8 Lessons My Own Recovery Taught Me
What I Wish I Could Tell My Younger Self About Eating Disorder Recovery
Long before I became an eating disorder recovery coach, I was the person on the other side of these conversations. I was the one sitting in treatment sessions, listening to people tell me things I wasn't always ready to hear and trying to imagine a version of my life that I couldn't quite see yet. Looking back, there were so many lessons people tried to teach me about recovery, but some of them I simply had to live before I could fully understand them. Recovery taught me about patience, discomfort, identity, relationships, body image, motivation, and what it actually means to choose yourself. And interestingly, many of the things I learned during my own recovery, long before I ever imagined becoming a coach, are now things I find myself talking about with my clients all the time.
If I could sit down with the younger version of myself now, I wouldn't try to convince her that recovery was going to be easy or that one day she would magically wake up without fear. I think I would tell her the things that took me years to understand. Some are encouraging, some are uncomfortable, and some probably wouldn't have been what I wanted to hear at the time. But they are the lessons that ultimately helped me build a life beyond my eating disorder, and they continue to shape the way I think about recovery today.
No One Can Do This for You
For probably 90% of the time I struggled with my eating disorder, I was waiting for my treatment team and support system to somehow pull me out of it. And honestly, that made sense to me at the time. I didn't really want to change, so why would I willingly work toward something I was scared of? I could show up to appointments, listen to what people told me, and technically participate in treatment without ever fully choosing what everyone around me wanted for me. I think there was a part of me that hoped if I stayed close enough to recovery, someone else would eventually figure out how to get me there. Maybe the right person would say the right thing, I would find the perfect treatment approach, or something would happen that would suddenly make all of it easier. I had so many people around me working incredibly hard to help me, but I hadn't yet realized that there was one part of the process they simply couldn't do for me.
It wasn't until that last 10% of my struggle that something shifted. I was tired of suffering every day, and I finally realized that if my life was going to change, I had to be willing to participate in changing it. That didn't mean I stopped needing help. If anything, I became much more capable of actually using the help around me once I decided I wanted something different. My treatment team and support system could give me tools, encourage me, challenge me, remind me what I was working toward, and believe in me when I struggled to believe in myself. But they couldn't physically make the recovery choices for me. At some point, I had to put on my boots, pick myself up, and start taking the steps I knew I needed to take instead of sitting in the misery and wishing my life looked different. There is so much strength in allowing people to help you, but there is also an incredible amount of strength in realizing that you are capable of helping yourself.
If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes
For a long time, I played a very passive role in my own recovery. I went through the motions without having much real buy-in to the process or the help I was receiving. I was angry at the people around me for wanting more for me, and I became very good at finding the negative. In a strange way, staying where I was felt easier because it was familiar. I knew what my days looked like. I knew what the eating disorder expected from me. Change meant stepping into something I couldn't predict, and even though my current reality wasn't making me happy, the unknown still felt scarier.
Eventually, I had a realization that really shook me: I may have been "content" enough with my eating disorder in that particular moment, but the thought of being in the exact same place five years later scared the shit out of me. When I imagined my future, I pictured something so much bigger and brighter than the life I was currently living. I wanted connection, independence, joy, purpose, experiences, and a life that actually felt like mine. And I had to acknowledge that staying stagnant wasn't somehow going to magically flourish into that beautiful life. If I wanted something different, at some point I had to start doing something differently.
I think we sometimes wait for a huge aha moment that suddenly makes us motivated enough to recover, but that isn't always how change works. Waiting for instant motivation can actually become another way of staying stuck. You may never wake up one morning feeling completely ready to challenge everything that makes you feel safe. Sometimes recovery begins with believing, even just a little bit, that you deserve something better and being willing to make small choices that give you the chance to find out what that "better" could look like. You don't necessarily have to feel ready first. Sometimes you make the change, tolerate the discomfort, and allow your confidence and motivation to grow because you proved to yourself that you could.
Lasting Recovery Has to Become Something You Want for Yourself
In the beginning, a lot of my motivation for recovery came from my family. I didn't want them to worry. I didn't want them to be upset. I wanted to make them feel better, so I tried to do the things that I thought would reassure them. And I don't think there is anything wrong with borrowing motivation from the people who love you when you don't have much of your own. Sometimes the hope other people hold for us can keep us moving during periods when we can't see very far ahead ourselves. My family wanting more for me mattered. Their support mattered. But eventually, I learned that it couldn't be the entire reason I recovered.
I spent years trying to build recovery around making other people feel okay, and that foundation never became strong enough to hold me up when things got difficult. You can't build your entire life off your hopes for other people. That foundation is shaky and unstable, and eventually you need something underneath you that belongs to you. If my only reason for making a recovery choice was that someone else wanted me to, it became much easier to abandon that choice when I was angry, scared, frustrated, or alone. I needed to decide that I wanted to know what my life could become.
