The Mealtime Companion
Your in-the-moment guide to getting through every meal of anorexia recovery: before, during, and after. It remembers your reasons, your evidence, and your progress, and it sits alongside your treatment team, never in place of it.
Welcome back
Read this first
If you're reading this, there's probably a meal coming that you're dreading. Or one just finished, and the panic is loud. Take a breath. You don't need willpower right now. You need a framework.
That's what this is. A structure to lean on before, during, and after every meal, built for the moments your treatment team can't be in the room.
This tool is a companion to professional treatment, not a replacement for it. Your dietitian, psychologist, and GP lead your recovery. This covers the space between appointments.
If you are experiencing fainting, chest pain, blood in vomit, or confusion, this page is not the right support. Go to the red flags list and contact your GP or emergency services.
Eight modules. One system. Yours.
Everything below saves to this device as you use it. The dots fill as each module starts holding your work.
14 first-person scripts · 3 live tools · your own evidence engine · a printable clinician summary · saved only on this device
How it compounds: The Companion Loop
This isn't eight separate pages. It's one loop. You write your reasons once. The tool hands them back before every meal. Every meal you get through becomes evidence in your own record. And your record travels with you into your next appointment.
Modules 02 and 04 to 07 are the skills library hanging off this loop: psychoeducation, daily structure, exposure work, and urge support. Everything you enter compounds. That is the difference between a page you read and a companion you keep.
Module 01
Start Here
How this tool fits alongside your treatment
Your treatment team sees you for around one hour a week. Anorexia shows up at every meal and snack, roughly 35 times a week. This companion exists for those other 34 hours.
It works best when you're already connected with a dietitian, psychologist, or GP. They set the direction of your recovery: your meal plan, your goals, your medical monitoring. This tool helps you follow through between sessions, one meal at a time. It is a companion to treatment, never a replacement for it.
Nothing here counts, measures, or scores your food. There are no numbers about eating anywhere in this tool, by design. The only numbers you'll see are about how you feel, because that's the evidence that matters: watching your distress fall, meal after meal, in your own record.
This tool is designed for people aged 16 and over. If you're supporting someone younger, please work directly with their treatment team.
Medical red flags: read before anything else
This tool is not for medical instability. If any of these apply, contact your GP this week or emergency services today.
The Why Anchor
Motivation is unreliable in recovery. It disappears exactly when you need it, usually right before a meal. So we're not going to rely on it.
Instead, write three reasons for recovery that outlive motivation. Not "to feel better", but the real ones: the life the anorexia is taking from you. These are saved on your device, and this tool will hand them back to you before every meal, when the ED voice is loudest.
What using this actually looks like, day to day
On a normal day, you will touch this tool maybe four times, for a couple of minutes each. Before a meal you open the Meal Protocol and it hands you your reasons and a plan. After the meal you log how it went, two taps. At night you tick off the day's structure in Mechanical Eating. That's it. It is deliberately small, because on the days you need it most you will not have capacity for anything big.
On a hard day it does more. The urge tracker gives you somewhere to put the compulsion instead of acting on it. The Hard Days module gives you words when someone at the table says the wrong thing. And on the worst days, the 50% protocol gives you a version of success that is still success.
Then once a week, before your session, you generate the summary and bring your week with you. Your clinician gets the real picture instead of whatever your memory decided to keep, and your session time goes further.
Writing an anchor that holds under pressure
The anchor only works if the reasons are specific enough to argue with the anorexia when it is loud. Vague reasons fold. Specific ones hold. Compare:
- Folds: "I want to be healthy." The anorexia will tell you that you are being healthy right now. It uses that word constantly.
- Holds: "I want to be present at my sister's wedding in March, actually there, not doing maths in my head at the reception."
- Folds: "I want to feel better." Feel better than what? The anorexia offers relief too, that's its whole pitch.
- Holds: "I want to be warm again. I want to sit through a movie without three blankets and still shivering."
- Folds: "For my family." Too abstract to fight with.
- Holds: "So my mum stops crying in the car after she drops me off. I saw her once. I think about it every day."
The pattern: a strong reason names a person, a moment, or a specific thing the illness has taken. If your reasons are one abstract noun each, go back and ask yourself: what does that actually look like on a Tuesday? Write that instead.
And update them. Anchors drift. What mattered in month one might not be what keeps you at the table in month four. Rewriting them is not starting over. It is maintenance.
If someone is supporting you through meals
A parent, a partner, a housemate. If someone sits with you at meals, they need to know what helps, because most people guess wrong. Well-meaning support usually arrives as either surveillance or cheerleading, and both make it worse. Send them this, or read it together.
