Eating disorder recovery

ED behaviors and changes since recovery. Part1.

Welcome back ! Its nearly the new year and that means, for a lot of us… new year’s resolutions. Do you like them ? I personally am a big fan of starting fresh and making resolutions, a dream board…

In one of my previous articles (How to start recovery, check it out 🙂 ! )I talked about how its important to make goals that promote recovery. I gave a few examples such as stopping all exercise. Thats what I want to write about today. I want to share with you all of my past eating disorder behaviors and how they changed in recovery by the act of setting goals.

I used to workout up to 5 hours a day, walking up to 42 km a day, doing 3+ hours of intense cycling, running 40 km a week. In recovery, the ultimate goal when you have such a strong adduction and compulsion to exercise is to stop it all. This can seem extremely hard but its actually the only way to go if, in the futur, you want to start a healthy relation with exercise. In recovery, you want every single calorie you are eating to go to repairing your damage organs. I you think about it, you have exercise so so so much that your poor organs are completely damage, especially if you were also restricting energy. So in the beginning of my recovery, I made a goal : stop all exercise cold turkey. That was bloody hard. BUT I promise you that it is LESS hard than keeping a little 30 min/1h of exercise a day !! The pain and guilt will stop and you feel so f*cking FREE and STRONG !
I used to skip A LOT of meals. At a point in my ED I was only eating once a day. But then I introduced back the standard 3 meals a day. But each time I had an opportunity to skip a meal ( leaving the house, feeling bloated, not having time …), I would. This lead to confusing my body, having even worse digestive issues, insomnia, severe OCD, an increase of every ED behaviors, and much more. In recovery : NO skipping meals. And I mean NONE of them. I had to shut the fear and ed voices and just eat. No matter what. The thing is, your ED will make you think » oh but I m not that hungry, its intuitive if I just skip this meal blah blah blah » That is a big fat lie. Your body, in starvation mode due to a restrictive eating disorder (anorexia ,bulimia, bigorexia…) Is STARVING 24/7. And of course you may not feel the physical hunger cues ( I will make a post about it !) because of the lack of energy that can produce a hunger signal, but your mental knows. Your mental hunger is most likely always present. In recovery, I made a goal of not skipping ANY meal.
OCD behaviors : (mine were) stretching all of the time, justifying and saying sentences in my head before eating, during a meal, and after eating, not letting myself go to bed after 10 pm, not waking up after 6am, saying and smelling each and every ingredient in my meal, taking the longest road when walking, standing up all day even when eating, pausing and using the hunger scale 10 times when eating, eating the same meals every day, walking at 27000 steps a day in addition of my workout routine… and a freaking lot more. wow what a life right ? You know what is even better than feeling the satisfaction that these behaviors give you ? STOPPING all of these behaviors and feeling FREE ! In recovery, you guessed it, NO OCD beheviours AT ALL !! all of these behaviors I wrote, I had to stop ALL of them cold turkey, force myself and FEEL the fear. Here was my number one motivation to stop : if you continue these behaviors, they won’t just stop with gaining weight in recovery. So imagine yourself, gaining weight and becoming at a healthy weight ( GOAL of recovery) BUT still having all of these behaviors !! This is just horrible to think about. Its keeping a part of the illness locked in you. I could not tolerate this idea, I wanted to be FREE and a 100% recovered !! physically AND mentally: And this thought led to me making goals for each and every behaviors. I promise you, this is so worth it. Becoming FREE; it feels like you are a new person.

I will do a part 2 of this ! I really hope this helped.

Until next time, take care !

Set point weight theory … trust the process.

Welcome back lovelies ! Today I wanted to talk about something that has helped me tremendously in my recover. And thats the set point weight theory. You may or may not have heard about it but its actually a real thing.

If you need to restrict yourself, deprive yourself or if you struggle with restrict-binge-purge cycle to control your weight, then your weight may not be healthy for you

Or if you need to spend hours exercising everyday, or compensate eating with exercising to not gain weight – then maybe your weight is not healthy for you.

The theorie is that our body has a unique and natural weight in which it is comfortable and optimally working. And that basically, by eating our natural diet made for us ( whole food plant based ), you don’t have to actively be worried about gaining weight, manipulating your body…

Another important fact to know is that in recovery from an eating disorder, our body will most likely over shoot : this means, that you might gain more weight than your set point. And that is crucial for healing the organs, letting your body know that it is now safe to thrive without a famine. But over time, as you continue in recovery, not restricting, trusting the process, giving your body lots of food, love and rest, the weight will naturally fall off, to your set point weight.

