How do you want your life to feel?
- Claire Wojturski
- May 13
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 12
We live in a world where success seems to be defined by how our lives look to the outside world. How we present ourselves, the clothes we wear, the house we live in, the car we drive, the job we have, our relationship status, the size of our body. While some of these things might have a place in our priority list I think we may, as a society, be missing the point. Perhaps a successful life is less about how it looks and more about how it feels to exist within that life.
When I was deep in my eating disorder, my life looked pretty rosy from the outside. I was thin (tick), had a good job (tick), lived in a cool city (tick), was in a long term relationship (tick), went on lots of holidays (tick), had great friends and family (tick) but I assure you that my life felt far from good. I was exhausted, hungry, cold, irritable, moody, unable to be present with my people, hated the lack of structure on holiday, feared anyone suggesting unplanned food, micromanaged my intake to allow for the “fun” dinners out, exercised without any consideration for how my body felt. In short, it felt like hell. But on the outside my life looked great, right?
Even during my recovery I was so focussed on what my life would look like when I was fully recovered. Where I would live, what type of clothes I wore, what sort of things I would do. And while these might all be reasonable things to aim for, if you aren’t considering how you feel while doing these things it will likely end up as an unfulfilling exercise. You can have those things but it doesn’t necessarily mean you will feel good once you’re there. I found it much more helpful in each moment of recovery to remind myself of what I want my life to feel like. Focusing on what I wanted my life to look like took me out of the present moment and allowed my decisions to be dictated by external validation. By returning to my body and how I wanted to feel in it, I was able to restore the connection with my core self and rebuilt self-trust. At the heart of an eating disorder is a total disconnection between our brain and body. We override so many body cues to the point that considering how we feel doesn’t even factor into our decision making. Decisions around our body and taking care of it are based entirely on what our brain deems appropriate regardless of what our body is feeling. A huge part of the recovery process for me was restoring that connection and learning to tune into what my body needed - and responding in a compassionate way. I had to learn to show up for my body and my mind as its friend. The best way for me to do that was to disconnect how I felt in my body from how I looked, or what my life looked like.
Whenever I was faced with a challenging food, or hunger that I didn’t deem worth enough to respond to, I would come back to - “how do you want your life to feel?”.
Did I really want to push through this hunger for another hour until lunch time, or do I want a life where I feel energised and focussed and have sufficient nutrition to not think about food constantly?
Did I want to feel free to order the iced latte and cookie after breakfast because it sounded good or did I want to feel like I was missing out on enjoying the little things in life?
These are all things that may be imperceptible on the surface but make an enormous difference in the way that you feel in your body and in your life. Being undernourished or restrictive in any way, be that mental or physical, will have profound impacts on your nervous system. This will leave you in a state which is not conducive to a relaxed, enjoyable life where you have the capacity to appreciate joy and happiness. Quite reasonably, your body will not relax until it feels safe that it has enough resources to do so. In simple terms, it’s very difficult to feel good in a body that is not eating enough - and that includes enough of the type of food that it wants.
You get to decide how you want your life to feel. Of course, there will always be things outside of your control, but an eating disorder is not one of them. You can decide to and take the necessary action to recover from an eating disorder so that you can feel so much better in your body and in your life. Yes it may come with changes to how you look, or indeed how your life looks, but I encourage you to shift the lens to focus on how recovery might improve how your life feels. In the hard moments, when your eating disorder is telling you precisely why that croissant is not a good idea right now, come back to the simple statement of “how do I want my life to feel?”. It may not be profound but it is a powerful reminder of what is in fact important. No one else will feel what you do so it is up to you to decide how it is that you want to show up in the world for yourself.
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