Module 02
Why Meals Feel Like This
Your brain is doing exactly what a starved brain does
The dread before a meal. The alarm bells while you're eating it. The panic that shows up afterwards. It's easy to read all of that as proof that something is wrong with you, or with the food. Neither is true. What you're feeling is a fairly ordinary response from a brain that isn't getting enough energy to run properly.
When a body is underfed, the brain starts treating food as a threat, which sounds like the wrong way round until you look at what a long energy deficit actually does to the threat system. The circuits that generate anxiety get more reactive, not less. Meanwhile the part of your brain that would normally talk you down, the part that knows this meal is fine, is running on less power than it needs. So the alarm ends up louder than the reasoning that's supposed to counter it. It isn't a personality trait. It's what an underfed brain does.
The same goes for how full you feel. Digestion slows down when the body is trying to conserve energy, so food sits there longer than it normally would and starts to feel like "too much" well before you've actually had enough. That's also why early fullness, bloating, and being cold all the time tend to travel together. They're symptoms of not eating enough, not signs that you've eaten too much.
What tends to help people keep going is knowing that none of this is permanent. With regular, adequate food over weeks and months, the alarm settles down and fullness cues start telling the truth again. The catch, and it's a real one, is that the only route to that recalibration runs directly through the thing the alarm is telling you not to do. That's the loop anorexia sets up, which is exactly why this needs a plan to lean on rather than just willpower.
The starvation study that explains your symptoms
In the 1940s, researchers at the University of Minnesota studied healthy young men through a sustained period of semi-starvation. None of them had an eating disorder. What happened to their minds is one of the most important findings in the history of eating disorder treatment. Tap each card.
Why the illness feels like you
Most illnesses feel like something happening to you from the outside. Anorexia doesn't work that way. It speaks in your own voice, in first person, using words that sound exactly like your own values. "I'm just not that hungry." "I'll feel better if I skip this one." "I'm just being healthy." Clinicians have a name for this, ego-syntonic, which is a fairly clinical way of saying the illness feels like identity rather than something invading it.
That's also why it needs its own name. The eating disorder voice is not you, it's a separate thing that has learned to borrow your voice so well that the two are hard to tell apart. And it lies to you, fairly often and not by accident. It tells you that you'll lose control if you eat, when eating regularly is actually what gives you control back. It tells you people are watching your plate, when almost nobody at that table is thinking about your food at all. It tells you a full stomach means something has gone wrong, when it's just digestion doing its ordinary work. None of that is instinct. It's a lie wearing instinct's clothes.
Once you can hear it as a separate voice, you get to argue back, which is a skill clinicians call externalising. When a thought pushes you to eat less, move more, or undo a meal, name it: "That's the anorexia talking." Not "I don't want dinner" but "the anorexia doesn't want me to have dinner." The thought is still there. But naming it opens a small gap between the thought and you, and that gap is where a choice actually becomes possible.
A few examples of how that sounds in practice:
- "You already ate today, you don't need this." That's the anorexia telling you what you need. Your meal plan says otherwise, and it was written by someone whose brain isn't running on empty.
- "Everyone's noticing how much you're eating." That's the anorexia inventing an audience. Nobody at this table is auditing your plate the way it claims they are.
- "Go for a run first and you'll feel so much better." That's the anorexia negotiating. It always offers relief up front and charges more for it later.
The friend test
Here's a quick way to catch the anorexia in a lie: take the exact thing it just told you, and imagine saying it to someone you love instead.
Think of a specific person. Your sister, your best friend, a kid you'd do anything for. Picture them sitting across from you, and imagine they said the anorexia's line about themselves, out loud, meaning it.
Practice: whose voice is it?
Read each thought and decide: is this the ED voice, or your voice? There's no score. This is ear training.
The curve that does the healing: habituation
There is one graph behind almost everything in this tool, and you will never have to draw it, but you should know its shape. When you eat a feared meal, anxiety spikes. If you stay with it, without escaping, without undoing it, the anxiety peaks and then falls on its own. Not because you did anything clever. Because that is what anxiety does when the feared disaster fails to arrive. Brains cannot sustain a false alarm forever.
Now the important part: the next time you eat that same meal, the spike is a little lower and it falls a little faster. The time after that, lower again. That downhill staircase is called habituation, and it is the single most reliable finding in the treatment of fear. It is also exactly what the evidence tracker in this tool is measuring. When you log distress before and after meals, week over week, you are photographing your own habituation curve.
The anorexia's counter-move is avoidance. Every time you dodge a feared food or undo a meal, the curve resets, and worse, the dodge itself teaches your brain that the food really was dangerous, because why else would you have escaped it? Avoidance is not neutral. It actively feeds the fear it protects.
Six more lies, six more truths
The more of its lines you can recognise on sight, the less power they have. Tap each card.
