What the Journey of Eating Disorder Recovery Actually Looks Like

Sometimes eating disorder recovery looks like a straightforward, if not simple, path. Work on eating a meal plan, restore health and weight and then waltz off into a well body and healthy life.

Anyone who promises this plan and utopian endpoint is not telling the truth.

Eating disorder treatment is a journey that is deeply introspective with unexpected twists and moments of fear and hopelessness and others of inspiration and joy. In between, there are long stretches of monotony and the mundane.

Recovery looks a lot more like daily life but just more intense. The journey from the reliable prison of an eating disorder combined with the numbness and isolation of that life to the immediate connection to and experiencing of the real world is a lot to handle at first. Being so much more exposed to outside reality and the internal experience of more emotion can be overwhelming, especially since eating and body changes accompany these steps.

Over time, it becomes clear that treatment is a much longer path. It’s necessary to have a companion, aka a therapist, who is knowledgeable, patient and kind. It’s important to try to surround oneself with at least a few other people who care. It’s essential to learn to have compassion and kindness for oneself.

There will be many bumps in the road. The negative thoughts about oneself stay present for quite some time. Moreover, finding things that matter serves a necessary function to show that there is more to life than an eating disorder.

The path is long, usually years long, but it is not a march to an endpoint. It’s a journey that steers life in a new direction, opens up ways to see oneself and the world that were unthinkable before and makes life so different than it might have ever been.

The journey is in fact the point, not recovery itself. The eating disorder was a byproduct of the effects of life and a stopgap measure for survival. Getting well means finding a way to live that matches the true person underneath and her desire to live in the way she wants to live. Recovery is not only playing the long game. It is focusing on one’s life and not just getting by.