recovered-ish with chloe cox

unexpected things my eating disorder taught me | the recovered-ish podcast ep. 25

• Chloe Cox • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Episode Description

It feels strange to say, but it's true: my eating disorder taught me things that have actually added to my life. Not the behaviors. Not the rules. But real, paradoxical lessons that I've carried with me into recovery and into the rest of my life.

In this episode I'm sharing a casual list of the unexpected things I learned through my eating disorder — about my body, about planning, about self-compassion, about the power of my own brain. These lessons go way beyond food and body. They're really about being human.

In This Episode:

  • Why my body sends me signals long before my mind catches up — and how I use that now
  • The hard lesson that planning doesn't always work — and what that shattered for me
  • Why I had to learn that I'm allowed to change my mind
  • Why you can't outsmart your emotions — and what happens when you try
  • How powerful the brain really is — and how that power can work for you instead of against you
  • Why self-criticism took me far but was never going to sustain me
  • The shift from self-hate to self-compassion — and why one crushes you while the other carries you
  • Why the lessons underneath an eating disorder are rarely about food and body at all

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro — summer stress and a note for anyone struggling right now 4:00 Why this podcast is also personal reflection time for me 6:00 Today's topic — unexpected things my eating disorder taught me 6:30 Lesson 1: my body knows something is wrong before my mind does 12:00 How hypersensitivity became a tool instead of a problem 13:00 Lesson 2: planning does not always work 18:00 Cognitive dissonance and why the eating disorder became my way of avoiding a hard truth 19:00 Lesson 3: I am allowed to change my mind 23:00 Lesson 4: you can't outsmart your emotions 27:00 Why feelings are signals, not problems to solve 28:00 Lesson 5: how powerful the brain really is 31:00 Using that same mental power for something supportive 32:00 Lesson 6: self-criticism took me far, but it was never going to sustain me 35:00 The self-compassion research that changed how I think about motivation 38:00 Why these lessons go beyond food and body 39:00 Closing thoughts

The Lessons, At a Glance:

  • Your body often knows before your mind does — pay attention to the signals
  • Planning gives you a sense of control, but it can't account for everything
  • You're allowed to change your mind, and that's not failure
  • You can't think your way out of feeling something — emotions need to move through you
  • Your brain is incredibly powerful, and that power can be redirected toward something supportive
  • Self-criticism can fuel you for a while, but self-compassion is what actually sustains you

Quotes from This Episode:

"There came a point where I realized I'm never going to get what this eating disorder is promising me. I need to find a different way to pursue my goals that doesn't require harming myself in the process."

"Feelings aren't meant to be fixed. They're not problems to be solved. They're signals."

"What used to feel like losing control — changing my mind, choosing a different course — now feels like actual control, autonomy, and freedom."

A Note:

If summer or anything in this episode is bringing something up for you, please know you're not alone in that, and support is available. In the US, the Crisis Text Line is reachable by texting HOME to 741741. If you're outside the US, a quick search for "eating disorder helpline" plus your country will point you to local specialized support.

Resources + Connect with Me:

Keywords/Tags: what eating disorders teach you, eating disorder recovery lessons, self-compassion eating disorder, planning and control eating disorder, eating disorder and emotions, recovered-ish podcast, chloe cox, ED recovery podcast, eating disorder therapist, body awareness recovery, self-criticism vs self-compassion, eating disorder reflection

Resources + Connect with Me:

