Quasi recovery; the worst of all worlds

Quasi recovery is one of the most painful parts of the entire recovery process. Not only is it painful, but it’s still so very dangerous. And unfortunately the majority of the medical community does not acknowledge this danger - in fact, very often those who are in a quasi state are deemed “recovered” by medical professionals as they meet a minimum healthy number on a BMI chart. Which could, and often is, not even full nutritional rehabilitation for many people, let alone mentally recovered. I will say it again for those at the back: restrictive eating disorders are mental illnesses, not weight illnesses.

So, what does quasi recovery look and feel like? You have gained some weight back - you may even be at your set point weight, but likely still a little below. You are not in the danger zone on a BMI chart and have perhaps started menstruating again if you are female. You are able to participate in life more. You can hold down a job, maintain relationships, participate in hobbies. But the thing is, your head is still full of all sorts of rules. You still do calculations and trade offs and spontaneity is hard. Your life is still juggled around your exercise regimen, even if to a lesser extent. You don’t feel like you can properly connect with friends and family. Deep down you just don’t feel free or happy. Quite the opposite - there is usually a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance. This is usually coupled with a significant drop in support from both professionals and loved ones. On the outside, you do appear better! And often you desperately want to be as well as everyone thinks you are. So you invalidate your own experience and try to convince yourself that yes, in fact, this is the recovered version of you. 

It’s easy to see why people stay in this state for so long. It is doing recovery on your ED’s terms. It can, at least to start with, feel like living a bigger life but without giving up the smaller body. This can only last for so long. As time goes on, you and your body know that this isn’t your happy place. While you might not be back in the depths of your ED you are still not free. That depression of living a half life seeps back in. The difficulty is that it now feels like the choice to continue with bold recovery action taking feels less necessary and urgent. At this stage it can be easy to invalidate your own need for recovery and for continued proactive effort. Be in no doubt that an eating disorder will always want to drop anchor before you have reached full recovery. This place of quasi recovery is where you have reached the edge of what your eating disorder will allow in terms of “getting better”. And this here is precisely why this is the worst of all worlds - you are in a body that is bigger than what you would like and still struggle to accept it; friends, family and even health professionals have reduced their support as you appear physically much better; yet your mind is still plagued with rules (though perhaps more flexible and different to before) and you know that this is not freedom. Neither your recovered self or your eating disorder is satisfied in this state. 

At this point there are two choices: 

1. Continue to maintain this quasi recovered state with some food rules still in place and the very real possibility that this will slip into a deeper disordered state at some future point

2. Push through to full recovery

The second option here involves doing precisely what you were doing in early recovery regardless of the physical (or indeed mental) progress you may have made. This means eating in abundance, identifying any food rules and doing the opposite action, resting like it’s your mission in life, responding abundantly to any and all hunger cues. Essentially, doing everything you can to rewire your brain to not take the ED neural networks.

I know what you are thinking: but what about my weight? I’m already at a “healthy” weight? Well firstly, are you? If you are still experiencing intense feelings of hunger, preoccupation with food or any other symptoms of starvation then I would hazard a guess that you are not completely nutritionally rehabilitated. But regardless, the fact that you have read this far into this article means that some part of you doesn’t feel that this is full recovery, irrespective of your weight. And that is the honest truth of the matter. If you still have an eating disorder in your mind then you still need to be doing the opposite actions to what your eating disorder wants. Going as far in the opposite direction as possible for as long as it takes to not have those disordered thoughts any more. This might affect your weight, but more importantly it will rewire your brain. You cannot be fully recovered by simply restoring weight - if that were the case then treatment centres and inpatient programmes would have vastly higher recovery rates. The truth is that you cannot recover without rewiring your brain. To do this you need to do the opposite of your eating disorder and that means eating vast quantities of the foods your eating disorder disapproves of, regardless of your weight or how long you’ve been in recovery or how close to the finish line you believe yourself to be (or any other caveat or condition you would like to insert here). I tried for years to find a different way out of this quasi state that I was stuck in. 

I will save you the time - just sit down and eat all the food you possibly can until the time that you no longer have urges to restrict at all whatsoever. Keep doing that until it feels easy. If it’s still feeling hard, or there is resistance to keeping on going, then you’ve still got more work to do. The easiest way I could think about it was to eat as much as possible. At a macro level that was the best possible opposite action I could take at any given moment. You probably have doubts that this will work for you. I did too. I also had doubts as to whether or not I could do it, when from the outside I seemed “recovered” already. But I knew that I wasn’t. I had to take the terrifying leap into the unknown and let go completely. I had to push through the limits that my eating disorder had put on my own recovery and you can do that too. It takes bravery and will feel scary but I promise you that it is worth it. Not a single person I have met regrets full recovery. Most people are in bodies bigger than they ever thought they would be comfortable in yet they are - they are accepting of their bodies and are free to focus on the life that they are able to live. A life that is vibrant and full. You are in the driving seat so you get to make the call, but if you’re wondering how? Then the answer is to continue to eat in a way that is in opposition to anything and everything that your eating disorder tells you to do. Keep doing that and let your body figure out its weight while your brain rewires. This is the only way to complete freedom from your eating disorder and you can do this.