How To Rewire The Brain for Eating Disorder Recovery (3 tips!)

Rewiring the brain is an important step for reaching full recovery from an eating disorder. Recovery is not only about “eating whatever you want” and letting go of dieting but it is also about rewiring the old habits and thought patterns. And this takes a lot of mental work!

In this post, I will give you 3 tips on how to rewire the brain for eating disorder recovery. 3 things that I think are very important to understand and start to practice!

So let’s begin!

Brain rewiring tip 1#: change your physical actions

People often think that the rewiring process is only something you do in your mind. But it is important to understand that actually your brain is also wired by the physical ACTIONS you take.

With every action you take you are either choosing to wire more eating disorder patterns in your brain or more full recovery patterns.

Are you restricting, purging, overexercising? Are you skipping meals, avoiding some foods? All of this is wiring your brain to have an eating disorder!

You can think – do I want THIS behavior or habit to design my future? IS THIS part of what I want for myself in full recovery?

Because the habits and actions you take today are the ones that design your future. When today you take an eating disorder action, then how can your future be any different?

For a more in-depth discussion on this step see my video:

Brain rewiring tip 2#: change your emotional reactions

In the previous step, we talked about changing your physical actions because those actions are wiring your brain.

But the next tip is to change your emotional reactions – THIS is what many people are missing from their brain rewiring practice!

1. Become an outside observer – This is a mindfulness technique that helps you to see the old urges or ED thoughts from a neutral perspective. As you maintain this neutral observer perspective those urges and thought can’t have power over you. And with this, you are telling your brain “thanks, but these are not important to me anymore, we can now reject these urges and thoughts”. 
2. Do not get emotionally involved – Do not take these urges and thoughts personally or seriously. And this you will do by your emotional reaction. By your emotional reaction to the urges and thoughts, you are teaching your brain what to wire or re-wire. A thought can be just a thought, but our emotional reaction determinates whats get wired in our brain!

For a more in-depth discussion on this step see my video:

Brain rewiring tip 3#: mental rehearsal

In the last two steps, we talked about brain rewiring from your physical actions and emotional reactions. But in this step, we will put it all together and talk about mental rehearsal as one brain wiring tool.

By mental rehearsal I mean things like visualizing your day in recovery, seeing in your mind’s eye how you want to act, what behaviors you want to engage in, what actions you want to take.

Also, you can wire your emotional reactions with mental rehearsal – you can visualize how you want to emotionally respond in a situation even before it happens.

Studies show that practicing visualization wire the same parts of the brain when an action is done either physically, in a real situation, or if an action is done just by imagining it – your brain doesn’t know the difference!

Many successful people use visualization as part of achieving their goals. Athletes use visualization to literally get better at what they do. So it is very much proven to work.

For a more in-depth discussion and explanation on this step see my video:

Start to practice these three tips as your brain rewiring practice in eating disorder recovery and you will see guaranteed results!

Reaching a full recovery requires physical AND mental work and this is what we do with my one on one coaching clients. I see that many people can make great success by letting go of restriction but very often this is not enough. You also have to get your mind to be ALIGNED with full recovery. And this requires brain rewiring and changing the eating disorder neural patterns.

But the good news is that your brain can 100% rewire as it is proven to be neuroplastic. It means your brain neural circuits are not set in stone.

You can change and rewire your brain! But it does require work!

PS. If you are interested in working with me one one one, take massive action and go through a full transformation then find out more about my private coaching here.