Stop Trying to Micro-Manage Weight Restoration
Has that complex ambivalence around getting well, meant that you’re trying to exert your control over your body – while still telling yourself you’re intent on recovery freedom?
If you’ve ever been down this path, you’ll know it’s a recipe for despair and disaster.
We enter a pointless cycle of recognising we need to be repairing our bodies with a greater intake, but feeling if we ‘take the handbrake off’, we’ll go into weight-gain freefall and that our body will suddenly double in size as we sleep.
Time and again, our inbox is flooded with the anxieties and issues around this very point.
“….I’m eating the same amount but all of a sudden my weight seems to be going up really quickly…”
“…I haven’t even begun fully responding to the level of hunger I have, but my weight gain is noticeable and it’s stressing me out to the point I don’t want to continue…”
“…I could cope with the weight gain going to certain places on my body if I could choose, but right now, I seem to have the most awful protruding stomach and I can’t bear it…”
“…Nothing makes sense about my weight gain. Some weeks I feel I’ve eaten less than I did the one before, but when my GP weighs me I discover I’ve put on more. It just makes me angry and like I want to return to my behaviours…”
The truth is, the harm we’ve done to our metabolism, and the desperation with which our body’s internal factory workers wants us to get well again, means there’s no chance of you micro managing your way back to full recovery, because your body is going to do what it wants to do.
By this, we mean, it’s become ‘desperate’ to repair your vital organs, keep you out of the famine state, and to rejuvenate every cell of your being…so at the slightest chance of more intake, at least for the short term, it’s going to hold on to that and put it to work.
Yes, put simply, for a short period, it will probably ‘grab on to’ any extra calories in ways we could not have really predicted.
In time, of course, as night follows day, your body begins to learn that you’re no longer going to keep it in a state of famine, and that food is freely available, and that it is not being forced to remain in a regime of malnutrition.
When it learns this message – which is does only when, day on day, you continue to feed it and rest it and answer your hunger cues – it understands and embraces that it no longer needs to ‘cling on’ to every morsel of food for the sake of vital repair.
Instead, it allows the normalisation of metabolism to take place.
Instead, it increases the rate at which you are burning through any fuel you consume.
And, if you can bear with it, you’ll soon find yourself in a situation where you now have the ability to eat far more, with a racing metabolism, and are not gaining weight at anything like the level you were when you first began refeeding.
But of course, it takes patience.
It takes patience and a whole lot of persistence.
This is why weight restoration is so tough on how we mentally feel about recovery.
Be honest.
You probably want to see any weight restoration only becoming evident on your boobs, your pecs, or perhaps a shapely backside.
Well – tough.
It really isn’t that straightforward, and you’re going to have to accept that micromanaging weight restoration is not something which works….so why the heck worry about it?
Instead, you’ve got to trust that glorious wonderful body of yours, to do its thing and get you well….and to subsequently leave you with that beautiful body you were always meant to have.
- Oct 2020
