Deep down, all I’ve wanted to do for years is spend time curling up in a blanket, being warm, feeling safe while eating good food… but in the illness this freedom was never ‘allowed’…. Well, not without intense eating disorder generated fear and anxiety attached so it was barely even contemplated. Now I give myself […]
Category: Rewiring / Neuroplasticity
Posts related to the rewiring (neuroplasticity) process in eating disorder recovery.
One thing that makes me sad and mad about eating disorders (true there are many things but I’ll just rant about this one for now!) is that the illness will rarely let us realise just what we have achieved in a day or even a moment. I often hear people in the eating disorder community […]
Recently I feel I have been doing better in recovery than ever, with great days of eating LOTS more, resting more, accepting weight gain. On bad days though I’ve still struggled to eat my usual ‘safe’ recovery amount or keep to a conservative recovery routine without intense anxiety. Of course recovery is ups & downs […]
After two months of starting this recovery, I wrote about what I’d learnt at that point. This is an extension, with the further learnings from month three. At the start of month three I adopted a faster approach & revised plan, which has had its ups & downs but generally proven beneficial! I plan to […]
Before the eating disorder I didn’t know what a calorie was – no clue and I could not have cared less either. I ate what & when I wanted and had no rules or restrictions around foods & life was good! As I became ill, I started to notice energy values -numbers on packets I’d […]
When accepting help creates terror but it’s not why you think. I have just had one of those dawning moments that make some of the recovery fears a little clearer. I consider myself an inadvertent victim of the traditional treatment I’ve received ‘help’ from in the past. Models where meal plans were barely adequate to […]
Well, it turns out that at times a little hysteria really does help. Lately in recovery I’ve been getting higher levels of anxiety than I was… I have always had anxiety with eating and resting more, gaining weight etc but the past week or so it had been escalating. I know that in recovery it […]
Today, I went to the hairdresser! To anyone reading this who doesn’t have an eating disorder, you will be thinking, ‘what’s the big deal?’. But I think a lot of you who have this illness will know why this is noteworthy. How many of us with eating disorders put off or just don’t go to […]
In a previous post I spoke about the confusion that weight gain in recovery was causing… In this post I want to address the need for radical acceptance of weight gain and body changes in recovery, if we want to recover. In my years of illness I always hated being underweight… the healthy me wanted […]
**This post was originally written for my Instagram account** In recovery from restrictive eating our body signals are beyond messy and plain unreliable! We are recovering from restrictive eating that has left the body depleted and struggling to stay alive. The only way to recover from a restrictive mindset and allow the body to fully […]
Will our efforts in recovery ever feel ‘good enough’ to us? As I write this, I have had another day in recovery land…. and recovery is long and tiresome at times. It is never ceasing having to focus on eating more, not letting the eating disorder into decisions on the food side and keep alert […]
Resting & relaxing can be the hardest & most exhausting thing in the world! In eating disorder recovery, we are always told we must rest, relax & heal. To most people, this probably sounds wonderful & peaceful – creating images of lolling about on a sofa, taking naps, reading books, watching Netflix & generally just […]
Hitting a little low patch… Throughout this recovery so far, it’s been an emotional rollercoaster but the past 2 days have been tougher than my usual dips. Tears, anxiety, frustration, anger & general pissed off-edness had become my norm, intermixed with feelings of exhilaration, achievement, success & even occasional playfulness! Lately things have been improving […]
If an eating disorder were a living creature I think it would be a weasel (possibly less cute) with countless sneaky tricks it can deploy to distract, confuse, terrify and kill its prey. Recovering from an eating disorder is being vigilant to all the tricks that the eating disorder can deploy to keep us trapped. […]
A week ago I started a new recovery approach. After a few weeks of high anxiety levels, distress & to-ing & fro-ing with the ‘right way’ to do recovery I needed to find a way through. I don’t work with ‘specialists’ or under medical guidance & my route to recovery is my own messy & […]
RECOVERING NOMAD 