Beliefs that keep people stuck, and what's actually true
"I should wait until I feel motivated." Motivation in anorexia is not the starting condition, it is a side effect of nourishment. The illness suppresses the very brain functions that generate drive and hope. People consistently report wanting recovery more after weeks of regular eating, not before. Action comes first. Feelings follow. It is the opposite order to how we assume change works, and it is the order that works here.
"I need to understand why this happened before I can eat normally." Insight is valuable, and it is also not a prerequisite. You can spend years understanding the roots of an illness that starvation keeps regrowing. Nourishment is what makes therapy able to land. Most teams work on both at once, with food never waiting for insight.
"If eating gets easier, I'm doing it wrong, it should feel like a fight." Early recovery is a fight. But easier is the goal, not a red flag. When a meal that used to take everything starts taking less, that is habituation working, not vigilance failing. The anorexia reframes your progress as danger because your progress is dangerous, to it.
"Recovery means I'll lose control around food forever." What actually happens, documented over and over, is the reverse. Chaos around food is a symptom of restriction. The obsession, the trance, the all-or-nothing swings are all fed by deprivation. Regular, adequate eating is what returns genuine control: the kind where food is just food and your mind is free to think about literally anything else.
Why you can't feel your way through this yet: interoception
Interoception is your brain's reading of internal body signals: hunger, fullness, temperature, heartbeat, fatigue. In anorexia, this entire channel is unreliable. Starvation turns some signals down (hunger often goes quiet, which the illness reads as proof you don't need food), turns others up (fullness screams after ordinary amounts), and the anxiety system talks over the top of everything.
This matters because "listen to your body" is genuinely good advice for most people and genuinely terrible advice for you, right now. Your body is not lying to you on purpose. It is transmitting through a broken radio. The repair is the boring one: regular, adequate food over months, after which the signals gradually come back online and can slowly be trusted again, a process your dietitian will guide deliberately.
Until then, structure substitutes for signal. That is not a failure of recovery. That is the treatment working as designed, and it is the entire reason Module 04 exists.
Module 03 · Core protocol
The Meal Protocol
This is the part of the tool you'll use every day. Three phases: before the meal, during it, and the hour after. When you begin, the rest of the page quietly steps back and this card holds the room with you. You don't have to feel ready. You just have to follow the steps.
Before the meal: five minutes
The anxiety you feel right now is anticipatory. It is almost always worse than the meal itself, and it does not predict how the meal will go. Let's set up.
How loud is the distress right now?
Zero is calm, ten is the loudest it gets. This is self-reflection, not a test. You're building your own evidence.
You haven't written your Why Anchor yet. Take two minutes in Module 01: future you, sitting in front of a plate, will be glad.
If your body is buzzing, spend a minute breathing before you sit down. It won't remove the anxiety. It takes the edge off the peak.
Breathe in
In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Follow the square. Twice around is plenty.
During the meal
Nothing on this screen measures, times, or scores your eating. There is no pace you're supposed to hit. There is only the next bite, and company while you take it.
Somewhere else to put your mind
The anorexia wants your full attention on the plate. Don't give it that. Deal yourself a card whenever the food is getting too loud.
The mid-meal wall
At some point the ED voice will say "that's enough, stop there". That moment is the wall. It is not a signal from your body. Pick a script and read it through the wall.
Or write your own
First person, the way you'd say it to yourself mid-meal. It will be waiting at the top of this phase from your next meal on.
SavedCouldn't finish everything? That's covered. Press the button anyway, do the After phase, and read the 50% protocol in Hard Days. The next meal still happens on schedule.
After the meal: the danger window
You did the hard part. Now comes the sneaky part. The hour after a meal is when compensation urges peak: the pull to move, to purge, to plan tomorrow's restriction. This hour is a wave, and the tool will show you exactly where you are on it. Distress after eating rises, peaks, and falls on its own. Your only job is to stay with it.
Press start when you leave the table. Check-ins arrive at ten, thirty, and sixty minutes.
Only if you want it. Nothing sounds unless you switch it on. If you leave this tab, the tab title will let you know a check-in is ready.
Ten minutes in: the crest
This is usually the peak. If an urge to compensate is here, that's expected, and it changes nothing about what you do next. Read this:
Want a hand staying put? Open something from the distraction menu below.
Thirty minutes in: the back of the wave
Halfway. Notice, without judging: is the distress the same as it was at the table, or has it moved? Many people find it has already started falling by now. If it hasn't yet, that's okay, some waves are slower. Stay in whatever you're doing and let the clock do its work.
Sixty minutes. You stayed.
That was the work. Not feeling good about the meal: staying through the hour without undoing it. Before you close this, mark where the distress is now.
Somewhere to put the next hour
Where is the distress now?
The two-minute table setup
Before the food is even in front of you, the environment can be doing half the work. None of these are rules, they are handicaps you remove in advance:
- Decide once, earlier. Whatever choices exist about the meal should be made well before you sit down, ideally by the meal plan or by someone else. Choice at the table is a door the anorexia holds open. A meal with zero live decisions is a meal with fewer exits.
