Stories of Eating Disorder Recovery: Living According to Your True Values
Andrea Burkley, MS, RDN, instagram
If I could choose one word that best describes what helped me most in my recovery journey, it would be freedom.
What helped push me to actually try recovery and give it a chance was the desire to have my life back and to lean into my core values.
It was the desire to be free from the restrictive and binding rules, the body distrust, and being a prisoner to the scale. Living with an eating disorder is not truly living, but that is difficult to see at the time. But as my disordered behaviors progressed, it became clear to me that I wouldn't be able to experience the adventures and create the memories I wanted if I was bound by my eating disorder. I remember having a moment where I told myself, "This isn't how you want to spend your time and your life". That inner dialog was the catalyst that began my path to recovery. There is so much more to life than what we are led to believe that our eating disorder will give us.
Recovery is a choice, a challenging and difficult choice that is made every day throughout our journey to food and body peace. But choosing recovery was the best choice I have ever made. Choosing recovery meant asking for help, embracing vulnerability, challenging my comfort zone, taking a blind leap of faith, and letting go of doing things perfectly. Stepping into the unknown can feel terrifying, but I encourage you to consider what you will gain by moving forward. Challenging the narrative of what we have been told by diet culture and embracing every part of what makes us our unique self isn’t easy, but that is where the true beauty lies. I had to do a lot of work (and continue to do so) on giving myself unconditional acceptance and self-compassion. I feel like we are constantly absorbing messages from our society and diet culture that we must be in a nonstop race of self-improvement and bettering ourselves to fit into a narrowly accepted mold and ideal. Giving myself permission to trust that I was enough as my true authentic self was incredibly empowering in my later stages of recovery. And I strongly believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t surrounded myself with a community and support system that accepted me as I was.
Recovery is many things. But recovery is not linear. Recovery lives in the gray space and we get to decide what values will help guide us on our journey back to ourselves. Ultimately, recovery gave me freedom and gave me the opportunity to live my life. Full recovery is possible, and you deserve a life of freedom. You are enough.