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By Courtney Levy Daniels, LMHC  Black and white thinking leads you to believe that something is either ALL good or ALL bad, ALL right or ALL wrong. Through the lens of an eating disorder, it can manifest like this: “I had a bite of cake, so my diet is ruined. I may as well eat the whole cake and be ‘good’ tomorrow.” Or how about, “I didn’t follow my meal plan completely, so I am a failure and I will never recover.” Sound familiar? The thing is, this type of thinking can be functional. I mean, why would we think this way if it wasn’t? It can give us a feeling of control by placing things neatly into categories, and serve as a way to help us make sense of the world. However, the downside is that when we limit our thinking to dichotomies, it keeps us from seeing nuances. It keeps us from experiencing the full spectrum of what life has to offer. For example, if we think of the weather as merely “hot” and “cold,” we’re not accounting for those perfect beach days - warm, sunny, and just the right amount of cloud cover to offer a few seconds of shade here and there. And let’s not forget those crisp fall days - the ones where the air is cool enough for a cozy beanie and a pumpkin spice latte, but not chilly enough to warrant gloves. If you ask me, it’s those days in between “hot” and “cold” that are the best ones! So while it may make you feel safe to think in “all-or-nothing” terms, you’re also narrowing your view and limiting your experiences. So how do we expand our black and white thinking to include color? Some tips: 1. Increase awareness:
2. Actively challenge the thoughts:
Instead of: “I didn’t follow my meal plan completely, so I am a failure and I will never recover” Try: “I didn’t make as many recovery-oriented choices as I would have liked to. Tomorrow is a new opportunity to make decisions that are in line with my values” 3. Practice self-compassion:
Reminder: This is not EASY! It takes practice, practice, practice. But with time, it will come more naturally and help you live a much more vibrant life. The Eating Disorder Center is a premier outpatient eating disorder therapy center founded by Jennifer Rollin. We specialize in helping teens and adults struggling with anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia, OSFED, and body image issues. We provide eating disorder therapy in Rockville, MD, easily accessible to individuals in Potomac, North Potomac, Bethesda, Olney, Silver Spring, Germantown, and Washington D.C. We also offer eating disorder therapy virtually throughout California and New York (NYC) serving those in cities including Palo Alto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Woodland Hills, San Jose, and Beverly Hills. We provide eating disorder recovery coaching via Zoom to people worldwide. Connect with us through our website at www.theeatingdisordercenter.com
By Jennifer Rollin, MSW, LCSW-C, Eating Disorder Therapist  On a regular basis, we are inundated with unhealthy messages about exercise. From fitspo on Instagram and influencers showing off their 6-packs to messages about ‘no days off’-disordered attitudes towards exercise are everywhere. Compulsive exercise (i.e. exercise addiction) is a socially acceptable prison cell. I’ve been there and I remember feeling so incredibly trapped-yet unable to stop my rigid exercise routine. The following are a few tips for recovering from compulsive exercise in an exercise obsessed world. 1. Surround yourself with pro-recovery, body-positive content & work to eliminate fitspo.When I was trapped by an exercise compulsion, I remember following fitspo influencers on social media. They talked about having a healthy relationship to movement-but their feeds were full of their chiseled muscles and orthorexic looking chicken bowls. I didn’t realize how much these accounts impacted me until I began recovery and unfollowed them. Step 1: is to think about the areas in your life that reinforce your unhealthy attitudes towards exercise and then cut out/set boundaries with what you can. So this means not only unfollowing social media accounts that cause you to feel guilty for not working out (yesss this includes that friend or family member constantly posting about their workouts)-but also setting boundaries or eliminating things in real life that trigger negative thoughts about your body and exercise compulsion. Then, it’s important to add in accounts that promote body diversity (i.e. people of all different shapes and sizes) and think about what you can start to surround yourself with in your life that promotes healthier messages i.e. podcasts (I’m looking at you Food Psych!), books, articles, friends, and hobbies that have nothing to do with your body or exercise. 