SPEAKER_00

There came a point at which I realized I'm never gonna get what this eating disorder is promising me. I need to find a different way to pursue my goals that doesn't require harming myself in the process. I really thought that the way to succeed was hypercriticism, looking at your faults, looking at them dead in the face, and saying, you suck, try to suck less. When I think about how powerful my brain had to be to convince myself to continue doing the things that I was doing, it's really mind-boggling and super scary and damaging and harmful in the context of an eating disorder. You're listening to the Recovered-Isch podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Cox. And yeah, I know a thing or two about eating disorder recovery. Between my own very complicated history with disordered eating and the work I do now, I've seen this thing from pretty much every angle. This podcast is where we talk about the messier parts of recovery that don't really make it online. No platitudes, no inspirational quotes, just the real, raw, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly liberating process of building a life beyond your eating disorder. Let's get into it. Okay, hello! We are back for another week on Recovered Ish. My name is Chloe, I'm your host, and as always, I am so happy that you're here. We are so in the thick of summer now. Even though technically doesn't summer not start until the 21st, I think by the time you hear this, it will be officially summertime. But once June hits, it really feels like summer to me, especially in California. Weather heats up, there's some gloom sometimes in June, but it's really summer vibes out here right now. My son is actually at the beach right now, my son and my husband, very jealous. As much as I obviously love my job. It would be nice to be at the beach today. But before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to say if you are feeling the stress of summer, you are not alone. I think we idealize summer in a lot of ways. For so many of us, at least in America growing up, summer is like Yahoo. No school, summer camps, beach. I just have really fond memories of the slip and slide in the backyard. And when you have an eating disorder, summer doesn't quite feel the same very often. Traveling is hard. I actually heard from some of you that traveling is the one time that feels like I can take a vacation from the eating disorder, and that is nice, but then when you come home, it's even worse. Also an incredibly valid experience. But obviously, it's like swimsuit season and wearing shorts. And I know I've mentioned on the show before that when I was a kid, I would never wear shorts because I did not like looking at my legs and like hard to avoid a lot of the triggers in the summertime. So if you're feeling the pressure of it, I just want to say atop the episode, you're not alone. We will survive through this. Maybe take this as a sign if you haven't reached out for help yet, to reach out for help. I know my practice in the summertime actually gets pretty busy because of how hard summer is when you have an eating disorder. So just take that as evidence that there are many of us out there struggling too. You're not alone. Everybody might seem like they're having a good time and having a lot of fun, but especially summer 2026, things are wild out there. There's a lot of triggering things about do your absolute best to keep eating your food, wear what feels comfortable, and stay in the moment. It's my best like cliff notes advice for you. This podcast gives me time every week to go into a reflective space because so much of what I talk about on this show is my own story, my personal experiences. I do, of course, try to weave in things that would be helpful for you all, coming from the lens of someone that's an eating disorder therapist and a coach, and this is the work that I do. But so much of this show is really personal to me. It gives me time every week to sit with myself and really think, okay, how are things going? Let's get back in touch with that younger version of me. How's she doing? How's she healing? I don't know if you all subscribe to the whole inner child thing, but I also really believe in the idea that all our past versions of ourselves are still active inside us. Maybe that sounds a little woo-woo, but I can totally identify with my inner 22-year-old or my inner 19-year-old, even my inner 26-year-old, she was having a rough time. There are so many different versions of me that went through so many different evolutions. And I feel sometimes under certain circumstances, those parts of me wake up and are active, my inner seven-year-old, whatever. But this week has me thinking about at this point in my life, I am so grateful for the work that I'm doing and my family and really what I've built in my life. And I was talking to a client earlier this week, and we were trying to hone in on motivation to recovery and why it feels so hard sometimes to actually push yourself to do the things. And landing on this idea that if we knew for sure that recovery was certainly going to bring good things, was certainly going to bring all the things that it promised, it would be a lot easier to commit to, even if it was a hard journey. We know exactly where we're going to get with the eating disorder, but we don't know exactly what's going to happen in recovery. That's still super uncertain and kind of scary. But it had me thinking about the fact that only now, as I'm about 11 years into my recovery, am I really able to look back and see all the things that I learned from my eating disorder and the ways that going through that struggle was actually really pertinent to my life story. And if those things hadn't happened, and if I didn't learn the lessons that I did, I would not be where I am right now. I have no clue where I would be. I don't think I'd live in California. I don't think I'd be married to my husband. I don't know if I would have kids. I definitely don't think I'd be a therapist. But in those ways, I am oddly grateful for the eating