It is time to wake up and start critically thinking about the idea that weight equals recovery.
One of the most important relationships you will have in your life, will be the one you have with your body.
In over 30 years of practice, we have never weighed a single person that walks through our doors, and yet there have still been many successful recoveries. You don’t need a scales to recover. You need blood tests, and actual science, experiences, not an outdated approach that shames many people by reducing them to a mere number on a scales.
Being weighed doesn’t help a person to recover either. What really helps is inviting people to learn and to explore how to respect their body’s needs, and how to successfully eliminate the obstacles that have been getting in the way of that up until now. What helps is learn how to equip people with the knowledge of what freedom is, and what is possible with the powerful union that comes from reconnecting with our bodies.
The more we understand recovery from ED, the less we talk about weight.
To help people recover, you do not need scales; you need understanding. You need to know what freedom is and become a navigator and fellow traveller in a person’s journey to freedom. Part of the recovery journey is learning how to look after your health. People learn to think differently about their bodies, how to use them, what their bodies need, and how to nourish and energize them.
Some people lose weight, and some restore muscle. People’s bodies return to the size nature intended. The body doesn’t want to be underweight or overweight; the body just wants to be in homeostasis. Learning to trust and listen to our bodies and their needs is a crucial part of recovery. Being weighed does the opposite. A person with ED becomes more upset about their size, and their fear increases. The ED part loves being weighed, but that is not the real person.
Telling a person with ED that they need to lose or gain weight is insulting and unhelpful. Their weight and size only indicate how they think about themselves and their bodies. Going for ten-minute consultations, being weighed, and being told: “You are doing well; your weight went up,” or “You need to improve; your weight dropped,” is a joke. Many teenagers just love being weighed and hearing that their weight dropped.
I know it is a medical guideline to be weighed when you suffer from ED. But just because something is a medical guideline doesn’t mean it is helpful. It’s time for a change. It is very sad how outdated ED treatments still are.
Who do we weigh people for? Ourselves, to have something to measure, or for the benefit of the person suffering from ED? Definitely not the latter.
Where do these guidelines come from?
BMI – Body Mass Index
A measure created in the 1830s by Lambert Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician and astronomer. We need to remind ourselves that BMI is very old and non-medical. Quetelet was curious and wanted to work out the ideal weight of an average man, “l’homme moyen,” as he called it. All the measurements were done on European men with no mention of health.
In the 1970s, American physiologist Ancel Keys started to promote Quetelet’s Index, and it became very popular, especially with insurance companies. Using BMI in ED recovery does more harm than good.
Ideal Body Weight charts are not as authoritative as the Ten Commandments. We must learn to think more critically about these charts and challenge whether they are useful or were just created for economic purposes. For example, in 1942, Louis Dublin, a statistician at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, grouped four million insured people into categories based on their height and weight. He interpreted these data to say that weight gain was associated with a risk of mortality. He was the most influential person in the last century to change people’s, including medical practitioners’, attitudes towards weight. He promoted the concept of average weight, ideal weight, and that it is not okay to gain weight with age.
In 1959, 26 other insurance companies also agreed to these charts. This life insurance company claimed that one person was healthier than another based on a weight that was taken once in their lifetime, only when they bought their policy. In 1983, these tables needed to be revised again, making them heavier than the 1942 tables because, in general, heavier people live longer today.
Experts have criticized the validity of these tables for several reasons:
Insured people tend to be healthier than uninsured people.
Frame size was never consistently measured.
The people included were predominantly white and middle-class.
People need to be medically looked after, regularly checked, and everyone in recovery needs to work with a medical practitioner. Health is not a number on a scale. There are many other, more helpful ways to monitor people’s health than scales. Yes, training in medical colleges in this area is needed, and hopefully, soon it will change.
When you have a lot of experience working with people who want to recover and be free of these coping mechanisms, you learn a lot. You do not need to measure or weigh people to see how they are doing. Changing a person’s attitude to life and learning the language of freedom https://www.marinotherapycentre.com/weekly-wisdom-recovery-as-a-new-language/ is an indicator based on experience, not just some outdated experiment used by insurance companies.
Weight is a heavy word. We live in a weight-obsessed culture.
It’s time to think about the next generation. Do we want to leave a legacy of measuring and weighing people or a legacy of valuing and enjoying our bodies? Which one would be healthier?
The number of people who believe that losing weight will make them happier is increasing, but that is an economically driven myth. This theory never achieves a permanent solution. The dieting industry is the only industry that grows despite having a 98% failure rate. The answer is not our weight but our attitude toward our bodies. Our relationship with our body is one of the most important relationships we will ever have. We respect our cars more than our bodies. Our bodies need to be listened to and have a voice.
As we can see, there is a lot of economically driven information pushed on us. Maybe it is time to start questioning if that is really healthy. People often ask why eating distress/eating disorders are on the rise. Many factors contribute to these conditions, but one of the biggest is the weight obsession pushed on us by commercialism. Every day we are exposed to about 3000 advertisements, with about 80% telling us that if we weighed less, we would be happier. That is a lot of pressure. We live very busy lives and do not have time to question. We absorb and often become more brainwashed and influenced than we realize. When a person is overweight or underweight, the mindset can be the same. Both groups feel not good enough.
Weight obsession can bring severe consequences, and the earlier we teach children to control their bodies instead of looking after and listening to them, the more damage is caused.
Recent reports find that tens of thousands of school children are on potentially dangerous diets. I would ask: Could this be brought about by the system highlighting the “good/bad food” idea?
Children are born with natural reflexes to eat when hungry and stop when full. The constant messages regarding “good/bad food” and the fear of obesity create a population afraid to nourish itself. For our children’s safety and so they can enjoy their childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, proper and different information is urgently required. Continued focus on symptoms only stokes an already raging fire.
Our children need to feel secure in their bodies and connected with them. That could be the best prevention for developing ED.
Maybe it is time to stop and start to learn that happiness doesn’t come from the weight of our bodies, but from the way we see ourselves as people, as valuable human beings.
We are more than our weight…
For more effective strategies to enhance your recovery process visit our Calling It Out https://callingitout1.substack.com