2. Notice the stories that you are telling yourself around exercise It’s also important to start to be mindful of the stories that you are telling yourself around exercise. The next step is to write down some of your unhealthy thoughts about exercise and then write back to them with more neutral and/or positive thoughts. Rather than trying to determine if the thought is true, try asking this: is the thought helpful or unhelpful in terms of getting you in the direction of a life aligned with your true-life values? Unhelpful Thought: ‘I’m so lazy for not exercising today. This is a slippery slope to never moving again.’ Helpful Thought: Not exercising today is actually way harder for you. So, this is something to be proud of in terms of helping you to recover. It’s the opposite of lazy. Just because you took a day off doesn’t mean that you will never move again. That’s super black and white-and even if all you did was activities in your daily life (rather than a formal exercise routine) that would be ok too. It’s important to practice dialoguing back and forth-and to coach yourself in the moment by reframing your thoughts as much as possible. It’s also useful to remind yourself that ‘more exercise’ isn’t always healthier (in fact it can be quite unhealthy in certain conditions) and that sometimes the healthiest choice for your body and mind is rest. Ultimately, exercise is a stressor on the body and if you are anxious about fitting in exercise etc it raises cortisol (the stress hormone)-which is also not healthy. 3. Identify the function of your compulsive exerciseOne good exercise is to make a DBT pro/con list of continuing to engage in compulsive exercise. You list out all the ‘pros’ and all the ‘cons’ and then next to each one write whether it is short term or long term-and then tally them out at the end. Compulsive exercise is serving a function in your life (i.e. anxiety reduction) and it’s important to identify the purposes that it is serving for you and more values-aligning ways that you can get any of the valid and adaptive needs met. For example, if compulsive exercise feels like it’s helping with your anxiety (spoiler alert, it decreases anxiety in the short term but increases it in the long-term and makes you more reliant on the behavior), think about other coping strategies that you could use for anxiety i.e. watching a distracting TV show, aromatherapy, playing with dogs, or spending time with a supportive friend. 4. Try a little ‘experiment. I think it’s helpful when making behavioral changes to say it’s going to be just an ‘experiment’ for that week. This helps to zoom out from the big picture (i.e. prediction of future doom and gloom) which your ED loves to jump to when you are trying to make scary changes. I remember the first rest day that I took since my eating disorder began-vividly. At the time, I felt unable to take a day off from exercise and my dietitian had challenged me to take a rest day. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin-like I wanted to escape from the situation. I also felt intense guilt around eating. But the thing is, with support from my treatment team-I was able to do it. Even though the first time felt truly awful-it got easier and easier. Then, I was able to make other changes to help myself to find freedom from compulsively exercising. Challenge yourself to shave 10 min off your routine, take a rest day, take a period off all-together (if you can)-whatever step feels like the best place to start. I promise, your body, mind, and soul will eventually thank you. The Bottom LineYour obituary won’t read she was so dedicated to the treadmill, I remember her for her six-pack, and I appreciate that her legs were really toned. It will focus on your relationships, how you pursued your passions, the kind of person that you were, and the difference that you made in this world. I don’t want you to look back and regret moments and memories that slipped away or were colored by compulsive exercise. Full freedom from compulsive exercise is 100 percent possible and so worth it. The Eating Disorder Center is a premier outpatient eating disorder therapy center founded by Jennifer Rollin. We specialize in helping teens and adults struggling with anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia, OSFED, and body image issues. We provide eating disorder therapy in Rockville, MD, easily accessible to individuals in Potomac, North Potomac, Bethesda, Olney, Silver Spring, Germantown, and Washington D.C. We also offer eating disorder therapy virtually throughout California and New York (NYC) serving those in cities including Palo Alto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Woodland Hills, San Jose, and Beverly Hills. We provide eating disorder recovery coaching via Zoom to people worldwide. Connect with us through our website at www.theeatingdisordercenter.com
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