- Screens out, one anchor in. Phones make trance easier and eating slower. Better: a podcast, music, a person, a TV show you've seen before. One steady stream of not-food to hold part of your attention.
- Warmth helps. If you run cold, and most people in energy deficit do, eat warm food in a warm room in warm clothes. Being cold amplifies distress and the urge to rush or abandon the meal.
- Same seat, same routine. Novelty costs energy. A predictable place and sequence lets your nervous system spend nothing on logistics and keep everything for the actual work.
- Set the after, before. Know what you're doing the moment the meal ends, and make it specific: this episode, this playlist, this person to message. The post-meal hour should never start with an open question.
More words for the before: three scripts
When you stall mid-meal
Every recovering person knows the stall: the fork gets heavy, the last portion becomes a wall, minutes pass. The stall is not a decision point, even though it feels like one. Try these, roughly in order:
- Name it out loud or in your head: "This is the stall. It shows up around now. It is not information about whether I can finish."
- Shrink the unit. Not the meal, your focus. The next bite is the whole assignment. Then the one after is the whole assignment. Nobody finishes a meal, everybody finishes bites.
- Change one physical thing. Sit up, plant both feet, put the fork in your other hand, take one slow breath out. A small physical reset interrupts the freeze without leaving the table.
- Re-anchor your attention. Back to the show, the conversation, the podcast. The stall lives in silence.
- If you're with someone safe, the agreed phrase: they say "keep going, you're safe," subject changes, meal continues.
- If the wall wins, go to the 50% protocol in Module 07 rather than abandoning the table. A structured incomplete beats an unstructured escape, every time.
The hour after, in more detail
Post-meal distress has a shape, and knowing the shape makes it survivable. For most people it peaks between roughly ten and thirty minutes after eating, when fullness is most noticeable and the anorexia is loudest about undoing, and then it declines whether or not you do anything at all. The whole job of the hour after is to not act on urges while the curve does its thing.
What fills the hour matters. The best activities share three features: they occupy the hands, they occupy some attention, and they are incompatible with compensating. A menu to steal from:
- Hands and eyes: colouring, knitting, LEGO, jigsaw, sketching, folding laundry slowly, a shower that is about warmth not scrubbing away feelings.
- Attention hooks: a competitive-ish game on your phone, a comfort show, calling someone who talks a lot, a language app, planning anything unrelated to food or body.
- Co-regulation: being physically near a safe person or an animal does measurable work on a nervous system. You do not have to talk about anything.
If a meal goes wrong
Sometimes a meal collapses. Half eaten, a compensation urge acted on, a skipped snack that snowballed. What happens in the next few hours decides whether it was a bad meal or the start of a bad week, and the deciding factor is repair versus punishment.
Punishment logic says: you failed, so restrict the next one to make up for it, and now the anorexia has converted one miss into two. Repair logic says: the next meal or snack happens on time, at full size, no adjustments, no interest charged. Repair is boring on purpose. It closes the door the miss opened.
- One missed or broken meal is an event, not a verdict. Log it honestly in the tracker, including the distress numbers. Honest data beats pretty data.
- Do not renegotiate the rest of the day. The plan already accounts for you being human.
- Tell your clinician at the next session, or sooner if misses are clustering. Patterns are their job. Shame hides patterns.
Module 04
Mechanical Eating
Structure over cues, for now
"Listen to your body" is good advice for a nourished body. Yours is running on a deficit, which means the signals it sends about hunger and fullness are currently unreliable narrators. Hunger goes quiet when it should be loud. Fullness shouts when you've barely started. Eating by feel right now means letting the illness set the menu.
So for this stage of recovery, we eat by the clock instead: three meals and three snacks, at regular times, whether or not hunger shows up. Clinicians call it mechanical eating. Think of it the way you'd think of a course of antibiotics: you don't wait to feel like taking a dose, and you don't stop when you feel a bit better. You take it on schedule because the schedule is the treatment.
What goes in each meal and snack is between you and your dietitian: they'll shape your plan so it covers all the parts of a plate your body needs. This tool deliberately holds no food lists, no examples, and no amounts. Its only job is helping you show up six times a day.
Set phone alarms for every meal and snack, and treat them like medical appointments, because that's what they are. You wouldn't skip an appointment because you didn't feel like going.
The Number-Free Logger
Six ticks a day: breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, evening snack. No food names, no amounts, nothing to compare or cut. A tick means "it happened". That's the whole system.
Your week
Missed ticks aren't failures, they're information for your next session. The streak resets without judgement, and the next tick is always available. One meal at a time.
