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My Facebook community has gained lots of new members this month.
This morning, someone mentioned that recovery from BED requires tracking food and understanding our powerlessness over it.
For those of you who have been following my content for a while, you'll know that this is not my go-to philosophy, and that I actually find it detrimental in many ways.
But I also understand that everyone is different, and that "food freedom" isn't a concept everyone embraces. In the BED world especially, it can feel like the wrong answer.
Binge eating is so often experienced as a loss of control that the idea of more freedom — not less — can sound like it's moving in the wrong direction.
Instead of thinking of freedom as: "don't think about it, just eat," (which is the connotation online), I think about it as the freedom to make choices about food without guilt.
That means you can eat something or not eat something without feeling like there is a rulebook about it. That you can remain in the drivers' seat of your own decisions without compromising your physiological, mental, or emotional regulation. That food is easier, not always a fight -- and that your parts are more reconciled within you instead of food being a battleground for their conflicts.
That's what food freedom means, to me.
But how we get there is a different route for everyone.
Someone reading this might need containment first.
Your nervous system might be looking for a tether, and without something to hold onto, there is no stability from which to be able to make choices. For you, structure isn't the enemy of recovery, it's the foundation of it.
And I believe this is partly why food freedom gets a bad rap. It can feel like it's asking you to free fall.
Meanwhile! Someone else here needs to know there are no rules coming. Not fewer rules or gentler rules — none.
Because maybe your history with food has been so bound up in claustrophobic restrictions and judgments that even the hint of a boundary sends your system into urgency. For you, that open door of food freedom is relief, and the lack of conditions or tethering is the path to safety.
(And sometimes the same person holds both of these needs, in different moments, different seasons. We contain multitudes, Walt.)
But regardless of the direction you're coming from, there's one thing that doesn't change:
We don't pathologize food, weight, or bodies.
Shame doesn't lead.
Not for what you eat, not for what you weigh, not for what you need in order to feel safe.
This is not practice of controlling yourself or whipping yourself into shape. You stay on your own team instead of locking up your "undesirable" parts in a closet in order to find containment.
That's the foundation, and it stabilizes the core of the journey regardless of the approach.
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