Stories of Eating Disorder Recovery: Changing Your Environment
Emma is a dietitian at Peace.Love.Food Nutrition Counseling who is on a mission to recreate society's definition of health and nutrition.
Changing my environment and finding a community that supported me (as I am) definitely helped me in the final stages of my recovery. This community included individuals on social media, in my workplace, in my personal life… but also me. I am the most important individual in the community that supports me.
Reflection is so important in recovery, however, it’s something that no one enjoys engaging in because it can be scary. It is scary to unravel all the thoughts you believe about yourself, the reality of the situation you’re facing, and the steps that need to be taken to move forward.
When someone stated, “Your body is the lamest thing about you.” I finally started to understand how valuable I was as a human, a friend, a significant other, a daughter, a sister, a coworker. All the love, happiness and care I brought to these people (and myself) were not impacted by my body - so why was I acting as if my body was the only thing people liked about me? Why was I trying to change something so badly to show people how great I was? When in reality, doing so actually took me away from these people.
It’s hard because nothing is ever black and white in recovery.
It’s actually just one huge gray blob.
It’s hard to commit to something when the outcome seems so far away. When I stopped worrying about gaining weight, I actually gained my life back. A life that I never had, a life that was filled with so much compassion, vulnerability, and growth. Things that my eating disorder could never give me. Because when it comes to trying to lose weight and shrinking ourselves… we lose more than just that.
We lose happiness. We end up forcing ourselves to eat a certain way, to avoid specific foods/options, which then pushes ourselves to move in ways our body isn’t ready to, in ways we aren’t ready to.
We lose trust. Trust in our body’s ability to work, our body’s ability to keep us safe; to keep us alive. Our bodies do so much more than just eat, digest, and absorb food.
We lose time. Time spent with loved ones, time spent exploring, discovering, trying, loving, being, living. Diet culture takes us away from this, forcing ourselves to spend too much time restricting and obsessing over food and movement.
We lose feeling. We push aside our body’s cues of hunger, fullness, cravings - restricting our options to nourish ourselves in different ways.
And we lose ourselves. We get so lost in the unrealistic expectations of diet culture that we forget that our size and our weight will never come close to our worth. To what we can do. What we are capable of. We start going through the motions, following rules day in and day out.
Think about what diet culture takes away from you. Take it back. Appreciate all that your body does, the breathing, the regulation, the movement, the loving. Loving your body is not always easy, so start small and just thank it. Thank your body for all it does, you never want to lose it.
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