Gained A Lot Of Weight During Your Eating Disorder Recovery: How To Manage Your Weight Safely

When you have been through treatment for an eating disorder, no matter which type of eating disorder that is, you may find yourself having gained weight in the process. This can be a struggle for anyone with an eating disorder but is an inevitable part of the process. If you are currently dealing with weight gain from your eating disorder treatment but not sure of how to proceed and safely manage your weight, you may feel a bit lost. Luckily, there are many ways that you can begin to healthily manage your weight, whether you have gained so much weight that you need weight loss services or you just need to learn how to accept being at a healthy weight. Get to know some of these steps that you can take so you can maintain your eating disorder recovery and manage your weight:

Hire a Dietitian

Because you are in recovery for an eating disorder, it is very important that any attempt at weight management or weight loss occurs with the help of other people. Especially early in your eating disorder recovery, you need a support system that will be there to catch you if you are heading down an unhealthy path.

Any attempt at weight management with an eating disorder should be done under the supervision of a dietitian. Dietitians are experts in the fields of food and nutrition and can help you to develop an eating plan that will suit your specific health needs and requirements. Look for a dietician that is considered to be a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). This means they have received degrees and certifications in nutrition and dietetics and can help you to safely deal with any related health issues.

If you are early in your recovery and concerned about weight management, they can help you write out a detailed daily meal plan to follow that gives you a good balance of nutrients and caloric intake. On the other hand, if you went through recovery for one eating disorder but ended up swinging to another extreme (i.e anorexia to binge eating and significant weight gain), the RDN can provide you with weight loss services that will keep you from resuming anorexic behaviors.

Watch Out For Weight Loss Centers that Encourage Disordered Eating Behaviors

While you may feel as if you need a quick solution to your weight gain issues from your eating disorder recovery, quick fixes are rarely the best answer. There are weight loss services and centers that provide you with excellent guidance on eating, exercise, and continued eating disorder recovery, and then there are those that may not.

Be on the lookout for those that may not be encouraging safe and healthy weight management and weight loss. Some weight loss centers are more concerned with fast results than health and encourage extreme weight loss programs including fasting, juice diets, and extremely restricted calories and nutrients. These are essentially starvation diets that are institutionalized forms of anorexic eating habits. Do not seek out weight loss services in this form.

If you truly need to lose weight to be healthy due to your weight gain in eating disorder recovery, find a weight management center that has experience and knowledge working with patients with eating disorders and that only promote medically sound and safe methods of weight loss. You can also choose to seek weight management services from a team of experts that are not together in one weight loss center (i.e. your primary care doctor, an RDN in another office, and a certified trainer at a gym).

There are ways to manage your weight and even lose weight healthily when you have been through eating disorder treatment and recovery. And these are a few of the ways to do just that.