@jess it used to break my heart. We come from very different places food wise - I love to cook, I find it easy to recognise hunger cues. Food is sociable, interesting, nourishing. He is much more food as fuel and as I said before has ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods as well as a whole load of shame and guilt about weight and eating. He isn’t so confident with cooking but has definitely become more so in the past few years.
There were points when I felt so stuck, like we’d got into a dynamic where I was being co-opted into this disordered eating without my consent!
I read more about eating competence and made myself stop commenting: on him bemoaning his weight (I’d normally reassure him) and on what he ate. I did buy him the cbt book and he read bits of it. I also introduced the new plan to him, and we approached as a team. I often devolved menu planning to him too, although I have to admit that he’s done best when I literally prep all his food and just make it easily available. I think then he’s got more brain space to deal with emotions and cravings.
One of the greatest wins over the last year was when he said to me ‘I had something off plan today. But I told myself, like it says in the book, that doesn’t mean everything is ruined. I can just start over at my next meal’. And I’ve also heard him say ‘no, I’m not hungry I just want to eat more and I don’t need to’ and walk away from food. It was scary for me at the beginning and hard to change our pattern around food but we are getting there.
It sounds to me like you want to do this diet. Sometimes you just have to play out the behaviour. I seriously doubt it will change your fundamental relationship with food and that’s the issue here. However it’s not like alternative options are going to stop being available to you just because for whatever reason you need to really really make sure that what’s not working isn’t working :) they will all be there for you when you’re ready.
I do understand that eating disorders don’t go away. We just get better at managing them. My sister had an eating disorder in her teens that she manages with exercise now. She is really anti any diet that excludes or restricts foods, because that’s a very slippery slope for her. Her exercise is now at a point where it’s not obsessive - it probably was for a while. My partner will probably never be ‘cured’, but he does now know what works for him and what doesn’t (apparently he thought it was normal for ones stomach to swell up like a balloon after eating a lot of wheat flour). I think you are repeating what doesn’t work for you, but sometimes we have to do that a number of times before we get that no, really and truly, it doesn’t work.