That is why you can let go and trust the process. Gaining weight felt so much more « enjoyable » for me because I knew this is inevitable for healing my body. And it helped me to really don’t be scared of gaining and gaining and gaining as I knew it was normal and that eventually the weight will fall off. So LET GO of the fear and trust the process. Your body has been in so much suffering because of anorexia (or any type of eating disorder) so let him have a chance to heal.

Eating, moving, resting… all of these things should not be manipulated. They are natural and healthy if done without micro managing every single aspect. In an eating disorder, you most likely have gone to an extreme. For me, I went to the extreme of not eating at all, skipping meals, doing 5 hours of exercise a day, never resting, sleeping 5 hours per night, being extremely skinny ..etc. SO to find balance you can NOT just consider yourself like a « normal eater/ exerciser », you have to first HEAL the damage and this by going to the other extreme. For me this meant eating a lot and a lot of food, resting literally all day, sleeping up to 10 hours every night, not doing any exercise. And of course, gaining weight.

It is not :

Eating disorder → normal eater (intuitive eating and exercise)

It is :

Eating disorder→ recovery→ normal eater

Recovery is about taking charge of your life and protecting your body.

I Hope this helps, take care !

How to start recovering from an eating disorder

Recovering from an eating disorder can be very difficult. Of course its a life challenge where you are basically creating a new life.

Today I wanted to start up this blog by giving you all of my best tips for starting recovering from an eating disorder. Because, for me, the hardest part was starting, taking the first step and giving in. I went on and off for 5 months before finally going all in recovery. But I think that if you can go all in as quick as possible then its always best. Alright, here are my best tips to jump in recovery.

Realize you have an eating disorder : That is so important. If you don’t realize it, you can’t identify the problem and work on healing. Take a look on your current life, what behaviors you are doing, the exercise you are engaging in, the restriction, the OCD behaviors. Make a list. This list will be very helpful to identify what to change and clearly see that these behaviors are not serving you. They are destroying you.
Create a recovery list : Now that you have identify the behaviors, the eating disorder in itself, you can change, you can create a recovery « plan ». Now, I am NOT recommending creating a rigid plan that involves a meal plan, exercise plan… because the ultimate goal of recovery is being totally free from rules. BUT, I personally took the previous list I made (about the destructive behaviors) to make recovery goals . For example, I personally had a very strong exercise compulsion and was exercising up to 5 hours a day. In recovery, I recommend going cold turkey on exercise. Exercise is DESTRUCTIVE in this part of your life. When you have a strong urge to exercise and basically can’t not do it, then stopping ALL exercise is a necessity. So, I used this as a goal. I wrote it on my recovery list : go cold turkey on exercise and stop it all. And you do this for every behaviors – creating a goal, a recovery goal.
Going cold turkey : ok so that may not work for everybody, but for me I found that the best way to start recovery was to basically change everything over night. Doing small little changes in one direction but still engaging in some other behaviors was just not doing it for me. The eating disorder was still present in my life because I was accepting it in some directions. But when I finally decide to go all in, everything changed. I became so much motivated to recover. I could make changes a lot more easily because I knew I was NOT going to compensate by increasing a ED behavior to try and compensate. So I decided to go cold turkey on everything. I started eating way more, never compensating, Not doing any exercise, relaxing as much as possible, stopping all OCD behaviors. Of course, this was bloody hard. In fact, it was the hardest thing I had done in my entire life. BUT my number 1 tip is » feel the fear, but do it anyway ». You know what you have to do to recover, I do not doubt in your motivation because often its not an issue, the real issue is the fear. This fear is huge. But, feel the fear and do it anyway. The feeling after it is amazing. Its like you get out of prison. You CAN !
Get support : this one is also huge for me. I did not know anyone with an eating disorder so it was hard to ask for help or just know where to start. So I started reading a ton of books and looking for online support. And thankfully there was a lot of resources available. It helped me so so much. And thats the reason I decided to create my own blog ! To help anyone who is struggling with an eating disorder. You are not alone and I promise you that its possible to fully recover. I recommend watching Alice Olivia’s videos on youtube, and reading « rehabilitate, rewire, recover » from Tahitha Farrar. There is a lot more .(Follow the intuition, itsahealthylifestyle, Kayla rose (damn the diet), Kate noel…)

All right then ! I really hope this was helpful and that it will motivate you to finally go all in. Recovery is scary but its the most amazing thing you can do for your life. It is so so worth it. You can start, and right now !! not tomorrow and not waiting to be more ready. There will never be a perfect moment to recover. The perfect moment to recover is now ! its when the voices tell you to wait. FEEL the FEAR, BUT DO it anyway !