THE METABOLISM, HYPERMETABLOLISM AND IMPLICATIONS FOR RECOVERY FROM A RESTRICTIVE EATING DISORDER October 2022 – UPDATED AND REPOSTED DUE TO THE POPULARITY OF THE POST A question that arises regularly from people in recovery from an eating disorder (ED) is in respect to issues around body metabolism, in terms of what it is; what hypermetabolism […]
Category: Exercise / Compulsive Movement
Compulsive movement or exercise is a key part of an eating disorder for many… and I can confirm, first hand, that it is a miserable and cruel thing to live with. Feeling compelled to keep moving your body, no matter what, and when not doing so feels overwhelmingly wrong and terrifying, makes the movement side […]
When in eating disorder recovery, there are a number of factors that can make a real difference to how much progress you make in terms of recovery changes and neural rewiring. I have written about some of these in a separate post but in this post, I wanted to highlight the importance of ensuring that […]
In eating disorder recovery communities, the term ‘all in’ has now been used for a few years to describe the eat all you can approach to recovery that many promote and have success with. I have written before about the concept of ‘all in’ on this site but I have never been a big fan […]
Every human brain (however old) has the ability to learn new skills, behaviours, thoughts and emotions. This is the concept of ‘neuroplasticity‘ or ‘brain rewiring’. Eating disorder recovery necessitates changing a lot of behaviours and thought patterns that in the years or decades of illness have become deeply wired into the brain, such that you […]
In the UK, this week is Eating Disorder Awareness Week. I am always uncomfortable about these awareness weeks because of the amount of damaging, stereotypical information on eating disorders that still rears its ugly and harmful head every year, but I wanted to do something to acknowledge the week in my own small way. Therefore, […]
Fundraising for charities or non-profit organisations is a challenge to say the least. It is hard work to raise money for organisations when you are up against so many charities now all competing for the public’s spare change. Eating disorder charities have the additional problem that eating disorders are considered by many in the general […]
Today I have spent the whole afternoon and evening wrapped under a blanket, on my sofa with some reading, TV and music… And it has felt incredible. Perhaps, it has felt even more incredible because not so long ago, when I was still deep in the eating disorder that I experienced for over a decade, […]
In this post, I am going to do something I have not done before… In my eating disorder recovery, I always found that writing a journal was incredibly useful to me as it helped me get out my frustrations, identify what was troubling me in that moment and then mentally process what I needed to […]
It is the second birthday of this website. When I look back now to where I was when I started this website: back living with my parents and going through a few very intense recovery months, my life today is very different and better in so many ways. However, when I look back and think […]
When something stops being an option in your mind for long enough, you just stop seeing it. During my years of heavy restrictive eating, compulsive exercise and movement and painful isolation, my brain learnt and adapted to this being my new normal and stopped paying attention to the fact that anything else was a real […]
I have not written on this blog for some time… I have not looked at it for sometime either and much of the time I easily forget that, ‘Recovering Nomad’ even exists. And then something today made me take a look at my ‘dashboard’ for the website and realise that every day, people are still […]
Within an eating disorder, the ‘martyr complex’, in which people will act like a martyr to the point of self destruction is a feature seen more often than not. ‘Martyr complex’ is a recognised term to describe people who seek out the feeling of being a martyr, putting others needs above their own suffering as […]
Is the dreaded ‘quasi-recovery’ an inevitability in the recovery process from an eating disorder? This is a question that occurred to me recently. Before I continue though, for those who are not aware of this term, ‘quasi recovery’ refers to the half-way (or maybe a bit more than half-way) recovery state that many people hit […]
Many of us with an eating disorder are told (probably because it is true) that we have very black and white thinking. I do not believe that the black and white mindset is a pre-existing ‘personality trait’ of a person with an eating disorder, which some ‘professionals’ might try to persuade us is the case, […]