which is another thing I do with my clients. So, but back to the original, the original message I'm wanting to share, I'm wanting to share, which is we can't think our way out of the fear. We need to behave our way out of the fear through action steps. So don't wait until you don't fear it. It's never going to come. We want to hold that fear alongside taking action while doing the deeper work. And I guess just a little bit of my experience. Um, I can share lots of different personal experiences, I can I can share lots of clients' experiences, but I'll just bring it back to mine this time. Um, there was never a time in my own disordered eating recovery that I wasn't feeling fearful that my body wasn't gonna stop gaining or fearful of my of gaining weight. Like that was always something that was really scary. Um, and I I just I didn't wait until that wasn't scary to start the work. And thank goodness I didn't. I just started with kind of tolerating it while I started doing different, while I started doing the deeper works and started started changing my behavior. And what happens when you face that fear? It starts to transform. And when you do all the other work, your your beliefs around body image, your healing around body image all start to transform too. So I was able to see, oh, I don't have to only just like tolerate my body, but maybe I can accept it and respect it. Maybe I can treat it a little bit nicer. Hmm, maybe I can have like some times I'm a little bit confident. Oh, maybe I can have more times that I'm confident. Oh, maybe I could actually like really like my body and appreciate my body. And it slowly starts to transform, but I couldn't think my way into that. I couldn't foresee those things. It took all the deep work and the action steps to get to all those different pieces of my body image journey. And you can go there too. I absolutely believe if you put in the right work, if you face those fears, if you if you commit, um, if you get that specialized support and you go the whole way, you can absolutely go from hating your body to not only tolerate tolerating and accepting your body and it just feeling neutral, you can also like it and appreciate it and feel confidence and comfort. So I wouldn't be doing this work if I if I didn't feel that way, because it would be sad work. But I absolutely believe you can get back to that place where you're always supposed to be. Respectful, compassionate relationship with this body that you were given that does so much for you.