New Blog Series: Revealing My Road to Recovered

Addictions, disorders or diagnoses do not spontaneously manifest. That’s one of the reasons why they are so pernicious. The origin of an addiction or disorder can be unnoticeable, but surreptitiously spread and infiltrate virtually every aspect of a person’s life. Or at least that’s how an eating disorder was able to hijack my brain and shape my life for three decades.

As a young child, I had crippling, and undiagnosed, anxiety fueled by low self-esteem and desperate feelings of unworthiness. Without the awareness and language to name what I was experiencing, my pain and discomfort manifested as being overly emotional, overreactive, too sensitive, too loud, too difficult, too everything…. As a kid in pain, I just wanted relief.

As an eight-year-old kid I did not have access to numbing tools like alcohol or drugs. I did, however, have access to food. I did not turn to food as a coping tool consciously. It just happened. Food tasted good and made me feel joy and comfort. Food provided a momentary respite. Nothing else delivered quite the same, almost immediate, satisfaction.

The use of food as a coping tool and early onset puberty mixed with the chaos of general adolescence, led to issues I was too naïve and emotionally immature to understand. Concerns about the increasing weight of my body became a topic of conversation.   

I didn’t know it at the time, but focusing on my body and weight provided a distraction. It also provided a fantasy where I believed if I lost enough weight and/or looked a certain way, everything in my life would be better. But better rarely showed up. And when it did, it didn’t last long.

With a heavy assist from our diet centric culture, my obsession with my body and weight quickly expanded to include calorie counting, moralizing food choices, body checking and punitive exercise. Then restriction, binging and purging. These obsessive thoughts and behaviors grew and hijacked my brain and drove my choices and actions for over thirty years.

I fought for recovery many times during those three decades. I focused on minimizing or eliminating eating disorder behaviors. At times I was able to reduce some eating disorder behaviors (like binging and purging), but, unbeknownst to me, I always compensated by using other eating disorder behaviors (food restriction and compulsive exercise). While I made a couple attempts over the years to address the thoughts (intense self-loathing and feelings of unworthiness) motivating the behaviors, the pain fueled by relentless and overwhelming shame prevented me from getting very far. 

Until March 2015, when at the age of thirty-nine, I committed to recovery in a way I had never done before. Without conditions, stipulations, or pre-requisites. At almost forty years old, I’d hated my body and myself for most of my life. I did not want my next forty-years to be the same, so I decided to move through recovery differently. Rather than find ways to move around recovery, I dove head first into recovery and journaled my way through it all.

Beginning Monday, June 7, 2021, I will begin sharing journal entries, emails and essays I wrote before, during and after my 2015/2016 eating disorder recovery. 2015 wasn’t my first attempt at eating disorder recovery, but it was my last. I recovered. For the first time in over thirty years, I no longer had eating disorder thoughts or behaviors and I accepted my body. Because of the strategies I learned, practiced and developed during recovery I have maintained a full recovery for over five years.