disorder, which feels like a really wrong thing to say. But we can hold opposing emotions at once. Would I ever wish anyone go through that? Absolutely not. But am I grateful to have learned what I did through my experiences? I have to say yes. So, what I want to bring to you this week on the pod is a casual list of the unexpected things that I actually learned from my eating disorder. We are not going to be talking about the behaviors I learned from my eating disorder or eating disorder hacks, blah, blah, blah. Not that kind of list. These are the things that my eating disorder taught me that have actually added to my life. Maybe a bit paradoxical because it did take a lot away from my life. But because I went through that experience, there's so much about my life that I can be grateful for. The first thing that's super relevant, especially now as I'm pregnant, and my cues are very loud from my body, I learned in my eating disorder that my body knows something is wrong, usually much quicker than my mind does. And I'd say this is true and this has been true probably my whole life. I've spoken a lot about how I was very hypersensitive as a kid to sensory input, where like the feeling of my clothes on my body was always something I paid attention to, or like noises are really irksome to me. And I I know that's one of the things that my eating disorder helped to dampen was sensory input for me. It helped to not feel the intensity of those sensations. But what I've come to understand is my hypersensitivity and my increased awareness of my body's experiences actually could be a superpower if I allowed it to be. Typically, my body will feel something emotionally and register it physically a lot sooner than the thoughts translate to my mind. So, for example, these days, when I'm feeling stressed, I'm in adrenaline mode. I'm going, I'm doing, I'm checking things off the list, I'm cramming my schedule full, I'm getting whatever done. I can normally handle getting through that. Like I can survive it mentally, but my body is not okay and will show me the signs. I'm with fatigue, with muscle tension, with appetite being all over the place, shortness of breath. Those are signs my body sends me before I've even put the pieces together that maybe I'm doing too much. I'm really prone to getting sick when I'm overly stressed. Oh, I also get horrible canker sores that I have no idea the origin of that. But usually it's stress-related. That's the only thing that I can really put the pieces together. And my mouth just explodes with canker sores. And if you've ever had a canker sore, you know how painful that is. But my body is sending me these cues a whole lot sooner than I will even register that something is off. My eating disorder was a great example of this, where so much of my life felt really unmanageable. There was a lot of uncertainty. There were some existential crises going on. I wasn't really thinking about any of that. I was just doing, I was just functioning on the track that I always thought I should be. The first sign that something was not okay was the anxiety that was rising up in my body, not mentally, the emotions that just the dial turned up like crazy in intensity. And then how I learned to respond to those cues. I wasn't putting these pieces together at the time, but I really do believe that a big function of my eating disorder was to manage how strong I felt those emotions. When I was able to focus on food and exercise, I actually couldn't touch into how intense those feelings were in my body. When I stopped using behaviors, all of that came back online and was very overwhelming. But I learned that the way I function best is not through thought and not through problem solving, even though that's really what I want to be doing in those moments. It's actually just sitting with myself, feeling whatever feeling is there, feeling the body's response to that, and then learning how to express it. So even now, as I'm sitting here, I'm aware of my heart is beating kind of quick, my breath is getting short. I think part of that's pregnancy related. But I know that this week has been a bit stressful for me, which I probably wouldn't pay much attention to unless my body was sending these visceral signs. Because I have that hyper-awareness to my body sensations, I'm able to hear that. I'm able to hear, oh, my heartbeat is beating. I can kind of feel it in my stomach, or my jaw is really tense. What could that mean? And I try now to approach that with a lot of curiosity rather than, oh shoot, I can't handle how overstimulating this is, or I can't handle how intense this feeling is. Let me restrict my food or skip lunch because I'm not connected to my appetite. Instead, I'm able to think, okay, whoo, my shoulders are tight, my breath is short. Can I take a deep breath right now? Can I allow my shoulders to release? And can I ask myself, what do I need? Before my MO was deprivation to reduce sensation. Now I take it as a sign, I take it as a clue. Something is off. What do I need? Those are the conversations I at least try to have. I'm not perfect. But if I can pay attention to my body first and use that as a guide, my body is always going to know what I need better than any app that I use or any plan that I can come up with, any problem that I can solve. If I really tune into the wisdom of my body, which yes, this might sound a little woo-woo. She knows best, she knows what I need. And if I can honor that, and that's the tricky part, then I am able to maintain equilibrium. I don't think I would have learned that lesson the way that I did, as viscerally as I did if I hadn't gone through eating disorder recovery and experienced the absolute overwhelm of eliminating behaviors and feeling all of that rise up, feeling all of the sensation rise up, and then having to learn a real system to manage that. That's somatic work, not easy to do. Piggybacking, if you will, off of that learning, another real hard pill to swallow for me, and this is still a hard one, is planning does not always work. This lesson rocked my entire world because up until the point that my eating disorder was at its worst, planning felt like it had really worked for me. I was a very driven child, no surprise. