There are many, many things I wish I had known before I had known before recovering from an eating disorder. Some of these things may have stopped me from developing anorexia and bulimia in the first place. These are a few of what I consider to be the things that I wish I knew the most.
- Your eating disorder will never truly go away. You can recover from your eating disorder and restore your weight but that doesn’t mean it’ll go away fully. It’s not like a physical ailment where you get a treatment and suddenly, you’re cured. That’s not to say that things don’t get better. It also doesn’t mean that recovery is useless. My life has gotten exponentially better after recovering and recovering is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. People just shouldn’t expect for it to fully go away. You’ll have good days, and you’ll have bad days and that is completely ok, that’s normal.
- Your body will change. A lot. But for the better. You’ll no longer be cold all the time. Or have headaches that last all day. You’ll also have to go through one of the scariest things I’ve ever gone through: gaining weight. But the weight gain, the energy that you are replenishing, will help your body actually function again properly. You’ll probably get stretch marks and maybe some cellulite, but in the grand scheme of things. A little bit of dimply flesh is a very small price to pay for happiness
- You’ll probably feel extreme hunger. Extreme hunger is when no matter what you eat, you still feel hungry, and that’s because you probably are. If you’ve deprived your body of nutrients for years, you’re going to have to play catch-up. So don’t feel any reason to restrict yourself, this is completely normal.
- The most important thing that I learned is that recovery is a choice. It’s not an easy one, and it’s one that you have to continually work at, but nonetheless it’s still a choice. It’s something that gets easier over time, but it’s still a choice that you have to wake up every day and choose. It’s a lot easier to slip back into old habit. To restrict. To over exercise. But those choices aren’t the right ones, and deep down you’ll know it. I’m not going to dive too deep into this right now as I want to make another post specifically about this! When it comes down to it, recovery is hard. And it’s something that takes years of work. Years of consistent work. But it’s so rewarding. In a million lifetimes I would choose to recover. I would choose to love living, to love food again, even if it was hard.
