Reaching the end of the leash

There comes a point in eating disorder recovery where you reach the end of the ED’s leash. It’s hard to know exactly where this will be, and it’s very individual, but there are arbitrary lines that you will not cross. There are just so many ways that this could show up - be it weight, food types, food combinations, timing or conditions.

It’s not that things have necessarily been easy up until this point, but you’ve been able to conceive of doing it. You’ve been able to make some progress but with the knowledge that there is an upper limit on this. When you do reach this Hard No it can be tempting to justify the boundary with ED’s favourite: “but you’re so much better than you were! You don’t need to keep pushing any further”.

You never used to eat bread at all, now you can have it twice in a day! You don’t need to challenge having pasta for dinner too.

You’re at a healthy weight on the BMI scale! You don’t need to keep eating large quantities of food if you’re not really hungry for them.

You’ve already added full fat dairy, unmeasured toppings and juice to breakfast! You don’t need to have a milky coffee too.

It’s this never ending refrain of anything additional being “unnecessary” or beyond what is acceptable. In my recovery I learned that whenever the words “unnecessary” or “unacceptable” came into my thinking I knew that my ED was getting involved. For me it was helpful to see these things as red flags in order to do the opposite - to march right into whatever my ED deemed unnecessary. It is so easy to believe this statement though, especially when you are a lot better than you’ve ever been before. There really is evidence of significant progress. The difference, though, is that you’re not at your destination yet. This isn’t what full recovery feels like. When you’re fully recovered, you don’t spend time wondering if something is necessary or not. 

So what do you do when you get to the end of the ED’s leash? You have to snap it completely. You have to pull so hard in the opposite direction that there’s no stopping you now. And in my experience that was completely liberating and a surefire way to build confidence. To be able to do the things that I thought I would never be able to do. 

I’ll say this again for the people at the back: you will never fully recover if you have conditions on your recovery.

You cannot pick and choose which pieces of your eating disorder remain. Typically, people with eating disorders, myself included, want to recover but not have their bodies change. This is a deal we simply cannot make. And we wouldn’t want to! Despite the aesthetic praise a malnourished body may attract in our thin-obsessed world, a body that is not at its natural unsuppressed weight will not function optimally. This resistance to weight gain is also in and of itself a symptom of the illness. This knowledge helped me dramatically in my recovery - to know that my fear of weight gain was in fact a symptom that would lift once I was recovered. To know that I wouldn’t always fear weight gain or find it unbearable to live in my unsuppressed body. I do acknowledge that I have recovered into a socially acceptable body and that the fear of being treated differently in society due to an unsuppressed body weight that does not benefit from thin privilege has many added layers of complexity. Despite these challenges, the simple truth remains that you cannot fully recover while playing within the boundaries of what your eating disorder deems acceptable.

The only way to fully recover is to continue to push through the arbitrary boundaries that your eating disorder has set for you. It’s at this point, when it feels almost impossible, that the biggest gains (no pun intended) are made. Through this process, despite feeling impossibly challenging in the moment, you will build so much self trust and empowerment that you will be able to carry with you into the next chapters of your life. The things we build in recovery are incredibly powerful and we take these lessons with us throughout our lives. So if you feel that sense of resistance, and have your eating disorder coming up with all sorts of reasons why anything more is “unnecessary” I encourage you to show up for your core self and push through these boundaries. You deserve a completely free life, not one where you’ve agreed to the eating disorder’s conditional recovery.