One thing I will say is that if you’re recovering from an eating disorder, be cautious of the recovery community here on tumblr. While I found useful information there that made me realize I needed to get help for my EDNOS, it also ended up being really harmful when I was actually trying to recover.
I’m struggling to find the right way to describe it, but I think one of the biggest things is that while there are a lot of people who say they’re in recovery and clearly aren’t (which is a whole thing on its own), there are also plenty of people who say they’re in recovery, and they actually are, but so much of what they do is talk about their ED. And I get it, it can be really consuming, but eating disorders are so competitive and it hurt more than it helped for me to see people who were all going through the same stuff in their recovery and I wasn’t. It made me regress a little bit in some ways, because I felt like my recovery wasn’t real and therefore my ED wasn’t real all because I wasn’t going through what these other people were.
An example of this was seeing other people talk about their “fear foods.” So many of the recovery bloggers I followed took their fear foods veeeerrrry seriously. They would talk about how hard it was to go out to eat and see a menu full of fear foods. They’d talk about breaking down crying trying to eat a fear food unsuccessfully. They’d talk about the victory of finally eating a few bites of a fear food. They would talk about how a year ago, their fear food was an impossible feat, but they just ate the whole thing and only thought about it a few times.
I didn’t have any fear foods. I wasn’t out there crying over a fear food I couldn’t eat, or posting about how it was scary seeing a menu full of fear foods. All my foods were fear foods, really, because I had a restrictive eating disorder. But when I would see people talk about their fear foods, I started to question myself. I already didn’t have an easily-definable disorder (and I’m not going to get into specifics, because I don’t want to accidentally influence anyone else to think the way I did), and even the doctors I had begged for help didn’t believe I had an eating disorder. But when, on top of that, my symptoms and behaviors didn’t match up with other people’s, I felt like I was even more unbelievable. Like maybe I didn’t really have a true eating disorder. And if I didn’t really have a real eating disorder, why bother trying to stop whatever it was that I was dealing with? Why bother to recover if there wasn’t anything real enough to recover from?
That mentality kept me from really working on my recovery for a long time. And recovery is a long process anyway, but that certainly didn’t help me move along any faster. And I want to say that maybe it’s my own fault that I was influenced by it, but really, many mental illnesses- including eating disorders- can make a person more vulnerable, and that was why it all got to me. As strong as I tried to be, it was tough when the place I turned to for refuge and support made me feel worse. I ended up trying to figure out what my fear foods were, and I sometimes even mentioned them in posts, because I hoped that by mentioning something that seemed “legitimate,” maybe my struggles could feel more legitimate, too. But all it really did was keep up that sense of competition that I had with my ED, and it got in the way of getting to a healthier place sooner.
I want to clarify that I’m not saying having fear foods is bad, or that posting about fear foods is bad- everyone’s journey is different, and if that’s yours, that’s fine. I’m just putting this out there to let people know to really be mindful of outside influences and how healthy the media around you is when you’re recovering from an eating disorder. If you have fear foods and it helps you to see other people talk about theirs, too, then great! It’s awesome to find something that helps you heal.
But if you realize a blog or multiple blogs you follow are hurting more than helping, take that big step and unfollow until you’re in a healthier place. I know we can’t control all the messages we see around us, but we can choose what blogs we follow, and I’d encourage anyone recovering to seek out the blogs that help, not hinder. Just keep moving forward in recovery. That’s what matters.
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