Why mechanical works when nothing else does
Mechanical eating gets described as training wheels, but that undersells it. It is closer to a splint on a broken bone: rigid on purpose, temporary on purpose, and doing the healing precisely by removing movement from the joint.
Here is the mechanism. Every meal decision, whether, when, what, how much, is a fight with an opponent that never gets tired. Mechanical eating wins the war by cancelling the fights: the decisions were all made in advance, by you and your dietitian, in a calm room, with your actual interests represented. At the table there is nothing left to debate. The anorexia can shout, but the meeting already happened.
Meanwhile, underneath the psychology, the regularity itself is retraining your body: digestion speeding back up, hunger and fullness signals recalibrating, energy levelling out, the brain slowly downgrading food from threat to routine. Six ticks a day looks like nothing. It is the whole engine.
The four rules that protect the structure
- No downgrades on the day. Swapping a planned eat for a smaller one, in the moment, is the anorexia editing the plan. Changes to the plan happen with your dietitian, in session, never at the table. If a swap genuinely can't be avoided, it must be like for like, decided before hunger and anxiety are in the room.
- Windows, not vibes. Each eat has a rough time window. When the window opens, the eat happens, regardless of appetite, mood, busyness, or the anorexia's opinion. "Not hungry yet" is not data right now. The clock is the data.
- Half counts, zero doesn't. On a brutal day, a partial eat inside the window keeps the structure alive and earns its tick with a note. Skipping to "make up for it later" is the one move that actually breaks the machine, because it reopens negotiation on everything after it.
- The streak is not the point. This tracker has no streaks on purpose. A missed tick is information for Friday's session, not a broken chain. Perfectionism is not a recovery tool, it's usually one of the things being recovered from.
Troubleshooting the structure
Woke up at 11am and the morning eats are gone? Start where you are. First eat happens now, and the remaining eats compress into the rest of the day with sensible gaps. The day's total structure matters more than the original timetable. What you don't do is declare the day ruined and eat as if it started tomorrow.
Out with people when a window opens? This is exactly what snacks that fit in a bag are for, and exactly the skill of eating socially without announcing it. If it truly cannot happen in the window, it happens at the first possible moment after, not folded silently into the next eat.
Still full from the last one? Expected, and covered in Module 02: fullness in a recovering digestive system persists longer than it should and means less than it claims. Fullness at the next window is not a reason to skip. It's the symptom the structure is treating.
Travel, shift work, chaos days? The structure travels in relative time. Six eats spaced through your waking hours, whatever those hours are. Pack the day the night before like you'd pack a bag: know roughly what and roughly when, so the chaos never gets a vote.
The tracker itself becoming a compulsion? If ticking boxes starts generating anxiety instead of relieving it, or you're checking it many times a day, tell your clinician. Tools serve you or they don't get used. This one is meant to feel like a hand on your back, not another examiner.
Where this is heading: after mechanical
Mechanical eating has an exit, and it's worth knowing the shape of it even though you should not schedule it yourself. When weight and nourishment are restored, when meals have been consistent for a sustained stretch, and when hunger and fullness signals have started making sense again, your dietitian will begin loosening the splint deliberately: a flexible snack here, a spontaneous choice there, structure fading as signal returns. The end state is ordinary eating, where food is decided by hunger, preference, and circumstance, and takes up almost none of your day.
That handover is gradual, planned, and led by your team. If the anorexia proposes an early exit, and it will, usually dressed as "I'm recovered enough to be flexible now", that proposal goes to your dietitian, out loud, before anything changes. The illness asking to remove the splint is not the same as the bone being healed.
Module 05
Fear Foods
Avoidance feeds the fear. Exposure starves it.
Every time you avoid a feared food, the anorexia logs it as proof the food was dangerous. The fear grows. The list of "safe" foods shrinks. Exposure runs that loop in reverse: you eat the food, nothing catastrophic happens, and the fear loses evidence. Do it repeatedly and the fear physically fades. This is one of the best-supported findings in anxiety treatment, and it works the same way with food.
Build your ladder below. Green means mildly uncomfortable, amber means genuinely hard, red means feels impossible right now. Then work the protocol:
- Pick a food that scares you about 3 or 4 out of 10. Not a red. Exposure works when it's challenging and repeatable, not heroic and once.
- Choose a safe context. A calm day, a support person nearby if that helps, no other big stressors stacked on top.
- Have a normal serve, and here's the key rule: the exposure joins a meal or snack, it never replaces one. Your six-a-day structure doesn't move.
- Repeat it five to ten times before moving up the ladder. Repetition is where the rewiring happens.
- Never compensate afterwards. A compensated exposure teaches the fear it was right. It has to stand on its own.
Bring your ladder to your next dietitian appointment. Which food, what order, and how fast to climb are exactly the decisions they're there for.
