Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Nothing Is Forever

In the previous part of this veganism/vegetarianism series we explored one kind of recovery- (and meat-)related zooming out: Remembering the maximizing good / miniziming harm tradeoff. In this one, the penultimate part of the series, we’ll consider a second kind: Remembering that this too shall pass.

One of the best ways to prevent yourself from doing something is to tell yourself it has to be forever. This applies with any new habit: Flossing will never get going if you say it now has to be every morning until you die; it probably will if you say you’ll give it a try for seven mornings and then see how you feel about carrying on. It certainly applies in recovery. If you treat everything you feel and desire and act on as just for now, just trying it out, a whole lot of the terror fizzles away.

I was reminded of how important this is when one night recently, the building site on the opposite bank of the river, where they start early (7:30) but normally stop by 5:30, didn’t go silent one night. The digger and the cement mixer were still going at 11, no idea why. I got upset about it—because immediately my mind was spinning off into “What if this goes on every night for months…”. I was turning a temporary inconvenience whose quick fix was reading a book for a bit and then pulling the duvet up over my ears into an indefinitely insoluble problem bound to result in me chronically sleep-deprived and incapacitated.

This makes sense as an evolved strategy: Human minds have survived by getting ever better at spinning predictions and counterfactuals into pre-emptive troubleshooting. But when real threats are minimal, this is often maladaptive. “This is going to be forever” is a prime example of the cognitive distortions of overgeneralization, catastrophizing, and “fortune-telling”, as well as a nice illustration of the association between absolutist language use (nothing/everything, never/always, etc.) and mental pathology (Al-Mosaiwi & Johnstone, 2018).

In recovery, if you instantly extrapolate from feeling hungry (or not feeling like eating any more bloody vegetables) today or this week into feeling this way forever, of course it’s terrifying: I will always want to eat four big snacks a day, I’ll never want to eat vegetable matter again. Immediately your mind is fastforwarding to how to take evasive action to solve the problem that doesn’t exist yet and probably never will. And the net result is typically that the risk is not taken, the appetite not heeded.

This doesn’t work. The only surefire way to keep your appetites unbalanced is to keep ignoring them. Dietary restraint is “cognitive effort that is expended in attempting to resist certain types and amounts of food in order to control weight” (Schaumberg & Anderson, 2016). It correlates with eating pathology, and not with “successfully” controlled weight. If you don’t eat to satiety now, then yes, your entire future probably will be a bleak one of staving off hunger unsuccessfully, i.e. dieting and so forcing hunger to remain a force to be fought with. As Schaumberg and Anderson put it, “Restrained eaters may have difficulty managing their weight and feel a loss of control which may produce stress and places these individuals at further risk for disinhibition”, i.e. loss of control over eating. And so unpleasant feedback loops between restraint, disinhibition, and compensatory behaviours easily kick in. Ironically, jumping instantly to the long term reliably wrecks the long term.

If you do dare to eat until you’re truly full, now and for hundreds of meals to come, the rest of your life has its best shot at equilibrium: at the delightful state of not needing to keep anything in check. The fact that you can’t get there by half measures has the logic of the pendulum swing. It’s so often needed in recovery: the temporary phase of excess to make up for the preceding phase of deprivation. For most people this means eating a really very large amount of food (relative to the healthy population) for many months or several years. For many it also means letting themselves drink more alcohol, take more other drugs, book more vacations, buy more clothes, drive faster cars, have more sex, do whatever versions of "opposite to anorexia" are most relevant to them. This phase tends to be crucial to growing up and out of the eating disorder, to finding a balance that doesn't have a permanent backdrop of deprivation. And usually it is just a phase, often a matter of mere months, maybe a few years. Again, the point is that telling yourself it’s going to be forever will prevent it from happening.

For me with meat it was pretty extreme. In a couple of years I went from 15 years of vegetarianism to nervously savouring my mother’s rib-eye fat to sharing tearfully happy steak frites with my father to curiously choosing reduced-price packets of bacon from the supermarket to revelling in my partner’s massively rich meaty German stews with dumplings (Year 1) to having a reputation at my college for being the one who lifted weights and had an insatiable appetite for meat (the bloodier the better) (Year 2). And then it stayed that way for about five years: years in which I ate six chipolatas and three eggs for breakfast, chomped my way through four-course dinners (with matched wines!) twice or three times a week, and was obviously the one who’d be asked to cook the steaks on the research retreat. That was entirely good and entirely necessary for me. And it came to an end.

Gradually I stopped wanting all that meat. I switched the breakfast sausages to fried halloumi and mushroom. I stopped choosing meat every time I went shopping. I got more selective about buying/ordering meat only at shops/restaurants where they demonstrably care about animal welfare. And now I probably eat meat about once a week on average, more if I feel like it, less if I feel like it, and I make it the best meat I can, so that animal’s life was almost certainly less full of suffering than the lives of the vast majority of humans alive today. And I’m fine with this now, just like I was fine with it being different before. Somehow, I was able to own it. I was able to do what I needed to, let it ride itself out, at the level of each meal and each year’s appetites. I was able to zoom out and let go of that easy instinct to instantly catastrophize and solidify the needs of the present into those of the rest of my life. And therefore I was able to let go of the unending fragility of dietary restraint as my life’s defining principle.

Appetite Essential Reads

Why People Get "Hangry"

Eating Well Is More Than the Food You Put on Your Fork

Doing all this also meant letting go of being such a gloomy absolutist about everything. Everything is messy, and anorexia hates that. Everything requires a bit of backbone, and anorexia prevents that (also literally). And almost everything is trainable, which anorexia will insist is untrue. “I never feel hungry when I first wake up” simply means “I haven’t trained myself to feel hungry when I wake up [and I don’t want to]”. “I feel nauseous at the thought of eating a burger” merely means “I’m not used to eating burgers”. Bar obvious exceptions like genuine allergies, almost anything you want to change about your eating habits and preferences and your hunger/reward signalling around food, you can. Just remember, this too is just another phase.

In the final part of this series, I make some practical suggestions for how you could start turning these V/V-related principles to good account for your own recovery process, right now today or tomorrow.

**Image credit: George Alexander Ishida Newman via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.**