Vigilance and Persistence are the Needed Traits to Get Better From an Eating Disorder

Eating disorder treatment is hard because the process is long and slow and because one needs a lot of resiliency to handle the ups and downs. It’s so important not to let the harder times transform into hopelessness and instead to remember that continuing down the path of recovery leads to getting well.

The eating disorder thoughts and urges become very ingrained. All mental and physical actions around food are somewhat subconscious since we are all biologically-driven beings who the need food to survive. This fact remains embedded into our most basic essence. Even if these actions are disordered, our minds are designed to repeat food patterns over time.

Changing those patterns involves a different type of vigilance. One needs to be aware of the smallest subconscious thought that might lead to eating disorder behaviors. People in recovery often say things like: “I’ll just do this one more time” or “I’ll start tomorrow” or “nothing will happen to me if I don’t change in the next few days.”

Even though everyone in recovery recognizes these thoughts are false, the lure and comfort of continuing a known path is strong and hard to resist.

Getting better means having consistent and regular accountability combined with contact with someone who helps recognize the insidious thoughts and choose a different action.

The central tenet of this part of recovery is vigilance. Only by being vigilant each and every day can a person in recovery make long lasting changes to the subconscious eating disorder thoughts.

The second part of recovery is managing the daily ups and downs of getting better. Everyone has stretches of time when thoughts and actions start to fall into place and lead to recovery-oriented steps. Similarly, everyone has periods that feel like going back to square one.

Neither extreme is the truth. These widely different experiences reflect the challenges of recovery. The process of getting well is not linear at all. For a long middle period of recovery, people know and understand the nature of the eating disorder, how the thoughts work and ways to counter the disorder mental and physical actions. Yet they still get stuck routinely in old patterns and become increasing frustrated and, at times, hopeless.

The second tenet of recovery is persistence. Changing ingrained patterns is a lot harder than acquiring new information and understanding. These well-worn patterns of eating will only transform with persistence to translate the knowledge about recovery into action and eventually into ingrained, subconscious behaviors. With enough work over time, this change will happen.

Vigilance and persistence underlie success in getting better from an eating disorder. The combination of these two traits with the focus on recovery each day leads to truly getting well.