It’s time to take down the second biggest obstacle to long lasting recovery from bulimia or binge eating:
Fear of Failing (again!)
“I’d be mortified if this was just another thing that didn’t work”
I hear this, or a version of this all the time.
I also hear, “I’m a failed anorexic”
If fear of gaining weight is the primary block to recovery, then feeling like a failure, and worrying that whatever you try won’t work, is a close second.
The fact that you watched my webinar with the title, ‘How To Beat Bulimia For Good (Even If You’ve Tried Everything And Nothing Has Worked)’ means that there’s a solid chance that you have no shortage of desire to recover, but you’re nervous to try because you can’t bear to have your hopes dashed yet again!
If you’ve tried everything that you can think of, to no avail, then I’d bet that you are not a failure, so much as you have tried things that were never going to work.
In particular:
1. Flawed Advice From Health Professionals Who You Turned To For Help.
There are plenty of well meaning doctors, therapists and nutritionists out there, but they …
– Don’t really understand bulimia and often make suggestions that don’t work. Or worse, who make suggestions that actively reinforce the restrict-binge-purge cycle! (I have literally had a Binge Eating Disorder client tell me that her doctor’s advice was to take laxatives!!)
– Don’t have lived experience and as such can’t really understand what you’re experiencing mentally and physically, and might over simplify the solution.
– May suffer from ‘disordered eating’ too – just not to the same degree. Many doctors, therapists and nutritionists also numb their emotions with food; calorie count; exercise to ‘burn off’ last night’s dinner; and drink ‘herbal’ (ahem, laxative) teas. Just not to the point at which they feel that they have a serious problem.
– Operate from a flawed model or strategy that has limited long term success.
But long before you approached them for help you were let down by a far bigger and more sinister system that lead you to believe that YOU were a failure:
2. The Weight Loss Industry
Before you ‘failed’ at bulimia recovery I’d bet you thought that you’d ‘failed’ at dieting too?
I’m here to tell you that you can safely let go of feeling like YOU failed at dieting because the trillion dollar weight loss industry has a piddly 2-5% success rate!!!
Yep. You read that right.
Weight loss programs have a teeny tiny chance of working long term.
With a failure rate so high it’s a miracle that there’s a weight loss industry at all, right?!!
And yet it’s BIG business.
The Weight Loss Industry operates on 3 myths that are so compelling that they feel like truth:
1. Calories in / Calories Out.
2. You can’t trust your body.
3. This diet & exercise plan works – it’s just that YOU don’t have enough will power.
Watch the video below as I deep dive this topic and not only bust these 3 Weight Loss Industry Myths, but also explain how the repeated experiences of failure has dramatically impacted your ability to recover.
https://www.bulimiafreedom.com/fearoffailure
It’s time to free yourself of the crippling loss of confidence (or worse, hope) that comes from believing that you have failed repeatedly, when in fact you were failed by flawed advice and strategies that don’t work.
It’s time to wipe the failure slate clean and start fresh.
And believe it or not, it is possible to ‘guarantee’ recovery.
Yep. Guarantee it.
I’ll post a video tomorrow to discuss the 6 principles that you can adopt to ensure that this time you WILL succeed.
To Your Success,
Helen “Reject Diet Culture” Bennett
p.s. In the BFF group this week I asked “What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received with regards to ED recovery?” and you wouldn’t believe some of the responses!! With advice like that out there…. it’s hardly surprising that there’s a high bulimia recovery “failure” rate.
Join the BFFs (The Bulimia Freedom Fighters) on Facebook.
Helen Bennett 