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 […]
Category: Rewiring / Neuroplasticity
Posts related to the rewiring (neuroplasticity) process in eating disorder recovery.
In this ‘brain post’ I want to explain a little more about two important brain regions that play big parts in how we think and act and how these two different parts of the brain often work against one another, trying to take the driver’s seat in guiding our behaviours. The two parts of the […]
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 […]
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 earlier posts, I have written about what neuroplasticity is (the ability of the brain to rewire and change) and why it is important for eating disorder recovery. Therefore, if you want to know more about neuroplasticity generally, have a read of my last post on the topic (here). In this post, I want to […]
As some of you loyal, wonderful and regular readers on here might know, I am now working as an eating disorder recovery coach and for that I have a separate website, which is hellybarnes.com. This post is not a marketing ploy though. I am just popping this post up to let you know that I […]
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 never ceases to amaze me how many layers of denial we can hide our truth under. How we can present to the world and ourselves a version of our lives that is shiny and wonderful and Instagramable, a version we really believe to be true, despite it being nothing of the sort. How we […]
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 […]
Over the past week, I was reflecting on my years of illness with anorexia and the periods of time I spent in eating disorder treatment (with more than one admission to an eating disorder unit). These are not the most happy memories to look back on but as I did so, I realised with no […]
The most searched for and read posts on this blog are my posts about overshoot weight and set point weight. Perhaps this should not be surprising as people with eating disorders are scared of weight gain and so seeking information about the weight they are gaining or have gained is probably to be expected. However, […]
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 […]
I wrote this post almost a year ago but did not publish it. It is about a state in recovery that has been present at various points in the recovery process… It is one that can trigger all kinds of feelings and judgements (including guilt, wrong-doing, shame, frustration) if we allow it to. This is […]
When you have an eating disorder, your brain is hard-wired in such a way as to instantly pay attention to information and ‘advice’ regarding dieting, weight loss, exercise and all the damaging diet industry and diet culture bullshit that dominates our modern day culture. These messages are precisely what we need to avoid when we […]
RECOVERING NOMAD 