“There is no right way to recovery, but you’ll know it when you’re there.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Every blogger will understand me when I say the fun in blog maintenance is looking at the search terms people used on Google to find your blog.
It used to be that all the search terms people used to find my blog were either disturbingly perverse (like “fat naked girls have fun burping”) or annoying (“why are Koreans so stinky”– You’re stinky!!!) or funny (“cocky journalists who hate PR”). And then there are also quite a few people who apparently desperately want to impress their ladies with “sexiest dessert for the lady,” and more people who are obsessed with Kiki Kannibal’s apparent sluttiness.
For the past several months, ever since I wrote this post about weight gain in recovery, I’ve been getting a lot of search terms that circle around a confused fear over gaining weight and recovery. And I’ve been getting increasingly concerned.
A look into my site stats: Alarmingly, a lot of search terms dwell around a refusal to gain weight during recovery: “how not to gain weight but recover from anorexia” or “I’m anorexic but don’t want to gain weight” or “how to restrict again after anorexia weight gain.” And just as grieving are the search terms that ask the wrong questions: “2500 calories too many in anorexia weight gain?” or “anorexia recovery diet plan” or “how much weight a day must I gain during anorexia recovery.”
I’m hoping those individuals will also find this post. Because there’s something I realized during the course of my recovery–and even now–and that’s that it is very, very hard to recover if you’re constantly thinking about recovering.
Take me, for example. I have thought and planned and agitated over recovery for years. Guess what? I never did. I might have made the right steps to gain the weight, but mentally, I just never recovered because I was still stuck in “recovery” mode: aka NOT NORMAL. And because my thoughts were still systemized in recovery/abnormal mode, at some point my self-will faltered– and it will someday, because we all have our weak moments– and I crashed back into relapse.
Of course, recovery is a war. You’re fighting against all your “natural” impulses. You’re defying your mind’s dictates to cut calories here, throw that food away, run in place to burn more calories, and ultimately crumble in petrification and despair. You have to be alert constantly. You have to catch yourself from succumbing to eating disordered desires. You have to forcefully change a lot of unhealthy habits.
But. Here’s the Catch-22: At some point in recovery, you need to live more than fight. Because nobody can fight forever.
The ultimate goal of recovery is not to survive. It’s not even to gain back the weight you need. It’s not just about becoming physically healthy. At the tip of it, it’s about gaining back your life. It’s about regaining the same opportunities other people have in pursuit of our dreams, and the same rights other people have to enjoy happiness. We want to be human.
Recovery won’t solve all our life’s problems (life without problems is not worth living), but that’s the whole point of it! Being recovered also means dealing with life’s other problems! We want to cry over break-ups like a normal human being who experienced love. We want to deal with disappointments that don’t have anything to do with food or weight. We want to get mad at people and resolve complicated relationships that are outside of ED’s web-fingers. That’s all part of life, and we want to be involved in it.
I remember during my struggles with recovery, every tear I shed had to do with my ED. It was due to frustration over my inability to recover, or anger that someone made me eat something I didn’t want to, or self-pity that I’m wasting away my youth at home with no friends and no hope. Every minute, I was planning recovery. After breakfast, I was planning lunch. After lunch, I was planning dinner. After dinner, I was planning how not to overeat before bed. Repeat the next day.
Okay, not everything was physical. I even sought God with the main motive to recover. I read my bible every day, hungering over words that I felt fed me strength to recover. I listened to sermons on podcast, tuning into topics that inspired me to recover. I wrote eloquent posts on my blog (not this one), all about how I must recover, want to recover, or can’t recover. I told myself I want to repair my relationship with God, but honestly, I just wanted to use Him to recover (And thus became utterly bitter towards Him when I relapsed).
I had “recovery” programmed into my mind and body. That kind of mentality just cycled me continuously round and round the ED circle.
It’s not easy to shed that “ED recovery” mentality. There isn’t a switch you can just click to turn it off when you feel you’re at a good place. It took quite a while for me before one day, I realized that I haven’t thought about ED for a long time. It’s just…not part of my life anymore, at least not a central part, because I have bigger fish to fry.
When I came back to the United States after my extended stay in Singapore, I thought I was in a very good place. Singapore was the turning point of my recovery, and I had stopped counting calories, started eating out more, conquered a lot of food fears, and gained some weight. I came back home all rah-rah, wanting to demonstrate to everyone how recovered I am.