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, or I thought I did, from the time that I was maybe eight years old. I had a whole plan laid out. I knew exactly how things were gonna go, where I was gonna live, what career I was gonna go down. I even planned out, oh, this is the Broadway show that I'll make my debut in. And then once I get experience from that show, then I'll be able to join an original Broadway cast of whatever. It was all formulated in my mind of how things were going to go. And for the most part, everything went according to plan until it didn't. And so this lesson was really hard for me to learn. That it's not as simple as study for the test, learn the material, take the test, get 100%. I thought that's the way that the world worked because that's the way the world had worked so far. Or practice really hard, perfect your triple pirouette, get the appropriate degree, move to New York City, thrive on Broadway. No, no, it is so not that simple. But that's what I thought would happen in my lifetime. And part of this was a powerful belief system that I held because I really thought if I just had everything planned and everything fully thought through, then I could achieve anything that I wanted to. I didn't have the foresight to realize you can plan to a point, and then circumstances will inevitably arise that make that outcome more difficult, if not impossible. There are some things that you just cannot assert control over and affect change upon. While my plan for my life had gone essentially exactly as I planned it to, what I didn't plan for was how miserable I was going to be. I really thought that A plus B equals C, and that's how you are happy. And I did all the things on the list and I wasn't happy. And that's what really shook me. And this is where the eating disorder came in as well. Because when that didn't work out, I had to plan something else. I had to use that muscle in a different way so that I could still feel like I was doing something right, like my worldview hadn't just been totally shattered. One thing that's really fun about being a human is this concept called cognitive dissonance. And you might see this a lot in our world right now. When you have a really strong belief or a worldview that you've had for a very long time, it is deeply ingrained, and then you're presented with information that contradicts it or calls it into question. We can do one of two things. One, the adaptive thing would be to integrate that new information and change your belief. What tends to happen for most of us is that is too much to handle. You believe something your entire life, and then you have an experience or you gain information that throws that belief into question. And changing your belief on that would mean changing your whole identity, or your whole entire life, whatever you believe to be true forever. That's a lot. That's a lot emotionally, and it's a lot of mental work. And so most of us don't do that. Instead, we say, no, I'm shutting that down and I'm gonna double down on the thing that I believe. And that's what the eating disorder was for me. I could not really let in the reality that this life that I'd planned for myself wasn't actually what I wanted. And so instead, I said, No, no, it is. I'm not gonna pay attention to that. I'm gonna go count my calories. And C, this does work. When I eat X amount, I lose X amount of weight, and then that's the result, and that's the success. And C, A plus B does equal C. I was trying to prove to myself that it still was true. Again, none of these things that I'm saying right now were conscious to me at the time. I've only put these pieces together through lots of therapy and reflection, but I know now that is for sure what was happening in my unconscious. I didn't want to see or face or believe that all this work that I'd put into this career, all this work that I'd put into planning this life was gonna go out the window. That, I don't know, could not look at that. It was a lot easier to say, let me find another source that proves that my ideology is correct. Planning my food and my exercise and trying to lose as much weight as I could, that was something that I thought was gonna prove differently and make me feel a little bit more secure in the belief system that I had always already upheld. But planning does not always work. And eventually I hit that threshold with the eating disorder too, where wasn't this supposed to make me happy too? Started to become the question. And wasn't this supposed to be the thing that made me feel better after losing however much weight or controlling my food the most that I possibly could? When was that gonna pay off? It did in little bits and spurts, but it was never lasting. And so, once again, existential crisis. I planned for this to work, I planned for this to bring me happiness, it didn't. And so now what? I really had to learn. You can plan, you can organize, but we have to sit with an acceptance of there are things beyond our control. There are things that we have yet to learn. We will always be learning, and no amount of planning can save you from the reality of being a human being, which is a harsh reality. I really don't think anyone makes it out of this life unscathed. And the sooner that we can accept that, the sooner we can let go of the shame around when things don't go to plan and the fear that drives the need to control it. I also learned here that I am allowed to change my mind. I'm a Taurus, which is relevant because Tauruses are notoriously very stubborn, very set in their ways, which I always thought was a cool trait. That when I believed something, I believed it to the very end. When I wanted something, I was stubborn in that desire. But the problem is it's incredibly appropriate to change your mind about things. It was very hard for me to let go of the idea that I didn't want what I always thought that I wanted, and I could change my mind about