How Beliefs Impact An Eating Disorder

Hey beautiful friend! Thank you for hanging out with me today. I am so happy to have you here.

I want to ask you, how are you feeling? How are you doing today? Be honest. Do you have an answer? Do you know how you're feeling? How's your day going? 

I'm going to talk about the belief, thought, feeling, behavior cycle. I don't know if many of you are familiar with it but I like to talk about mindset, perspective and internal outlook. Your belief, thought, feeling, behavior cycle is very important in your daily life. I wanna talk about it today so that you can kind of tie it in and see if you can analyze your beliefs, thoughts, behaviors and see how it could be feeding into your negative body image, or into your eating disorder. 

If you aren’t familiar with this concept, it basically is saying our beliefs form our thoughts and our thoughts create our feelings. We then act out of our feelings which is our behavior. These behaviors then support or discredit the initial belief that set this whole thing into motion. 

Visualize it as a circle. There's the belief and then it leads to your thought and then out of that thought is the feeling and out of that feeling is the behavior. It's a cycle. The behavior cycle supports or discredits that initial belief.

I'm going to share a personal story and apply this cycle. The belief, thought cycle. So you can see how you can use it to analyze something going on in your life to see if there's a pattern. Because once we can pinpoint whether there's a harmful belief, if we can pinpoint that, then we can start to reframe that thought or that belief so that we act out of it differently.

When I was stuck in the thick of my eating disorder, one of my number one dominating beliefs was that food was my enemy. I really believed this. I believed food was my enemy because if you eat, it's calories and there's fat in the food. Consuming calories and fat went against everything I was trying to achieve. I was trying to weigh a goal number. I wanted to weigh 105 pounds. I remember when I was in Junior High, I heard someone else talking about what they weighed and I thought “well she weighs 105 lbs so I have to weigh that too because look at her, everyone likes her”. That's kind of where those thoughts came from. The belief that food was my enemy. It was going to sabotage me in a way. 

Picture a 14-15 year old thinking, living that way for a couple years, believing food was the problem. Two years into my eating disorder, my dad had a massive heart attack. I was 17. I was at home when my dad came home from his workout at the gym. He wasn't feeling well. I was sitting near him and he started sweating profusely and he asked me to get a towel. That's how much he was sweating. He was having a heart attack. My mom called the ambulance. I went and stood out on the boulevard waiting for the ambulance and the police and the fire truck so they could find our house faster.

I remember standing there thinking “oh my gosh, are they ever gonna get here”? I could hear the siren. You swear it's getting closer but it's just not coming soon enough. I just stayed outside on the boulevard. I couldn't move. I was in shock, really. 

Another image I remember specifically from that day was turning and looking at my front door. The front door was wide open and they had my dad laying in the entryway, cutting open his shirt and attaching things to him and working really fast and furious. They eventually loaded up and hauled them away to the emergency room. Thank God he survived. 

But needless to say, that was very traumatic for me and honestly I have not even fully dug into all the ways it affects me now. But I went from believing food was my enemy. My dad’s heart attack was bad. Later we found out he had clogged arteries. He eventually had to have quadruple bypass surgery, so there's so much involved with this story and it's really hard to talk about because it's traumatic. It really affects me. It was really hard to watch that day. 

When I saw my dad having a heart attack, I went from believing food was my enemy to suddenly believing food was going to kill me. 

My dad's heart attack not only perpetuated my belief that food was the bad guy, but then I chose to see his heart attack as evidence that food was going to kill me. That ramped up my eating disorder to another level. Then I really started cutting out foods like crazy. Anything with saturated fat, trans fat. I became hyper aware of labels and ingredients in food. 

I would get anxiety being around food like pizza, french fries, fried chicken. Any greasy food with a lot of fat content gave me anxiety. Not only would I not eat it but then to be around people that would eat it, I would almost have an internal panic attack. Being around people eating pizza was hard. 

I went 7 years without eating pizza or french fries.

That's how long it took me to get over the belief food was going to kill me. Why am I sharing this? Because I had this belief that food was my enemy. Then something traumatic happened. I witnessed my dad’s heart attack. I almost lost my dad. The EMTs that day said they don't know how he survived. They really don't. My fear spiked. I feared food, food was the enemy and then it just ramped up to a whole different level. That belief fed into the thoughts around food and how I felt about food and then the behavior of restricting even further and not allowing pizza or french fries. No more cookies, no more saturated fat. 

“If this is processed you can't eat it because if you put it in your mouth and you eat it you will die.” 

That was the belief, thought, feeling, behavior cycle I got on for years. And I just spun around it and I spun around it and I spun around it. Stuck on it. Stuck on it. But the key is to identify it. 

I'm asking you to be a detective of your own beliefs. It can be challenging to pinpoint the initial beliefs that are wreaking havoc on your mind. If that is you, if you don’t have an “aha” moment, like “oh yeah, I know what you're saying. This belief really leads me into thinking these things and feeling this and then I act this way and then it just reinforces it all over again”. If you're having a hard time pinpointing it, work backwards from the behavior. 

What is the behavior that is noticeable? What’s obvious? My behavior of restricting food and not eating foods was so obvious. It was obvious to everyone around me because everyone would be eating pizza and french fries and I wouldn’t eat. Or we'd be on a road trip and we'd have to go through a drive through and get food and people were ordering food and I would say “no, I’m not eating”. I remember my brother getting mad at me saying “you have to eat” and I looked at him and said “no I don't”. I needed that control because my fear had me in its grips. 

That was the behavior. It was so, so obvious. But why was it that bad? So then I could work backwards from that. If you can find the behavior and then if you can link it to the feeling that you had leading up to the behavior, ask yourself why you may feel what you are feeling, and then it can lead you to the thought that preceded that feeling. And then it’ll clue you in on the belief. And if you had that clue on what belief is causing the most distress, then you can go at it. You can choose to reframe. You can work on reframing that belief and start healing in that way. 

But the main thing is awareness. Bring awareness to what needs to be done to start the healing journey. Initiate momentum and hope. I want it for you, friend, I really do. I believe that if you can work today or over the next week or month or whatever it may be, just work at it. Identify one of those beliefs and start working on it. Because half the battle is identifying the belief. If you don't know the belief, work backwards from the behavior. Pinpoint that behavior because you can see from my story the importance of realizing how grand a belief is in your life. How much impact it has on your life and how it can get twisted and molded into something worse. It did in my scenario, based on trauma and my perception of that trauma. 

It all goes back to speaking out loud about your belief. If you haven't listened to episode one or two, go back and listen to those. I touch on the importance of beginning the conversation around your eating disorder and around that negative body image. Whatever it is, get that conversation started because then you start to separate yourself from that identity of “that is who I am”. You can start that process and it's just so important to start seeing yourself as your identity, your person and not your eating disorder.

Identifying those beliefs that could feed into your eating disorder, into your toxic body image, you have to start evaluating and being a detective and analyzing your own beliefs. Your beliefs make up who you are. And you are so important. You are so loved. You are so valued. Your purpose is greater than anything you can ever imagine. I really want you to get to a place where that becomes real for you. It all begins with our mindset.

Please let me know how this goes for you. If you had any major breakthroughs in identifying a belief, send me a message. Email me: hello@andreacarow.com

DM me on Instagram: andrea_carow

Please let me know how I can help you in any other way. Connect with me so I can help you on this journey. I’m on this journey with you. I want to be here for you so let me know what I can do for you, friend. 

Be that detective, tackle that belief. You might have to start backwards from that behavior but I know you can do it. I believe in you.