But real life doesn’t work like the structured days I had in Singapore, where dining was planned and people tried to cater to my preferences. I found myself freaking out whenever I had to enter a situation not knowing what or where we’re going to eat.
I still remember the weekly Friday Bible studies with my church friends, and how much I agonized over the fact that nobody factored meal plans into that meeting. My friends would say, “Okay, let’s meet at 7 p.m.” And that left me flabbergasted! 7 pm?! That’s dinner time! So are we going to eat together? Should I eat before? But that’s too early! After? But it’ll be 9 p.m. when we’re done! And so I haggled them, “What about dinner? Should we just have dinner together? Should I prepare something?” And inside, I was boiling with self-righteous indignation. HOW can they be so insensitive?! I fumed. Don’t they know that I still have to gain xx lbs? Don’t they know I have to eat constantly? I can’t just skip a meal like they can!
And then one friend finally told me: “Sophia, I feel like you’re always fixated on the meal. That’s not the focus of our meeting. Relax. We’ll deal with the meal situation when we come to it. Nobody else is worrying about dinner, just you.”
God. How I reddened up then! Of course. Here I was, thinking I was recovering by following the precise steps of recovery, but missing the whole point of it. I still had ED in the brain. I was still acting like a patient obeying prescriptions for pills and bedtimes. But at some point, I needed to get out of the ED hospital, and enter society in the real world.
I have received a lot of emails, and a huge chunk of them have to do with questions such as “What do I eat? How much? When? What happens when I eat xx calories? Is xx lbs too much? Can I eat this and that?” And I tend not to directly answer those questions, because I feel that it just leads the person in the wrong direction. Instead, I really want to emphasize the whole purpose of recovery: living outside of the ED bubble.
We know what it is like to live with ED. Our mind is constantly fogged and buzzing with questions, fears, anxieties. What’s the good in loading it with more questions? There is no right way to recovery, but I know recovery when I see it.
I know how hard it is to have to deal with the constant questions that pop into our heads. But I feel that you don’t have to deal with all of them. Sometimes, you just need to tune them out because they are meaningless distractions from life. Turn on the music, dance wackily, and laugh at yourself in the mirror. Go out with friends and listen to their problems. Get your hands busy in clay, paint, knitting, whatever.
And at every moment that you can, marvel at the miracle of life, and the awesomeness of God. Smile at the people around you, because they are precious. Enjoy simple self-pampers like slathering your hands with sweet-smelling lotion. Read the Bible because God’s Word is sweet, not because you think it’s the weapon to recovery. You’re not just regaining your health and future with recovery. You’re regaining the ability to give thanks and pleasure in the daily moments of life, right now and then.
From my experience, when you find that first, recovery will find you. But for now, keep calm and live on.
P.S. I blabbered so much in this post, yet I know I’ve missed many significant things. If you’ve got any more to contribute, please do. 
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spot on.
Such a powerful post, my friend. I’m so proud of you for writing it and for where you are. The only thing that could make it better would be a picture of you from Facebook recently. You are gorgeous and glowing and look…so alive
Those search terms are kind of sad and scary. I hope they find this post too.
Oh how I remember frantically typing all those search-terms you just mentioned…
You’re spot on with this one. And sadly, I needed the reminded, so thanks so much for this.
I know you’re absolutely right, I feel the same. When I’m busy, either being productive or having massive fun, I’m fine. It’s not until I’m alone (or even isolate myself a bit) when things start getting out of control. And once I slip, I continue to (b)eat myself up instead of giving myself a time-out to start over. A “relapse” is killer for me; I find it so hard to get back up on my feet. Oh how I miss the girl I re-found this summer, the free, lively, open old me. I really thought that was the break I had needed to grow back into ‘me’ again. And then, about a month later, I slowly lost it again, that feeling of ultimate freedom. I am yet to find the groove back..
Must say though, that, during (earlier) recovery, I would sometimes (unconsciously) ‘mis use’ the ‘I just need to keep myself busy to not focus on ED’-mantra. ‘Oh wanna meet at 7pm? Fine, oh no worries about dinner, normal people sometimes skip!’, or just simply not give myself to think about the whole recovery and mostly the reasons behind ED. I was so busy being busy. Which is not healthy either, especially when you still need to heal so much more than gaining a social life back.
Sorry for this mini-essay, but again, thanks for the reminder Sophia. I hope you’re well.