what I wanted without that meaning I had failed. I had not failed, in fact. I had just realized that what I thought was supposed to make me happy actually never was going to. Looking back on it now, I see that not as a failure, but as a really mature truth to come to at that age. But there's something that felt really wrong about changing my mind. It felt ambivalent or inconsistent, and I never wanted to be seen as those things. I wanted to be seen as driven and successful. And so to say, actually, never mind, I don't know what I want to do was deeply terrifying. Now in my life, I change my mind all the time. And it feels so good to do that. When I first started my career as a therapist, for example, I thought that I really wanted to work in treatment long term, changed my mind about that. As much as I loved working in higher levels of care, I realized other parts of my life were very important as well. And having a family and growing a family required a certain degree of flexibility that job wasn't going to be able to give me. So I changed my mind, went into private practice. I, when I First, I started building my private practice. I thought that I wanted to be this group practice owner and have 10 therapists working for me, and we were going to be this powerhouse eating disorder care center. I realized actually, no, I'm pretty introverted, and I've always thought that I was somebody that could really lead a team. And maybe I can do that, but I don't really enjoy doing that. So I have one amazing therapist that works with me, and she's incredible, and I'm happy with that. I don't need to hire anyone else. I'm cool. I actually find a lot more enjoyment sitting here with myself and talking to all of you and funneling my energy into that rather than leading a big old team. Changed my mind. And then there's this other part of me that knows maybe someday I'm not going to want to do this anymore. What I'm doing right now. Maybe someday I'm going to not want to be a therapist anymore. Maybe someday I'm going to want to do something entirely different. And I'm okay with that now. I actually feel like that's so liberating. For some reason it felt so wrong. But what used to feel like losing control, changing my mind, choosing a different course, now feels like actual control and autonomy and freedom because it's honoring what I actually want. And instead of believing that no matter what I plan, I will be successful at that plan because I have such certainty and control and discipline, I now believe I can trust myself to lead from intuition. I have the drive to back it up, but I'm open to my life changing, my world changing, my beliefs changing, and my ideas of what I want changing too. And I rely on myself now to determine what's right and what's wrong for me versus some plan that I made when I was eight years old. This is an interesting one that I wrote down, this next thing that I learned. I learned that you can't outsmart your emotions. I see this all the time, not just in reflecting on myself, but with my clients. I have so many amazing clients, and I really believe this. I defend this belief to anyone. I think some of the most intelligent people are prone to eating disorders. And any person that's ever sat in my office, I'm usually blown away by just how smart and insightful and self-aware everyone is, and also the struggle with an eating disorder being so severe. I say this because we have the tendency to we could sit all day long and unpack this is why I have an eating disorder. And A leads to B, this is the trauma that it stemmed from, and this is the situation that really set things off. And I know that logically X, Y, and Z is true, but I still keep doing these behaviors because it makes me feel safe. And that safety is required because I didn't get these needs met as a child. You all could wax poetic about this stuff intellectually. And I was the same. Where, you know, when we really started unpacking things, I was like, yeah, this all makes sense. It's perfect storm. I get it. I get why this happened to me. But if you'll recall from the episode when I was reading my journals from Residential, it took me a really long time to actually open up and cry in therapy because that's what I was doing. I was trying to place my eating disorder in a really clean narrative that made sense so that I could figure out how to get out of it and fix it and problem solve it. But I was missing a huge component, which is what was going on for me emotionally. There was no way that I was going to be able to outsmart the eating disorder without feeling through and dealing with the underpinnings. So much of my eating disorder was an effort to outsmart my feelings, was an effort to distract or paint a different picture, reframe even situations that I was in. But no matter what I did, my feelings were gonna come out in some way. I would go through these periods of time when I was deep in the disorder where I would be feeling really good about things, like that golden age of I'm doing it, I'm doing it all right, and everything's fine and everything's good and everything's perfect. It was never fine and good and perfect because it would reach a certain point where something would happen and I would just completely unravel. And depression would overtake me and anxiety would be immense, and then I would do my best to pick myself up, brush myself off, and get right back to the disorder to help me manage through it. But I could never keep those emotions down fully or sustainably. They came up at some point. And I honestly thank God for that because if the eating disorder stayed feeling really good most of the time, I don't know if I would have ever sought help or sought treatment. But if you are trying to recover and you're bypassing the emotions and you are trying to just really mechanically get through it, there's a time and a place for that, 100%. But I also think it's incredibly important to get a handle and an understanding on what you're really feeling and release it. Feelings aren't meant to be fixed, they're not problems to be solved, they're signals. And that's why I say you can't outsmart your feelings. There's no trick that you need to learn to feel differently. Feelings are meant to be felt. