Now a bit of a content warning, I discuss my eating disorder pretty in-depth here, so if that bothers you, this might not be the best post for you. Now let’s jump right in.
The biggest thing to know if you or a loved one has an eating disorder is that recovering is a choice. As horrifying as it is to watch someone you love get worse and worse, there’s nothing you can do to force them to get better. My parents explained in detail what I was doing to my body, and how it was killing me slowly, and that still didn’t stop me. They told me how I could lose my teeth from all the stomach acid and how I could lose heart tissue and die, like Karen Carpenter, but it didn’t matter. I was so convinced that it wouldn’t happen to me- that I would be lucky and be able to stay Anorexic and never develop any issues. Well, I was wrong. Although I am grateful everyday for the fact that I don’t have any serious complications from my Anorexia, I still have some minor issues that cause me inconvenience. My kidneys are a little iffy and I do have some teeth damage! Isn’t that wonderful. Now, I am also extremely lucky to have many people around me, who supported me recovering, but ultimately it didn’t matter. I had to make the choice to get better. It didn’t matter that I knew of the possible complications, or the fact that I knew that this was tearing my family apart and causing them to not be able to go to their favorite restaurants or go on trips because I couldn’t find something on the menu that fit my very restricted pallet. I still had to make the choice to recover. Other people can try to help. For example, my parents didn’t let me go to the bathroom for 30 minutes after eating to try and stop me from purging, but that didn’t really work. By the time they figured everything out, I had experienced gastric slowing, which is essentially your stomach delaying digestion. Because of this, I could basically purge up to 3 hours after eating. The thing is, true recovery is not something you can half do. Recovery is hard. It’s a choice that you have to wake up and choose every day. For the first 2 years of my recovery, I didn’t try at all. I went to therapy, and went through the motions of recovery, but I wasn’t actually recovering. I remember thinking, “Yea thanks for the advice Casey, (my therapist at the time) but I’m no going to stop doing anything that I am doing.” I was going through the motions of recovery to try and make my parents believe that hospitalizing me wasn’t necessarily. The think is, with recovery, you quite literally have to rewire your brain. You have to change the way that you think. Nobody else can do that for you. You have to take charge of your own life. Even to this day I have to make that choice. I have to choose to not purge, even though when I’m stressed it seems very, very tempting. I also have to choose to not restrict, and to take care of myself. These are extremely hard decisions, but there’s a reason why I make them almost every day; recovery has opened up a whole new world of joy.