Your ladder
Building a ladder that actually gets climbed
- Rungs should scare you the right amount. A good next rung sits around 4 to 6 out of 10 on fear: uncomfortable, doable. Rungs at 9 create refusals and resets. Rungs at 2 create the illusion of progress. If the gap between two rungs is a cliff, build a step: smaller portion of the fear food, eaten with support, in a safe place, counts as its own rung.
- Same rung, repeated, until boring. One exposure teaches your brain that you survived once. Five exposures to the same food teach it the food is survivable. Boring is the finish line for a rung, not eating it once through gritted teeth.
- Vary the context on later reps. Once a food is manageable at home, the fear often reattaches to context: the cafe version, the version someone else made, the version with people watching. Same food, new setting, is a legitimate and important rung.
- Success is defined before the attempt. Success means: ate the planned amount, did not compensate, logged the numbers. It does not mean: felt calm. Feeling calm is what happens around repetition number four. Expecting it on number one sets you up to call a win a loss.
Exposure day, start to finish
- Schedule it like an appointment, on a day without other spikes: not the day of the big work deadline, not a hard anniversary. Ordinary day, ordinary meal slot.
- Tell one person if you can: your support person, or simply your clinician in advance. Witnessed exposures get completed at much higher rates than secret ones.
- Run the normal Meal Protocol around it. Fear foods do not get a special ritual, that's the point. Same before, same during, same hour after, with the distress logging doing double duty as your exposure record.
- Afterwards, write one sentence in the log notes about what actually happened versus what the anorexia predicted. "It said I would lose control. I ate it, watched an episode, and was fine by 8pm." That sentence is the evidence the fear can't argue with next time.
- Book the repeat before the glow fades. The best time to schedule exposure number two is within a day of finishing number one, while your own proof is fresh.
When a rung won't budge
Every ladder has a rung that keeps getting postponed. Three ways through, in order of preference:
- Split it. Smaller amount, easier context, support present. Half the fear food with your support person on a Saturday afternoon is a real rung, not a cop-out.
- Pair it. Fear food alongside safe food, in a meal that is mostly familiar. Exposure does not require the whole plate to be a fight.
- Take it to session. A rung that survives three planned attempts is carrying something extra: a specific belief, a memory, a rule with roots. That is exactly the material your psychologist works with. Bring the ladder screenshot and say "this one won't move." That sentence is a great use of a session.
Module 06
The Urge to Compensate
The behaviours that undo the meal
Compensation is anything you do to cancel out eating: compulsive movement, purging, promising yourself you'll "make up for it tomorrow", or checking your body for evidence the meal did damage. They wear different clothes, but they're the same move: the anorexia collecting its fee for letting you eat.
Every act of compensation does two things. It undoes the nutrition your body needed, and worse, it teaches your brain that eating really was a threat that had to be neutralised. That second one is why compensation keeps mealtime anxiety high. The meals can't prove themselves safe if something always cancels them.
The way out is the same skill every time: notice the urge, name it ("that's the anorexia asking to be paid"), and ride it out without obeying. Urges that aren't obeyed get quieter over weeks. Urges that are obeyed get louder. You're not fighting the urge, you're outlasting it.
The ten-minute wave
When an urge hits, delay it by ten minutes. Not "resist forever": just ten minutes, timed, doing something from your distraction list. Urges crest and fall faster than they threaten to. Most don't survive the ten minutes.
Start the timer, then go do something with your hands. The wave will crest before the clock runs out.
Want the surfing words in your own voice? Write them once, and they'll appear here whenever you ride a wave.
SavedLog it, either way
Logging honestly matters more than logging perfectly. "Acted on it" entries are not failures: they show you and your team the pattern.
Compulsive or joyful? The movement audit
Movement isn't the enemy. Compulsion is. Tick any that are true of your movement right now:
A medical line, clearly drawn: if you're noticing a pounding or racing heart, dizziness, fainting, or chest tightness with movement, stop and go back to the red flags in Module 01. Moving through those symptoms is not dedication. It's danger.
Your rest permission slip
The anatomy of an urge
Urges feel like commands, but they are events, and events have structure. Knowing the structure is half the defence:
- The trigger. Usually fullness, a mirror moment, a comment, a number seen accidentally, or plain anxiety looking for its favourite exit. Triggers are worth logging because yours will cluster, and clusters can be planned for.
- The spike. The urge arrives fast and loud, with a false deadline attached: do it now, before the feeling gets worse. The deadline is the tell. Real needs don't expire in twenty minutes. Compulsions do.
- The peak. Minutes, not hours. This is the stretch the wave timer exists for, and it is the entire battlefield. You do not have to defeat the urge here. You only have to not obey it.
- The fade. Unfed urges decay. Not always to zero, but reliably to manageable, and the fade is where the learning happens: every urge that fades unfed teaches your brain the alarm was survivable, which makes the next alarm quieter. Every urge that gets obeyed teaches the opposite lesson and buys relief at tomorrow's prices.
