Abandoning Your Eating Disorder

Eating disorder recovery is often described in positive, self-affirming words: a triumph, the road to a better life, a battle worth fighting for or a way to save yourself. It’s easy to couch a very challenging path in phrases that feel victorious and that lead to a new wonderful existence. However, these words belie the challenges and realities of what real recovery looks like.

The nature of an eating disorder is to be tightly woven into one’s self worth and identity. So recovery can feel like ripping away a central part of who you are. If it is clear how much pain and suffering the eating disorder causes, people will understand what the process is like and can see more clearly how they will get better. The idea that recovery is somehow wonderful and easy could not be further from the truth.

Extricating oneself from the idea that you are the eating disorder is a painful and tortuous process. It feels like losing a piece of oneself and saying goodbye to a central part of your being. Despite the torture of the eating disorder, the thoughts, symptoms and rituals provide structure and solace throughout the day. They make one feel productive, comforted and safe. They create rules that otherwise don’t exist. They provide a feeling, no matter how false, of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Without the grounding and soothing of the disorder, life feels confusing, aimless and pointless, at least until one can see how other parts of life can be fulfilling and meaningful. Recovery demands the need to find other important parts of life to replace the disorder, like friends, work, passions or hobbies, that can feel grounding in and of themselves without the eating disorder. At first, it feels like nothing can replace the eating disorder, but over time other elements of life do begin to matter.

I recently read Evanna Lynch’s memoir, a large part of which is about her eating disorder recovery. She says many astute things about recovery. The one that stands out to me the most is that there is no bargaining with an eating disorder. As long as you bargain, the eating disorder always triumphs. The only way to get better is to abandon the eating disorder, as if leaving it by the side of the road to die on its own. As painful as this step is, it’s essential to find a place inside oneself where the eating disorder rules and thoughts just don’t matter anymore. It’s a painful and lonely place at first, but it leads to a new way of life that has its own rules and eventually joys. The pull to the simplicity of the eating disorder may linger, but life takes over in surprising ways when you let go.

This is a novel thought because she does not sugarcoat recovery. She talks plainly about how difficult it is. And she also describes a clear but painful path to getting better. It’s better for someone embarking on recovery to know the truth.