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And sometimes they're really hard to deal with, sometimes they're intolerable. They feel like you can't survive it. It's that intense. But feelings never last forever. And the only real way to move out of that feeling is to move through that feeling. And I know this is all really ambiguous, but I hope that you understand what I mean. I don't know if you've ever had a really good cry and really let it out. And at the end, you're like so exhausted, but it feels like a weight has lifted. That is kind of what I mean. And that's not something that I let myself do, I think, for the longest time when I had an eating disorder, that I really had to learn how to consistently do in my recovery so that I understood better how to take care of myself. That's the real question. We don't want to outsmart our feelings, we want to learn how to care for them. And so I thank my eating disorder for forcing me into that lesson. This next one is a double-edged sword. I learned through my eating disorder just how powerful my brain is. Our brains are so powerful that they can convince us and rewire themselves to make the unsafe feel safe, to make the safe feel dangerous, to actively work against our biology, and to persist and survive through extreme circumstances that we put ourselves under. When I think about how powerful my brain had to be to convince myself to continue doing the things that I was doing, it's really mind-boggling and super scary and damaging and harmful in the context of an eating disorder. However, in my life now, I can recognize that my brain is still powerful in those ways. And if I channel it to the proper source, to something that is supportive, it can actually be amazing and also very adaptive, like a true survival mechanism. I think about certain things that have gone through in my life since the eating disorder that have completely flipped my world upside down. I never thought that I was going to be able to get through it. In the moment it was like life-altering, earth-shattering things that a week after it had happened, it was just my life now. And you learn to adapt and you learn to persist and you learn to just move through and meet yourself where you are. And I accredited to how powerful my brain is and how resilient my brain is, which I don't think I realized about myself until I went through something like an eating disorder. With how powerful our brains can be, we see how wild it is, the things that we can convince ourselves are true when we're in a disorder. We can also use that same power in the opposite way. We can convince ourselves that things are true that would actually be really helpful for us. We can convince ourselves of the opposite things that the eating disorder convinces us of. It just takes a lot of work. But your brain has the power and the capacity to do that. We know that for sure, knowing that you've been through a struggle like this. Another thing I can compare this to is the various moments in my life that I've gone through existential crises where I've felt like there's no meaning to the world and there's no meaning of life, and like, why are we all even here? And that's taken me down such a dark rabbit hole. At this point now, I can still ask myself those questions. What is the meaning of life? Why are we all here? What is the point of waking up every day? Questions that sound really maybe a bit dark, but I can ask them now from a place of curiosity and openness, and it actually gives me energy versus makes me terrified. And that I accredited to how powerful reframing in the brain can be and how powerful my own brain can be. That I can ask myself the same questions and they can take on different meanings depending on the way that my brain processes it. Now, when I ask myself, what's the meaning of life? I'm like, I really wonder. Like, I really wonder. There has to be something, right? We're all not just here by accident, right? That would be crazy. And if that was the case, if we were all just here by accident, what? That's insane. That I can take on now versus there's no meaning to life. So what is even the point of being here? I might as well not be here anymore. That's where it kind of used to go before. And now I'm able to use that same line of logic to come to a completely different conclusion. Very powerful stuff. But the same powerful brain that drove the eating disorder can drive other things that can make your life a whole lot better. This last one dawned on me more recently. In my eating disorder, I felt that the most powerful motivating factor was really self-criticism, judgment, and self-hate. Not to sound hyperbolic, but those were really the things that drove a lot of my behaviors. If I felt bad about myself, if I made myself feel guilty, if I criticized my body, then what did I do with that? I used it as motivation, I used it as fuel to really deepen my disordered behaviors. And that got out of control pretty quick, obviously. I really thought that the way to succeed was hypercriticism, looking at your faults, looking at them dead in the face, and saying, You suck, try to suck less. This was not just true in my eating disorder, but also how I dealt with getting grades. When I would get even a couple things wrong on a test, I would think, What is wrong with you? Why did you miss that? I would berate myself into studying harder the next time. Or in a dance class, if I wasn't picking up on the choreography, I wasn't in there thinking to myself, like, it's okay, Chloe, one more try. I was thinking, like, oh my freaking gosh, you better do this right. Use that as motivation to fuel myself. If I ever didn't get the part that I wanted in a show, I beat myself up like crazy for it and then said, I have to just do better. I wasn't good enough, I have to do better. And it wasn't from a positive place of better luck next time, work hard and you can do it. It