XSooz
That is really weird, because that is exactly how I found your blog, though it shames me to say it. This was around 9 months ago when I was thinking about recovery but didn’t want to gain the weight, you know, the usual story. It’s only as I went on that I found weight gain was a) Neccessary for my health. b) The only way to recover fully. Once you gain weight everything food and weight related clicks into place mentally, though when you are starving to death is is hard to believe that!
But anyway, this post is so true, because I got obsessive about recover, as much so as I was about my anorexia, though I was obsessed with gaining this time instead of losing… I think recovery is more about ‘letting go’, something I am currently struggling with. It’s funny how sometimes recovery can be as much of an eating disorder as our eating disorders…
Most people who have disordered relationships with food and excercise are high achievers who also are very pattern and control oriented. I think, especially in today’s day and age, it’s very easy to become addicted to the idea of meeting a calorie goal. It’s just another way to define the hours of your life, and to give you direction in what, let’s admit, is very directionless world. (as a sidenote, just another reason why I think, even for people who don’t admit it, we all need some kind of spiritual force guiding our lives.)
It’s something I struggle with quite a bit. In recent weeks, one thing which has helped me, however, is to SIT and pray when these feelings of calorie or activity anxiety really rage.
Our minds impose patterns on us. Makes us slaves to nuerological impulses. If you’re “normal” has become running 5-6 miles a day and undereating, then doing anything but seems alien beyond comprehension. However, that lifestyle is the one that’s alien to most dynamic people with other priorities in their lives. Recovery is what those priorities are, even if it means the unfortunate distinction of yes, sitting on your but at work all day, bored out of your mind.
Through those kinds of actions, you’ll eventually break the addiction to habits which have redefined what ‘normal’ is.
always love how you care and want to help others hugs
What an amazing post
LOVE THIS. And it’s so true. Recovery is not about a attaining a target weight, it’s a mental thing, which is something I think so many people fail to realize. I calorie counted for over a year after I was “recovered” and agonized over every calorie…and though I was a normal weight and not restricting, this kind of behavior still isn’t normal! Recovery has to be about a return to normalcy and can’t just be about a number on a scale.
Dear Sophia,
I agree search terms can be pretty hilarious.
And appreciating the miracles that is life, people and our differences always make me realise just how beautiful our world is and that life is truly worth living.
I thought this was a very well written and thought out piece, one of your best yet. I love all your pieces, but this one sort of summed them all up and finally helped me better understand that complex psychological state a person is in, in recovery, that I had a hard time grasping because it seemed so contradictory to me. You need to live more than fight… those were key words in helping me understand. Thanks
I mostly love this post, because it describes a transition I’ve been through recently. I totally agree that to be truly recovered you have to stop focusing on recovery and get on with life. However, I do think it depends very much on where you are in recovery- when I first started gaining weight, I simply wouldn’t have been able to do it without counting calories and obsessing over weights and times, etc. And if I hadn’t done gained the weight and made myself eat, I would never have been able to get my life back. I think that you have to go through the obsessive phase before recovery will find you.
Thank you very much for writing such an awesome post.
This was such an amazing post. Absolutely beautiful.
I AGREE. LISTEN TO YOUR BODY AND ALIGN YOUR POSITIVE THINKING
So, so spot on. And I agree with Abby: After visiting your blog for the first time in months, I’m totally astounded by how beautiful you are, and radiating health. Your writing, while amazing before, is somehow even better now.
Everything you said here in almost 100% in accord with my experience in recovery. I’ve finally gotten to a place where I realised, a little while ago, that I haven’t thought about the ED I used to have in months. For the first time in a long time, I look normal and my attitude towards food is similar to those around me. I also remember having meetings that were meant to start at 5pm and run until 8pm and thinking, ‘When am I supposed to eat? I CAN’T be hungry! Must eat!’, and would be tempted to skip classes that supposedly ran past lunch time. (*Rolls eyes* It sounds insane writing about it but I know at that point in recovery it felt like the only rational thing to do was focus solely on eating…)
Once again, you somehow make a great piece of writing about a certain phenomenon without having to explain it. Aside from the eloquence with which you write, I think another reason it’s so powerful is that the piece essentially says “me too”.
(If that doesn’t make any sense — I’m trying to channel Brené Brown’s TED talk where she says that “The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: me too.” I’d argue it applies even if it is a past struggle!)
Anyway, great post. I will definitely keep calm and live on – just as you seem to be doing!
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