One hurdle that can really trip people up in recovery from an eating disorder is the belief that their difficulties and recovery journey are somehow unique and different from everybody else’s.

Whilst it’s true that we all have our own reasons for being ill and our own path to recovery, the feeling that we are going through a different process to everyone else can be a very sneaky way for the eating disorder to keep its claws in. Some of the thoughts I had are ones I know are shared by others, and I wanted to try to help challenge them.

Everyone can eat freely/intuitively but me
I always believed that I would never be able to eat intuitively because I didn’t trust my hunger cues or ability to judge how much or little I needed to be eating. I’d been rigidly controlling my intake for my whole life to various extremes, so I found it really hard to know if I was hungry or full. I also had a perpetual fear that once I started eating ‘bad’ foods, I’d never be able to stop. I didn’t trust myself around foods I was craving, which were often very energy dense, because I was convinced I’d binge. As it turns out, those urges and obsessions around particular foods decrease with adequate, regular and consistent eating. Since my body has understood that I am going to give it enough food when it’s hungry, those cravings have stopped. I can quite happily eat the foods my eating disorder told me were ‘bad’, and I can stop when I am full or have had enough. I don’t fantasise about eating and I understand the cues for when I’m hungry and full. I can eat as and when I like, trusting that my body will tell me when and what it needs. It can take a long time to learn, but it is possible.

I will keep gaining weight forever
This is probably one of the things that held me back the most. I constantly feared if I stopped controlling my intake that I would continue gaining and gaining and gaining. The only way I’d ever maintained my weight for any period of time was still by rigidly planning everything I put in my mouth, and because of that I feared I’d lose control over my body. Whilst it is true that my natural weight settled at a higher place than I’d have liked it to, and above the target weight eating disorder services set for me, the weight gain did stop. Trusting my body to let me know when it was at its healthy point was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I was absolutely petrified. But the world hasn’t fallen apart regardless of me sitting at a slightly higher weight than I have been previously. It was also really important for me to recognise that even if my body does settle in a particular weight range for a while, it doesn’t mean it will stay there forever. There are lots of reasons why bodies change over the course of someone’s life, and it was a big step in my recovery to realise my weight at 30 is unlikely to be the same as when I was 17. It’s also likely I won’t remain the weight I’m at now forever, because things change and that’s okay. Also, most people need to gain above their pre-eating disorder weight to be healthy and free from the illness, and we don’t talk about that enough.

Everyone else doesn’t have to compensate but I do
Looking around me, I could see lots of people who don’t exercise, purge, use laxatives or restrict their diet in some way, and their weight remained stable. But I did not believe that was the case for me. All of those behaviours have plagued me at one point or another, and I was convinced that the only way I could allow myself to eat more is if I continued to compensate in some way. There was always a caveat to increasing my intake. It was only through reducing and stopping these behaviours that I discovered I could maintain my weight in a healthy place without them.

Other people can recover but I can’t
I have believed this my whole life. Looking around me and seeing other people doing well in their recovery didn’t give me hope, because I convinced myself I was different from them. I always felt that my eating disorder was somehow harder to recover from, or that I’d been ill for too long, or that I wasn’t strong enough to make changes that others could. It was just something I didn’t believe was possible for me. What was true, was that I wasn’t pushing myself enough. I was always too afraid to let go, too afraid to make the changes I needed to make for recovery to be a reality for me. Once I did that, and got out of my comfort zone, recovery started to become a realistic prospect.

Others deserve recovery but I don’t
Eating disorders are often inherently connected to low self worth in some form or another. When your self esteem is poor and you feel unworthy, thinking you are deserving of a happy and illness free life can feel impossible. That can be a significant barrier to motivation, which often waxes and wanes throughout the recovery process anyway. Learning that you deserve to be well because everyone deserves to be well can be a real turning point. You are not the exception to this rule – your happiness and future matter too.

There are lots and lots of ways eating disorders will try to keep their claws in you – for me these were some of my biggest stumbling blocks. With lots of hard work, therapy, food and consistency, I have been able to overcome them. Although I still have some of these worries every now and again, they do not get in the way of me making the right choices for myself and my recovery.

It’s undoubtedly true that everyone’s recovery journey is different, and that it is more difficult for some than for others. Length and severity of illness, availability of treatment, external support network and many more factors can influence someone’s progress. All of those reasons are valid and it’s absolutely true that the trajectory of each persons recovery is individual. The reasons I have listed are those that an eating disorder says you can’t recover, and those are the ones we can challenge.

Keep going, don’t let it take any more time from you than it already has.