Delay, don't debate
Arguing with an urge at its peak is a losing format: it has adrenaline, you have reasons. The winning format is delay. You are not saying no forever, you are saying not for fifteen minutes, which is a promise the nervous system will actually accept.
While the timer runs, do the opposite of what the urge wants your body doing. Urge to move compulsively: sit or lie down, wrap up warm, slow show on. Urge to undo the meal: leave the bathroom zone entirely, be near people, hands busy. Urge to check or measure: out of the bedroom or bathroom, mirror-free activity, message someone. Opposite action is not a distraction trick, it is the urge's fuel line being cut.
After a slip: the repair protocol
If an urge wins one, the next hours matter more than the slip did. Same logic as a broken meal, sharper edges:
- No compensation for the compensation. The illness will immediately propose restricting to atone for the behaviour, which is how single slips become spirals. The next meal or snack happens on time, in full.
- Log it in the urge tracker, honestly, with the trigger if you can name it. A logged slip is data. A hidden slip is a foothold.
- Tell your team, at the next session as a minimum, sooner if slips are clustering or if purging is involved, because purging carries medical risks that need monitoring, not managing alone.
- Watch the shame, it has a job. Shame's function here is to keep the slip secret, and secrecy is the only thing the behaviour actually needs to survive. Speaking it, to the log, to a person, to your clinician, is the repair.
Module 07
Hard Days Toolkit
The 50% protocol: when you can't finish
Some meals won't go to plan. The danger isn't the unfinished meal. It's what the anorexia does with it: "you've already failed, so skip the next one too." That all-or-nothing spiral does more damage than any single hard meal. So here's the protocol for imperfect days:
- Half counts. Getting through part of a meal on a brutal day is recovery work, not failure. Something in the tank always beats nothing.
- Liquid nutrition counts. If solid food isn't happening, a nutrition drink or smoothie your dietitian has okayed absolutely counts. Done is the standard, not perfect.
- The next meal happens on schedule, regardless. This is the rule that breaks the spiral. Nothing gets skipped to make up for a hard meal, and nothing gets added either. The plan just continues, as if the anorexia hadn't interrupted.
Then tell your dietitian at your next session. Hard meals are clinical information, not confessions.
Eating out and eating with others
Restaurants and shared tables stack extra loads on top of the meal itself: menus full of unknowns, other people's eyes, other people's comments. Strategies that help:
- Decide from the menu online, before you go. One decision made by calm-you at home beats twenty decisions made by anxious-you at the table. Then close the menu and don't reopen negotiations.
- Order first if you can. It stops the anorexia from "auditing" everyone else's order and revising yours downward to match.
- You don't owe the table commentary. "I've been wanting to try this" ends most food conversations. So does changing the subject: people follow the new topic.
- Anchor to the company, not the plate. The meal is the medicine. The people are the point.
When people comment: your response bank
People will say clumsy things. Some mean well, some don't think, and either way you deserve a response you didn't have to invent while flooded. Tap each card for options: one polite, one firm.
Firm: "I'd rather not talk about how I look. Tell me what's new with you?"
They said a kind thing clumsily. The anorexia is the one translating it into something sinister.
Firm: "I don't do commentary on my plate. How's your meal?"
Their surprise is about their expectations, not your needs. Your intake is between you and your treatment team.
Firm: "Comments about my body aren't helpful, even nice ones. Please don't."
Body comments are the hardest. Have your line ready so the anorexia doesn't get to write one for you.
Firm: "My food isn't up for discussion. Full stop."
This one can come from diet-culture autopilot. Their food rules are not your treatment plan.
Before the big meal: boundary scripts to send ahead
High-stakes meals (holidays, birthdays, family dinners) go better when the ground rules arrive before you do. Copy, personalise, send.
More responses for the response bank
Same rules as before: short, calm, delivered while reaching for the next thing on the table. You are not opening a debate, you are closing a topic.
- "You look so healthy now!" "Thanks, I'm doing well." Then move on. Healthy is a compliment about your life, even when the anorexia insists on translating it. You do not have to correct their wording or your brain's translation at the dinner table.
- "Wow, you're eating so much better!" "Yep. So how was the trip?" Plate commentary gets acknowledged in two words maximum and never rewarded with a conversation.
- "Should you be eating that?" "Yes." Full stop, warm tone, next topic. The single word is the boundary.
- "I'm being so bad today, I'll have to earn this later." Someone else's diet talk, not aimed at you, still lands on you. You don't have to police them: "I'm enjoying mine" and a subject change protects your meal without starting a fight about theirs.
- "You used to have such discipline with food." "That wasn't discipline, but I'm good now, tell me about the new job." Optional honesty, mandatory redirect.
