Stories of Eating Disorder Recovery: Learning to Trust My Body
Angela is a future Health at Every Size®- informed PA and is passionate about dismantling diet culture. Follow her here for more inspiration!
“Our bodies are not against us.”
That is something that I would go back and tell myself a couple years ago when first starting recovery. With diet culture being as pervasive as it is, the message that our bodies are in constant need of fixing is creating a collective distrust among the inherent wisdom we hold. Trusting our bodies has become an abstract and strange concept. Learning more about body diversity, weight stigma, and HAES®, has helped me monumentally in taking a wider perspective on these issues that create a disconnect between our inner wisdom and bodies. It’s not anyone’s fault that they feel as if their bodies are a problem and need tight control over. That’s the message we’ve all been taught over and over again.
You aren’t broken for not being able to accept your body. Instead of jumping into expressing gratitude for my body, I first had to acknowledge all the amazing things it does for me. It can be hard to feel gratitude when we spend a long time going against what our bodies are telling us. That’s the thing with having an eating disorder: it’s like battling the very thing that’s trying to keep us living and thriving. If the process of regaining trust with our bodies is not a smooth transition, that makes total sense. I started with coming up with a few things each day that my body was doing. I didn’t necessarily expect to feel gratitude or acceptance, just acknowledgement. “My body is keeping my heart beating and my lungs breathing,” for instance. Eventually, I was able to recognize just how cool it was that my body was doing those things despite the fact that I had ignored it’s signals for so long. I felt like maybe my body truly was a friend. Hunger wasn’t something I had to fear anymore. If my body was giving me intense signals (mental or physical), to eat, it wasn’t that my body was trying to trick me. My body wanted me to heal. It wanted me to heal. I could work with my body, instead of against it. This felt like taking a huge sigh of relief. It gave me a foundation to work with for the rest of my recovery. Maybe instead of questioning my hunger, I could recognize that it was guiding me towards the life I wanted. Extreme hunger was normal. Mental hunger was normal. It was normal to eat huge quantities of food. It was normal to eat more than anyone else. My body had a plan to get me healthy, and it was okay to trust that.
I mentioned earlier that educating myself on HAES® and diet culture helped me in my recovery, and that’s something that I consider crucial in recovery. How can we accept body changes when we hold the belief that fat is bad? I really had to immerse myself in what fat activists had to share, and open my mind to new ideas that go against the grain. Being fat, getting fat, or staying fat, are all acceptable. I don’t think enough people talk about this in the recovery space, and it’s a necessary conversation to have. When eating disorder professionals assure people that “they won’t get fat,” what’s the message they’re sending? It’s harmful to suggest that getting fat would be a negative outcome of recovery. Perhaps someone has to gain a significant amount of weight to get their full life back, and maybe that body size is larger than what society would consider “acceptable.”
There is no acceptable or unacceptable body size to start recovery, or end up at through recovery.
I really had to accept that my mind may not like my body size, but my body doesn’t care about my judgment around that. I can learn to slowly become neutral about my body, or even learn to accept and love it eventually. I’ve had to separate nourishing my body from my emotions around it. Liking what you see in the mirror is not a prerequisite for caring about your body. Exposing myself to all body types on social media was helpful in this process as well. Mainstream media has a long way to go in showing diversity, but there are more and more people on social who are unapologetically showing up and sharing their stories.
On the topic of social media, I encourage everyone to clean out their feed and unfollow anyone who makes them feel like they have to change or measure up against someone else. Social media has been an incredible tool in my recovery journey, but we must be cautious in who we follow. I have found it most helpful to follow ED professionals such as dietitians who are HAES®-informed, as well as fat activists and fat positive accounts. If you are not aware of the HAES® movement and how it can relate to recovery, I invite you to start there. There are also amazing podcasts such as Christy Harrison’s “Food Psych” podcast that are informative and changed my recovery for the better.
The last thing I have to say, is to be an advocate for your own healing. I’ve talked with so many people in recovery, and they are some of the most compassionate and intelligent people I know. Take that same compassion and give it to yourself as well, because we all deserve a full recovery. You deserve that. You deserve to fight hard for your freedom, because the world needs you in your full self. Counting calories and shrinking our bodies is not what we are here for. There’s a purpose for you, and I hope you realize how valued you are. Please keep going, and please don’t be afraid to show up for your healing. This process doesn’t last forever, but you’re the only one that can take initiative and go for it. Life is different when we aren’t living based on the disorder’s rules. It’s different in the most liberating and empowering way, and you need to experience that for yourself. Do not lose hope. You are loved.