So just looking at your weight chart we can see it's gone down 500 grams but you were completely convinced you'd actually put on two kilos today. What do you make of that? Yeah, that's so weird.
I definitely thought my weight would be up today. I just feel so gross and so fat today. Feeling gross and feeling fat today, you said? Yeah.
Okay. That's not the first time you've described it. yourself as feeling fat. Have you noticed that? Do you tend to say that a bit?
Yeah definitely I feel fat a lot of the time. And we've noticed that it's something that people with eating disorders do tend to feel quite often. quite intensely as well so it might be worth talking about today.
Okay sure. Well it might seem strange but fat is not actually an emotion so you can feel sad or you can feel angry you can feel happy but you can't really feel fat. What do you think about that? I guess so, but like when I'm saying I sort of, I do feel it, I feel like, feel on my thighs, I feel like a father.
Yeah, well I guess what we find is sometimes when people are sad, feeling fat or they're saying that they're feeling fat that there can be some other stuff going on at the same time but that fat becomes like a a label for for their negative feelings that there could actually be some other emotions going on or something some other physical sensations. Okay. Well, you felt strongly this way this morning.
What was going on for you today? Well, I woke up. I felt just pretty awful, I guess. I went out for dinner last night with my boyfriend and we went to a restaurant that I didn't really want to go to.
I wasn't really comfortable with the menu. And then we had all these arguments about our stuff. and I was thinking about all this this morning. Okay. Didn't want to go to work.
Didn't even want to come here. I wonder if maybe you were having some feelings about what happened last night, the disagreement about the restaurant and how that went. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess I was. I was thinking about it a lot and I was feeling pretty guilty about what I ate. I was feeling pretty guilty about how I reacted. I was feeling really anxious.
about going to work and people seeing me and I thought I'd put on weight. So, yeah, I guess there was a lot of stuff. Sounds like there's a lot of difficult feelings going on actually. Yeah.
You know, what can happen is that when we're feeling lots of negative feelings, it's all very confusing and overwhelming. It's not uncommon for that, if you have an eating disorder, for that focus to shift onto your weight or shape, which you're already pretty unhappy about. You already have some kind of... with feelings about yourself and your body and weight and shape. So with all that other stuff going on, it's not uncommon for your focus to become about that and for you to then think, oh, I'm feeling fat, rather than all the other emotions that you mentioned.
Yeah, I guess that's what makes sense. It seems a bit strange, but I guess so. But I am just fat, so...
Right. Well, don't forget that your weight's actually gone down today and remember you weren't actually... feeling so fat last session if you recall there's been sessions where you've you've reported feeling really fat and in sessions where you felt pretty good yeah that's true that's a bit weird doesn't really match on with my weight does it one way to think about it it's like this that we've been tracking your weight and it's been kind of fluctuating in the normal range but as you've described sometimes you feel really fat and other times you don't so your feelings of fatness are fluctuating a lot more than your actual weight it's not that you're getting fatter and smaller and fatter and smaller it might be that there's some other things going on like what you just described last night yeah that's definitely true i do feel like i've gone up heaps and it hasn't and this is your actual weight here so what i'm curious about is these more intense feelings of fatness and i'm wondering if if when you feel fat you could start to jot that down in your monitoring sheets.
Yeah, I could do that. There might be quite a lot of them though. Yeah, well, I understand that often you can feel fat, but let's focus on the really intense times because I think they'll provide the most information for us.
Okay, sure.