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Key points
- Appetite and action need reconnecting in recovery, and eating long-avoided foods like meat is one way to help it happen.
- The speed/comfort tradeoff in recovery is hard to negotiate. Meat may offer a useful way to increase speed (with the attendant discomfort).
- Attending to appetite should begin within a meal plan, which may also involve encouraging appetites (e.g. for meat) that haven’t yet emerged.
In the previous part of this series, I argued for the importance of posing the uneasy question, "just how much do I care about recovering?". This part tackles another of the biggest recovery questions: How do I need to be eating to make recovery happen? The question of whether or not to eat animal products is a subset of this, and as with all the other subsets, one way of answering it is to ask what your appetite says. This may feel surreally weird and/or hard, but it will need to happen at some point in the process.
In the simplest sense, acting to start recovery means acknowledging that you have appetites that anorexia is preventing you from sating. The central case is acknowledging physical hunger for specific foods you haven’t eaten for a long time, by eating them. This is bound to involve unease. It may also involve delight.
For me, a tentative desire for meat heralded the start of my final recovery effort. Early in 2008, before I started recovery in July, I noticed that I was finding the smell of cooking meat more interesting and attractive. I asked my mother and stepfather whether they’d be willing to buy steaks for themselves so I could have a taste. When they did, and I did, I realized what I really wanted was the fat around the edge: the glistening rim of browned fat that surrounded the muscle, crispy on the outside and melting as I bit into it. This was clear deficiency signalling: My diet had some fat from chocolate and other sweet things, but it didn’t involve a lot of prime rib-eye. A good proportion of the numerous vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, antioxidants, and other bioactive compounds available in beef (Williams, 2007) had probably been missing or radically depleted for years, and this was the best way to get them. Sure, I could also have taken supplements for some of them, but that’s not how you get a diet that nourishes you back to life.
A reader once asked how I dealt with that desire to eat meat, and what I felt when I did. I remember feeling nothing much afterwards except a desire for more, mingled with a fear of more. The standard anorexic conflict about having ingested anything, really. It didn’t last long; I didn’t have any more meat for some time, and the glimpse of what real food does to you like receded like the memories of all the other foods I’d allowed myself only a tiny taste of. It felt remarkable at the time, but it was also not particularly hard to process. Starvation is great at deadening everything, even the impact of eating. For you, the aftermath may feel more complex. But anything traumatic about it will probably not last, whereas the benefits will.
This distant memory brings me back to the example I began this series with: me in the supermarket a couple of months ago, understanding that this particular week, only meat would fill me up. Both this and pre-recovery me, her body crying out for steak fat, illustrate at very different levels of physical robustness how direct and how useful your body’s signalling mechanisms can be. Your body is saying what it needs, and that is getting eaten. Roadblocks and diversions have not been inserted in between.
For me now, the directness of the appetite–action link is a beautiful part of what it means to live well. For me back in 2008, deep in the anorexic trench and not even thinking seriously about getting out, the link had been all but severed. When recovery was in progress, the link was fragile, and pivotal: Over and over, there was the option to listen or not listen to those little appetites hesitantly blossoming where ironclad rules used to be. The primary task you’re trying to accomplish in recovery from a restrictive eating disorder is to reforge the link between appetites and actions, and more broadly between needs and wants. There is no way this can happen other than by you getting better at noticing tiny nascent impulses to eat things, and then giving them all the benefits of the doubt.
In the early days, acting on appetite is momentous, whether by eating at a time you wouldn’t normally, eating a type of food you wouldn’t normally, or eating more of something than you normally would. You will, almost inevitably and almost immediately—maybe once you decide to do the thing, maybe once you start doing it, maybe both—be inundated by fears and doubts, by hysterical all-or-nothing thinking that inflates listening to your appetite this one time into proof that you’re gluttonous, out of control, and will probably be covered in fat rolls by next Tuesday.
If you’re starting to eat meat, dairy, or eggs again after a long time without, the avalanche of “I shouldn’t be doing this” will come pre-enhanced with a set of ethical objections (but the methane emissions, but the poor creatures in the terrifying abattoir). These may feel even harder to dismiss than the more clearly disordered responses, because this isn’t just about your predicted suffering, this is about the past, present, and/or future suffering of others (whether a specific type of animal or a bigger vaguer set of planetary populations). This added element may well help ramp up the self-centred fear factor and so the chance of you backing out and falling back on the ethics excuse.
Recovery, like the rest of life, involves many tradeoffs between incompatible aims, and recovery’s macro-tradeoff is basically between comfort and speed. If you never do anything that makes you uncomfortable, you will not recover (you won’t even start). The more uncomfortable things you do, the quicker you will recover—if you can cope. Knowing how hard to push against the disordered discomforts is one of the great skills of making recovery proceed reliably, and no one learns it without a good bit of trial and error, where error means both 1) undershooting and not achieving much and 2) overshooting and getting freaked out. Almost everyone does too little of 2). If you’ve been doing V/V for some time, allowing animal products back into your diet will probably be one of the most uncomfortable things you do in recovery; it will probably (partly therefore) be one of the things that does most to bring the end of your recovery closer. A reliable pro-recovery rule is “follow the fear”, so if you feel it here, take note. Fear typically means your eating disorder really really doesn’t want you to do this. You should need no better reason to go out and do it.
A practical caveat to conclude: The earlier in recovery you are, the more your actions on appetite should be supported by a robust plan: a framework for number and size and timing of meals and snacks, for example, into which you can slot these daring innovations in food types. I set out more on this in my posts on using a meal plan in recovery, starting here. As you progress, the plan can grow ever more fluid until you realize you don’t have or need one at all anymore. But starting out pretending that will probably end in disaster, or just inefficiency (which also often results in failure). Your appetites will grow reliable again by being listened to as part of decisive retraining that acknowledges they are not entirely reliable yet. This may even involve acting as if you felt a desire for meat, to see whether (as so often) the appetite follows the eating. And thus, by bridging the appetite–action gap from both ends, the deadly insight–action gulf is closed up too.
In the next two parts of this series, before rounding it off with some practical steps you could take tomorrow, we’ll consider two meat-related ways of zooming out, starting here.
**Image credit: Thanks to Fat of the Land Farm, Elgin, ON, for the kind permission.**
References
Williams, P. (2007). Nutritional composition of red meat. Nutrition & Dietetics, 64, S113-S119. Open-access full text here.
