Eating Disorder Recovery During a Pandemic
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
Tomorrow. I will start eating more tomorrow, I tell myself.
A flood of relief washes over me as I scurry out of the kitchen and back to the safe haven of my room.
For years, this was the pattern of my life.
I would decide that I wanted to stop being the isolated, self-absorbed, anxiety-filled shell of a human being that anorexia had reduced me to. But every time it came to doing the hard work — eating more, exercising less, and allowing my body and mind to just rest — I backed out.
I wanted to recover in theory. I just couldn’t muster up the courage to do it in practice.
Until one day, I got really sick of it.
I got sick of my mind feeling like a storm was brewing in there, all the time.
I got sick of feeling tired and angry and overwhelmed for no real reason, other than that my body needed to be fed.
I was sick of a life in which the only time I could feel happy was when I was running — and even that wasn’t true happiness, but simply a byproduct of the endorphins produced by my brain because of the exercise I forced on myself.
I was sick of living in my own world, of cutting myself off from the amazing people and opportunities in my life.
And so I chose to truly recover, which meant that I had to change my disordered habits. I stopped restricting food, stopped overexercising. I gradually healed my mind and body, until I got my life back.
I just wished it hadn’t taken me ten years to truly start this process.
Because if I had done the hard stuff ten years ago, if I hadn’t allowed myself to relapse as soon as I gained some weight, I wouldn’t have had to endure a decade of misery and isolation. I wouldn’t have subjected my family to the cruelty that is anorexia — for ten long years. And my body wouldn’t have had to undergo the destruction that malnourishment forced upon it.
I wouldn’t have had to sacrifice years to this cruel ‘half-life’.
But I cannot turn back the clock. I cannot change what I did.
However, I can tell you this: Don’t wait to start recovery from an eating disorder.
Many recent news articles have highlighted how coronavirus and quarantine make it more likely for people with a history of eating disorders to relapse. They emphasize how the pandemic makes it even more difficult for people in eating disorder recovery to recover.
I completely understand that these articles are written with good intentions.
I understand that they are meant to make people with eating disorders feel less alone in their struggles.
But here’s the thing about eating disorders: they will use anything — and I mean, anything — as an excuse to survive, to keep a firm grip on your mind.
They will find any excuse to prevent you from living a life of freedom and joy.
And you can bet that your eating disorder will try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to restrict food, to exercise more, to turn to your eating disorder as a way to cope. It will tell you that this is a time when these things are okay because you are using them to cope, despite the harm they are doing to you.
But here’s the other thing about eating disorders: they will never allow you to feel ready to recover.
Your mind will always find a good reason to procrastinate recovery. It will keep telling you that now is not the time to fight against your eating disorder.
There will always be a million different fears that stand in the way of your recovery.
But here are three critical reasons to start recovery NOW:
1. If your body is energy-deficit and/or malnourished, then your body is deteriorating.
When your body is undernourished, it stops producing critical hormones such as estrogen. And, when your body doesn’t produce enough estrogen, your bones start to break down due to decreased estrogen.
This will cause your bones to become porous, and will eventually lead to osteoporosis unless you heal your body. Estrogen also prevents heart disease by keeping the arterial walls flexible, which allows blood to flow to the heart muscle. When estrogen is low, the walls of the arteries can grow rigid, and this can cause cardiovascular disease. This means that the longer you wait to nourish your body, the higher your risk for heart disease.
Estrogen also prevents aging of the brain while improving cognition. When estrogen levels are low, the brain ages faster, increasing one’s risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Low estrogen also prevents proper neural functioning, which impairs cognition and can cause drowsiness and brain fog.
Basically, when the body is not receiving enough food and rest, it will decrease estrogen production, which places your heart, brain, and bones at risk.
See, many people who develop anorexia intend to recover but prolong it for too long. So I was lucky, extremely lucky that my body didn’t shut down, that my heart didn’t stop pumping because of the torture I induced upon it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t have the time, don’t have the chance, to change.
The human body wasn’t designed to handle the stress that eating disorders place upon it.
So do everything in your power to alleviate that stress, before it’s too late.
2. Everything and everyone else in your life will fall to the wayside the longer you stay stuck in your eating disorder.
Eating disorders don’t just prey on physical energy; they take much of your mental energy as well, leaving little room for anything but food, weight, and exercise. This means that your relationships will fail. Your career will fail. You will deem friendship frivolous. You will have no time or energy left for other people.
Even though there are people in your life who need you, you can’t really be there for them until you stop treating yourself like a machine and start taking proper care of yourself.
3. The longer you continue to hold onto your eating disorder, the stronger it becomes — and the harder it will be to get yourself out.
Eating disorders are essentially a series of bad habits, done over and over again until they become ingrained into the mind, and the longer you are sick, the deeper they get.
And the deeper these ruts in your brain get, the more difficult and anxiety-provoking it will be to combat them.
So choose now to recover.
You have to start doing the hard stuff. Your mind will not change, your life will not change, until you change your habits.
And while recovery may be challenging and uncomfortable, it will definitely be worth it, because you will get your life back.
So keep moving forward.
