Eating can be really hard when you have an eating disorder, but affirmations can help. Eating disorders are mental illnesses, which means that we need to change our thoughts and beliefs in order to recover. This is where affirmations come in. Affirmations can help us replace our disordered thoughts with healthy thoughts. Over time, this can change the pattern of our thinking and support recovery.
Common thoughts and beliefs that drive eating disorders are:
- If I eat too much I’ll feel sick and/or gain weight
- I can’t eat food/carbs/sugar etc.
- Exercise is required to “burn off” food calories
- There are some foods that are good and some that are bad
- I can’t trust my body to make healthy choices for me
- I’m not hungry
- That’s too much food for me right now
These thoughts all make sense because we live in diet culture, which perpetuates them all the time. But we can overcome these false beliefs and thoughts with affirmations that counteract the eating disorder thoughts and lead us towards health and recovery.
Emotional Regulation Worksheets
Give your child the best tools to grow more confident, calm and resilient so they can feel better, fast!
- Self-Esteem
- Self-Regulation
- Mindfulness
- Calming strategies
Having an eating disorder can make it really hard to eat regularly and trust your body to be healthy. Recovery doesn’t happen with affirmations alone, but parents can support recovery by teaching their kids eating disorder recovery affirmations. Here are nine affirmations you can teach your child who has an eating disorder:
1. My body needs food every day no matter what I do
My body needs food. And it’s not just that I need food when I exercise. I need food even if all I do all day is sit on the couch. My brain, lungs, heart, and every organ in my body need food every single day just to exist. My body needs me to eat food every day. Food is the best, most essential, and healthy thing my body needs.
2. All foods are good foods
Even though there is a lot of misleading information about food out there, I know that all foods are good foods. Unless it’s moldy or expired, all food is clean. It’s not better to eat a salad instead of a burger if what I really want is a burger. What I eat should be based on what my body wants and needs, not what someone else has told me is “healthy” or “good.” Right now I need to trust my dietitian and my parents to help me make the right choices for my body. Over time, I’ll learn to listen to my body, which will guide me to eat exactly what I need every day.
3. I can be afraid to eat and choose to eat anyway
Eating is scary for me right now. It makes sense – I mean, I have an eating disorder! But just because I’m afraid to eat doesn’t mean that I won’t eat. From now on I’m going to feel my fear and eat anyway. Trying to get rid of my fear will never work, but showing my fear that I can eat even when I’m afraid of it will help me feel stronger every day. Fear gets to exist in my mind, but I will not allow it to drive my decisions or put my health at risk.
4. I never need to burn off my food with exercise
My mind thinks that every time I eat, I need to work it off with exercise. And that thought keeps coming up for me, but I know it’s not true. Exercise is healthy as long as it’s not being used as a punishment or way to purge what I’ve eaten. Right now I need to take a break from exercising while I recover, but that doesn’t mean I need to eat less because I’m not exercising. I can’t wait until I’m exercising before I eat more food. That’s just not how bodies work. Exercise is not the price we pay for eating.
5. My body is perfectly capable of digesting food
A lot of times I feel as if I won’t be able to handle the food I eat. I worry that I’ll gain weight, that I’ll vomit, that I’ll feel nauseous, and that I’ve eaten the wrong thing or too much. All of these worries show up in my head, but that’s OK. I’m still going to eat with the knowledge that my body can digest so many things. Sure, if my doctor has diagnosed an allergy I won’t eat those things, but otherwise, I’m going to follow my dietitian’s and parents’ advice about what to eat and how much.
6. I can’t really trust my hunger and fullness cues right now, but I will if I keep eating
Right now my hunger and fullness cues are all over the place. With my eating disorder, I put my mind in charge of my body, and it’s kind of messed with my body’s natural signals. But that’s OK. I know that if I keep practicing and eating what my dietitian and parents tell me is good for me then I will slowly rebuild my brain-body connection. Over time, I’ll relearn how to listen to my body and will be able to eat intuitively, without fear, and according to my appetite.
7. My body does not need to be oppressed to be good enough
For whatever reason, I decided that my mind needs to take control of what my body needed. I’ve been treating my body’s signals like they’re naughty children who need to be dominated and controlled. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve become a dictator, an oppressor! I want to treat my body with the respect and dignity it deserves. My body is strong and wants me to be healthy. My body doesn’t need to be a certain weight or shape to be good enough. It’s already good enough. Over time I will learn to listen to my body, but right now I’m going to stop oppressing it with food rules.
8. Counting calories may feel safe to me right now, but it’s not a healthy way to live
I’ve become a master of calorie counting. It happens automatically for me every time I eat or think about food. But this catalog of calorie counts is not making me healthier. It’s part of my eating disorder. Every time I start to count calories I’m going to ask my brain to stop doing that. I mean, I understand that my brain thinks counting calories will keep me safe, but I’m not buying it anymore.
9. Just because I don’t want to eat doesn’t mean I shouldn’t eat
Right now it makes sense that I don’t want to eat most of the time – I have an eating disorder! And eating has become a huge hassle and drama in my life. But I know that if I eat what and when I’m supposed to, I’ll recover from this eating disorder and won’t need to force myself anymore. So I’m going to keep remembering that even though I don’t want to eat most of the time, I’m going to do it anyway. My body really needs food, and I’m tired of my eating disorder hurting my health and controlling my life.
These affirmations should help your child gain confidence in eating disorder recovery. Recovery takes time, but repeating these affirmations supports the process of building new beliefs and thoughts. Feeding a child with an eating disorder is hard, but your approach can make all the difference.
Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts
- Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
- Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
- Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
- What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Ginny Jones is on a mission to empower parents to raise kids who are free from eating disorders. She’s the founder of More-Love.org and a Parent Coach who helps parents navigate their kid’s eating disorder recovery.
Ginny has been researching, writing about, and supporting parents who have kids with eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.
Ginny’s most recent project is Recovery, a newsletter for deeply-feeling people in recovery from diet culture, negative body image, and eating disorders.