Brian Pollack, LCSW, CEDS-C
Brian is the Founder and Clinical Director of Hilltop Behavioral Health, a boutique eating disorder specialty practice in Summit, NJ. He is one of the few male master’s-level Certified Eating Disorder Specialists in the country, with expertise in FBT, male clients, athletes, and muscle dysmorphia. He hosts the Minding Men podcast and serves as an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University.
Learn more about Brian →Watch the full episode above before reading on — or keep scrolling if you’re already thinking, “yeah, this is exactly me.”]
There’s a moment in eating disorder recovery when someone says something that sounds almost too simple to be helpful. Something like: you have to change how you eat to get better. And your first reaction might be to roll your eyes so far back you can see your own thoughts.
Because yes, obviously. You know that. So does everyone around you. But knowing something and being able to do something are two very different things, and that gap is exactly where eating disorders live.
Because yes, obviously. You know that. So does everyone around you. But knowing something and being able to do something are two very different things, and that gap is exactly where eating disorders live.
The Rules Nobody Handed You a Rulebook For
Here’s something worth sitting with, you didn’t wake up one day and decide to have a complicated relationship with food. Nobody does. Food rules, the ones that whisper things like that’s bad for you or you don’t deserve that or if you eat that, something bad will happen, don’t arrive with a warning label. They sneak in.
They come from an ever-shifting list of what’s clean, what’s toxic, what’s “real” food, and what’s basically poison dressed up as a snack. They come from social media, from a coach who once said something offhand about your body, from a parent who meant well, from a sports team, from a magazine you read at thirteen. They come from everywhere, which is exactly why they feel so normal, so rational, so much like just… the truth about food.
The tricky part? By the time most people recognize these rules as rules, they’ve been following them for years. They’ve become the background noise of every meal, every grocery run, every restaurant menu. They feel less like a choice and more like gravity.
As registered dietitian and Intuitive Eating co-author Evelyn Tribole puts it:
“Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices.” Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
That reframe matters. Food rules don’t just change what we eat, they quietly attach themselves to our sense of worth, making recovery feel like so much more than a plate of food.
Control, Comfort, and Why the Rules Feel Like Friends
This is where it gets important. Especially if you’re a parent watching your child struggle and trying to understand why they won’t “just eat.”
Food rules don’t just restrict. They organize. For someone in the grip of an eating disorder, those rules often represent one of the only places where life feels predictable. In a world that can feel chaotic, scary, and out of control, knowing exactly what you will and won’t eat is a form of order. It feels like safety. It feels like competence. And that’s not weakness, that’s a very human response to an overwhelming world.
So when someone, a parent, a therapist, a treatment team, asks a person with an eating disorder to let go of those rules, they’re not just asking them to eat a sandwich. They’re asking them to dismantle the scaffolding holding up their sense of security. That’s why it’s so much harder than it looks from the outside. That’s why love, willpower, and logic alone rarely cut through it. The rules aren’t just habits. They’re survival strategies that have long overstayed their welcome.
Eating disorder specialist and author Carolyn Costin captures why recovery requires building something new in the place those rules once held:
“When your healthy self is strong enough to deal with all that comes your way in life, your eating disorder self will no longer be useful or necessary.” Carolyn Costin, 8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder
Recovery, in other words, isn’t just about subtracting the eating disorder. It’s about growing the part of you that doesn’t need it anymore.
What If There Were No “Bad” Foods?
Recovery asks something radical. It asks you to consider, even for just a moment, what it would look like if food was just… food. Not good or bad. Not clean or dirty. Not earned or forbidden.
Just food.
That probably sounds somewhere between impossible and irresponsible. Our environment and diet culture has spent decades building a very convincing case that certain foods are dangerous and others are virtuous, and unpacking that in the middle of an eating disorder can feel like trying to rewire a house while the lights are still on. But recovery isn’t about perfection or even full belief, it’s about practice. It’s about making room for the possibility that the rules might be wrong, even when every anxious thought insists they’re right.
Tribole and her co-author Elyse Resch describe the obstacle clearly: the principles of intuitive recovery work “by either increasing interoceptive awareness, or by removing the obstacles to this ‘superpower.’ The obstacles usually arise from the mind in the form of rules, beliefs, and thoughts” (Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach, 2020). In other words, the food rules themselves are the barrier, not a lack of willpower, not a character flaw, not a failure of love.
What breaking free from food rules looks like is different for everyone. For some, it’s working with a therapist trained in Family-Based Treatment (FBT) to take the decision-making pressure off the person struggling while the family provides structure and support. For others, it’s slowly, methodically, and compassionately challenging one rule at a time with clinical guidance. There’s no single path — but there is a direction, and it always points away from restriction and toward flexibility, nourishment, and eventually, freedom.
The goal isn’t to love every food or to never have preferences. The goal is to eat without fear. And that is absolutely possible, with the right support.
Ready to take the next step? Whether you’re navigating your own recovery or supporting a child or loved one, the team at Hilltop Behavioral Health specializes in exactly this kind of work. We’re here when you’re ready. Contact us today to learn more.
