Things I wish I had known about Recovery
It is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, it’s more difficult than starving, fasting or counting calories, it hurts more than hunger pangs and dizziness; it brings to light every ounce of self loathing you have and you can’t just starve it away anymore but learn how to sit with the pain
On that note, if you’re asking yourself “am I even sick enough to have anything to recover from?” the answer is 100 per cent yes, because healthy people do not have to ask themselves those questions. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been enduring this, whether you’ve lost fifty lbs or your weight hasn’t changed - eating disorders are a mental illness, not a physical one.
That being said, you can’t have one foot in recovery and one foot within your eating disorder. Trust me, I tried. All it does is create a hellish purgatory where you’re not losing weight but you’re hungry all the time and all you can ever think about is food and numbers and macros and weight and meal times and miles walked and your body.
When you first start recovering you’re going to experience a terrifying level of hunger, you’ll eat full meals and it won’t even touch the sides. You’ll wonder how you ever managed to get through the day eating so little, and you’ll try countless times to curb your insatiable appetite. However the very difficult truth is that the only way to get rid of extreme hunger is to - you guessed it - eat.
Eat when you first wake up, don’t worry about chugging a litre of water. Eat snacks for no reason, eat junk food, eat because someone else is, eat when you’re hungry and when you’re full and when you’re bored and when you’re angry and when you’re scared. Eat. Eat the meal your mother made for you and cherish the taste, remember how much you loved her cooking when you were a kid. When your jeans don’t fit anymore, eat. When someone makes a comment about your weight, eat. There is no way to escape the insatiable hunger your body feels because you have been starving it for so long.
You will be confronted with the harsh reality of how sick you are. This is particularly prevalent for those of you in denial - like I was. I told myself it was all ironic, that I could stop at any time, that I even ran a fucking thinspo blog ironically because I wasn’t like everyone else, I wasn’t stupid or skinny enough to actually develop an eating disorder in my late teens. Instead every day I had to endure my suddenly overwhelming thoughts regarding food, and there was no escaping it.
You’ll start to realise how frequently normal people engage in disordered behaviours or ways of speaking. You’ll have to watch your colleague drink the black coffee that you tried so hard to pretend to like. You’ll listen to aunts, sisters, cousins, brag about their new diet or talk about how bad they’ve been for eating. You’ll listen to guys talk enviously about some other girl who is super skinny. You have to rise above it.
The alternative to recovery, of course, is death. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even in ten years. Perhaps you’ll live to the ripe old age of ninety. I wonder how your body will look then? Will you have children sat by your death bed - could you endure the horror of being fat and pregnant? I wonder how much you’ll weigh? Will you look back on your life and feel an immeasurable sense of pride because against all the odds you’ve had a thigh gap to die for. You missed out on the birthday cakes, on christmas dinner, on going to the movies with your partner and your hands touching over a bowl of popcorn. You sacrificed years of your life to running, walking, starving, starving, so hungry you think you’ll die - but you didn’t, except one day you will.
Despite it all, how infuriatingly difficult recovery is; if I could go back to my lowest weight and run my hands over my ribs, admire my teeny waist and collar bones; I would choose recovery every single time, because I am myself again - after fucking years of living as a ghost I can proudly say I actually exist and have thoughts outside of food and I promise you it is possible to be fully recovered, but you have to eat.
