Recovery is URGENT

This is urgent. Your life depends on your recovery. REGARDLESS of where you are in that process. If you aren’t fully recovered, fully nutritionally rehabilitated, fully rewired then you must treat your recovery with a sense of urgency.

It’s often easier to believe this when you first start recovery. But once you’ve gained some weight and rewired some fears and can live a much less restricted life it becomes much harder to validate your own need for further work. Not least because traditional treatment focuses on weight not state. Your ED will always tell you that this is far enough and often support networks become less concerned. Outwardly you appear pretty okay, especially compared to where you were, so often that support tapers off.

Unfortunately this is where people get complacent. If you aren’t in a fully recovered state you cannot afford to let your foot off the accelerator. With any trace of an ED in your mind, once you stop pushing forward it is so unbelievably easy to fall back into old disordered behaviours and thinking patterns. Not only do you have to be vigilant but you have to keep pushing on. The places where the ED lingers will become less and less obvious. The restriction can be disturbingly invisible to the outside observer. This is where it is your responsibility, that you must treat with urgency, to identify where restriction is still showing up. What behaviours are still taking place to show your body and your brain that you are not in a place of food abundance, that food is still something to be restricted, that weight gain is something to be feared.

I know it is frustrating. I know it feels endless. I know you just want to get on with your “normal” life. I know you don’t want to have to actively think about recovery any more. But you must. You must you must you must until there isn’t a shred of doubt that you are fully recovered. Despite what your ED, and even others in your support team, might be telling you, you are still in the grips of a life-threatening illness and it is your responsibility to do what you need to do in order to be fully free.