"Fat is not a feeling . . ."

[formyed]

A friend and I were talking about this phrase the other day. She hears it in her treatment setting regularly. I've known treatment providers who LOVE the phrase in the past, but I've never heard anyone at my current center use it. At all. I can't help but wonder if they intentionally avoid it, and I could see that being the case, based on

Comments

[almost_home]

on the note of replacing any emotion with 'fat' -- i'm not exactly an ED professional. i'm a nursing student and when i care for kids at work with eating disorders who tell me that they're fat, that this food is going to put weight on them, that they can't eat what i'm asking them to eat because it will make them fat i say, "are you scared, x?" & "every time you go to tell me that you are fat, try and tell that you're scared, instead." & then i ask them what sorts of things used to help them feel safe when they were frightened.

[laja_89]

Ugh, YES. I had a lot of issues with my treatment centre, and this was definitely one of them. If I said I felt fat they would completely negate it by saying 'fat is not a feeling'. It doesn't make sense to me, yes it isn't a normal feeling like happiness, or sadness, or anger, but somedays I feel fatter than others and there is no other feeling that can describe what it feels like when I 'feel fat'. I don't care what anyone says, fat IS a feeling!

[lilacpetals]

We had "emotions check ins" at the beginning of every group. we were not allowed to say we felt fat - they encouraged us to figure out what feeling "fat" really meant. I never heard them use that phrase though.

I think that people who say that may be trying to get you to focus on your real emotions.

[as_she_starves]

My therapist used to challenge me to find other words to describe my feelings in place of "fat." I think this was helpful to me in that it encouraged me to think harder about the reasons and causes behind my behaviour; I learned a lot about what I really wanted out of my eating disorder, which I discovered, in this way, is far more than a certain number on the scale.

However, the idea that "fat is not a feeling" often seems unfair and limiting to me. Sometimes I simply do feel fat compared to other days, when my body feels and looks thinner to me. While I've become better at identifying my emotions by learning not to rely on "fat" all the time, I do think there are occasions when I simply feel fat without there being any greater meaning behind that feeling.

[laja_89]

This.

[stacey1981]

It depends the place. A few places it was just known so the therapists never had to say it. Nobody would step to group and say they feel fat. Partially because they were either patients who had been through the treatment cycle sever times like at two of the places I went to. The other place that is was never said was an intensive day program and the patients were well beyond that point of processing. The places that used it more extensively also had more shallow processing (nice way of saying their therapy sucked and worked on surface issues) than the other programs I have went to.