- The colleague who comments every single lunch. Patterns need one private sentence, not table sparring: "Hey, do me a favour and don't comment on my food, even nicely. Makes lunch easier." Most people are mortified and stop instantly.
Event days: birthdays, holidays, the big table
Big food occasions concentrate everything hard about recovery into one room: fear foods, an audience, disrupted timing, diet talk, and family dynamics, all at once. They are survivable with a plan and brutal without one.
- Keep the day's structure intact around the event. The classic mistake is saving up: skipping earlier eats to bank for the feast. Arriving under-fuelled means arriving with the anorexia at maximum volume and the meal already loaded. Normal morning, normal snacks, whatever the occasion is.
- Do reconnaissance where possible. Knowing roughly what's served and when removes the ambush quality. Menus for restaurants, a quiet question for hosts.
- Assign your support person a job from the boundary scripts: seat beside you, subject-changer on standby, the walk-buddy for the post-meal window.
- Plan the exit before you arrive. Not an escape from eating, an escape from the room: a time you can reasonably leave, a breather spot if it spikes. Knowing the door exists usually means not needing it.
- Afterwards, log it like any meal and expect a louder hour after than usual. A big-event meal is roughly a fear-ladder rung and a social exposure stacked on top of each other. Score it accordingly, which is to say: generously.
Sick days, exhausted days, flat days
Actually ill? Eating continues, adapted. Illness raises what a body needs, never lowers it, and "too sick to eat" is a door the anorexia will hold open long after the virus leaves. Easier formats absolutely count: warm, soft, drinkable, simple. If genuine appetite loss from illness lasts more than a couple of days, that's a message to your dietitian or GP, not a solo judgement call.
Exhausted or flat? Low days lower the executive function that recovery runs on, which is precisely when the structure earns its keep: no decisions needed, just windows and ticks. Drop every optional demand on the day before you touch a single eat. The plan is the last thing that flexes, not the first.
Days you want to quit recovery? They come, usually mid-process, when the illness's anaesthetic has worn off and the promised better life hasn't fully arrived. That gap is real and it is temporary, and it is the exact stretch your Why Anchor was written for.
Why this one isn't free
Our free Binge Eating Emergency Kit is built for a crisis moment, and it remembers nothing, by design. The Companion is built for the 35 meals and snacks a week. It keeps your reasons, your evidence, your ladder, and your record, and hands them back exactly when the ED voice is loudest.
And it remembers you on this device only. No account, nothing uploaded.
Buying this for someone you love?
A lot of copies of this tool are bought by a parent, partner, or friend. If that's you, three things worth knowing:
- This is a private workspace. What they write in it belongs to them. The kindest thing you can do is never ask to see it.
- It is not a monitoring tool, a treatment substitute, or something for under 16s. It works alongside a treatment team, not instead of one.
- Your job isn't the food. Their dietitian holds the meal plan. You get to just be their person.
If you'd like words to send with it:
Module 08
The Clinician Bridge
You don't have to remember your week. Bring this instead.
Sessions are short, and "how was your week?" is a hard question to answer through fog. This summary pulls together what you've logged here: meals supported, how distress moved, urges ridden out, your fear ladder, and it prints or pastes in one tap for your dietitian or psychologist.
The summary is built from data stored only on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to share it.
Yours, on this device
No account. Nothing uploaded. Nothing to unsubscribe from. Everything you write here lives in this browser, on this device, and nowhere else. That privacy has one trade-off: clearing your browser data would clear your work. So the Companion gives you the file.
Don't have a treatment team yet?
This tool works best alongside professional care. Our accredited eating disorder dietitians and registered psychologist provide telehealth care Australia wide, and this companion slots straight into that work.
Book a telehealth consultationGetting more out of your sessions with it
The summary turns "how was your week" from a memory test into a two-minute review, which frees the rest of the session for the real work. A few questions worth bringing alongside it: which meal this week had the biggest before-to-after distress drop, and what was different about it? Which rung of the ladder should be next, and does my clinician agree with my read? Is there a pattern in my urge triggers I'm not seeing from inside? Questions like these move sessions from reporting to actual strategy, and the record makes them answerable.
The space between sessions is where recovery is practised
This companion supports the space between sessions. Recovery itself is built with your treatment team. Our accredited eating disorder dietitians and registered psychologist provide telehealth care Australia wide.
Book Telehealth ConsultationEverything you enter here is saved only on your device, in this browser. Nothing is uploaded, tracked, or shared. Clearing your browser data will clear your saved work, so use the backup button in Module 08. This tool provides general support and self-reflection alongside professional treatment. It does not provide diagnosis, assessment, or medical advice, and it is designed for people aged 16 and over. If you are in crisis, contact your GP, emergency services on 000, or the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673.