was like, you are the worst. Get it together. You're never gonna get what you want if you don't work hard. And I learned that can actually take you pretty far. It did take me pretty far in my personal life, in my professional life, driving motivation from criticism took me pretty far. But there will always be a limit. If you are not on your team, if you are working against yourself, if you're the one tearing yourself down, there's gonna come a point where you crash. There's gonna come a point where you succumb to how horrible it feels to be carrying all of that self-hate. And you realize, no matter how much you try to correct it, that it's never ever gonna be enough. I first learned about the concept of self-compassion when I was, I first really dove into the concept of self-compassion when I was in college doing an internship. I read Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff, and there was something that she compared it to. There's an example that she used in the book, I believe, that kind of turned this idea on its head because I really thought, if I'm not mean to myself, how am I gonna achieve what I want? If I don't criticize myself, then I'm gonna have no motivation to change anything. I'm just gonna be fine with how I am. I'm gonna be content. I'm never gonna achieve anything, I'm never gonna be successful. She paints this picture of a little boy who comes home with a bad grade on a math test. And in one example, his father responds with anger, saying, Why did you get this grade? You're stupid, you should have worked harder, you're a disappointment to me. And what happens to that little boy? He feels really sad and awful. And he's gonna try next time, but he has this belief now that he's stupid and a disappointment. And now he's going through the world with that belief and it's coloring his choices. He's thinking, why should I even apply myself? It's if I'm stupid and a disappointment, anyways. It actually doesn't really help to fuel him all that much. Maybe a little bit, but there comes a point where his self-belief is just trash, and so he's not going to be able to motivate himself further. Versus the second example, little boy comes home, bad grade on a test. Dad says, Okay, that's not ideal. What happened? And they have a conversation about what happened. How did you study? Was the test what you expected it to be? Do you feel like you were paying attention to the material? Look, it's okay. Everybody messes up sometimes. People get bad grades on tests. I know you're really smart. Let's figure out how to do it differently next time. Then that little boy feels number one, supported, number two, seen, human. Shame is reduced, and he's thinking, okay, I'm not bad and defective. Maybe the way I approached this didn't work. Let me think of a different way to approach it. I know I can do it. That type of motivation is gonna take you so much further than self-hate ever will. Maybe it doesn't fill you with the same fire that self-hate does or urgency that self-hate does, but one is gonna crush you eventually and the other one's gonna sustain you. And that's something I really learned from my eating disorder because the amount of self-hate that I was carrying around, yes, it took me far in pursuing the goals of my disorder, but it also was gonna crush me and kill me. There came a point at which I realized I'm never gonna get what this eating disorder is promising me. I need to find a different way to pursue my goals that doesn't require harming myself in the process. It took a long time for me to trust that I could motivate myself from a place of worth and valuing my skills and compassionate assessment versus judgment and criticism. It took a long time for me to trust that, but now I really believe it to my core. And all that I do, I try to evaluate and incorporate feedback, but what I really try to remind myself is that I am always doing my best. And sometimes outcomes aren't going to be what I want them to be. That doesn't mean that I'm an unworthy person, which is what I would tell myself before. It means that I'm a human. And if this is something that I really want, let's reevaluate, let's figure out a different way forward, let's refocus on what the goal is. How do I want to feel? I'm asking myself questions that actually get my wheels turning in a way that energizes me versus making me feel like a total screw up and why should I even try? So again, these are all broader life themes. And I really find it interesting that so much of an eating disorder is a microcosm for problems or challenges that we face in so many different other areas of our life. Food and body boils it down to something that looks very specific. But when we really unpack the themes that are there, they show up all over the place. And so there really is a lot that you can learn from healing your relationship with food and body that has nothing to do with food and body, and everything to do with your personhood and your life and your goals and your dreams and your relationships. There's so much more to mine there. And a lot of these lessons, as I said, I don't know how I would have come across them if I hadn't gone through the pressure cooker of having an eating disorder and doing intensive therapy and recovering. So for that, I am pretty grateful. And today was a good reminder for me too, as I sat down and thought about this of those lessons and has brought up some hopefulness in how I can realign to those concepts and learnings more closely in my day-to-day. Thank you all for listening. As always, I so appreciate you being here. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would be so grateful for a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. If you're here on YouTube, hit subscribe, thumbs up. That really helps get this message out to more people that need to hear it. And again, if you are struggling this summer, you're so not alone. It is a rough time, it's a rough year to be in recovery, it's a rough season to be in recovery. But please eat your food. I will be eating mine, and we will talk next week. Bye.