Doing it for myself changed the way I participated in recovery. I started paying more attention in sessions instead of simply being physically present. I spoke up when I was upset. I shared when I disagreed or had an opinion about my own journey instead of silently going along with everything. I started looking for joy in my days and paying attention to the pieces of life that made me curious about what else could be out there. I learned to feel hard emotions without immediately treating them as evidence that I needed to turn backward. Most importantly, I started holding onto the possibility that this wouldn't last forever and that maybe one day I would look back and be grateful that I kept going. And, spoiler alert: I do. Every single day.
Your Eating Disorder Will Always Keep Moving the Finish Line
One of the hardest things for me to realize was that my eating disorder was never going to give me what it had promised. For so long, I had trusted this idea that there was something waiting for me on the other side of continuing to listen to it. Eventually things would feel right. Eventually I would feel satisfied. Eventually I would reach whatever invisible point I had been chasing and finally feel like I could relax. But eating disorders don't really work that way. The expectations shift, the rules change, and whatever once felt like "enough" somehow stops being enough.
When I really started to understand that, I felt lied to. I felt deceived by something that had once brought me comfort and convinced me it was helping me. There was grief in realizing that, but there was also anger. And honestly, that anger became useful. It gave me the drive to question what I had been promised and become curious about trying something different. I started to see that I had spent so much time chasing a finish line that was intentionally designed to stay out of reach.
That's one of the biggest things I wish I could tell my younger self: the eating disorder is never going to turn around one day and lovingly tell you that you've done enough. There will always be another reason to keep going, another doubt, another promise, another way it convinces you that you're almost there. At some point, I had to stop asking whether I had finally satisfied my eating disorder and start asking a completely different question: Was I satisfied with the life it was giving me? The answer to that question eventually became much clearer.
You Don't Need to Love Your Body to Stop Fighting It
For me, body image recovery became much more realistic when I moved away from believing I needed to practice body positivity all the time and started embracing body neutrality. Of course I love moments when I genuinely feel positive about my body, and I think there is absolutely space for that. But I don't think it's realistic to expect ourselves to look in the mirror every single day and love everything we see. We are human. Our perceptions fluctuate, our emotions change, and sometimes we're simply more critical of ourselves. Expecting constant body positivity can sometimes create another impossible standard to reach.
What mattered much more for me was learning not to directly tie my body image to my emotions, my worth, or the way I cared for myself. I started treating negative body image more like information: something I could notice and listen to without automatically acting on it. I could have the thought that something looked "wrong" without immediately deciding that meant something was wrong. I could feel uncomfortable in my body and still nourish it, respect it, get dressed, go see my friends, and continue with my day. Body image can change in a matter of minutes depending on our mood, environment, stress, comparison, or a million other things, so treating every negative body image thought as objective truth was doing myself a huge disservice.
Stopping the fight meant I stopped trying to manipulate or "fix" my body based on how I happened to feel emotionally that day. Instead of using my body as a way to change my emotions, I began practicing allowing it to exist and respecting it for everything it does for me. This is something I hope my clients can learn too: to create some distance between how they feel about their body in a particular moment and how they view themselves as a whole person. You don't have to earn the right to take care of your body by liking how it looks first. Our bodies are incredible machines that allow us to experience our lives. They deserve to be cared for, not constantly picked apart and broken down.
You Have to Build a Life That Gives You a Reason to Recover
My eating disorder made my world very, very small. The things I genuinely valued (connection, community, laughter, art, compassion, integrity) were slowly put on hold for the promises my eating disorder sold me. So much time and mental energy went toward the eating disorder that there simply wasn't much space left for everything else. And when your world has been small for a long time, it can be incredibly difficult to imagine why you would give up the thing that has become the center of it. I think that's part of what can make early recovery so confusing. You're being asked to let go of something familiar before you've necessarily had the chance to see what will eventually take its place.
One of the most meaningful parts of recovery was watching my world start to expand again. My relationships and my freedom began filling the space my eating disorder had occupied. I rebuilt friendships and started creating memories that had absolutely nothing to do with an eating disorder. I went back to school, found my independence again, and discovered new interests. Learning how to be on my own again was incredibly empowering and freeing. I fell in love with art and creating things again, and that brought so much joy back into my life. Slowly, I wasn't just someone "in recovery." I was a friend. A student. A creative person. Someone who could laugh, make plans, try things, change her mind, and build a day based on what actually mattered to her.
I think it's incredibly important to give yourself time for this part. You may not immediately know what your big, beautiful life beyond the eating disorder looks like. How could you? You haven't gotten to live it yet. You have to give yourself enough time and opportunity to discover what you care about, what makes you laugh, who you like being around, what interests you, and what makes you feel most like yourself. Recovery isn't only about removing something harmful from your life. It's also about slowly filling that space with things that actually matter to you. You have to give yourself the chance to build a life that feels worth being present for before deciding that life doesn't exist.
Your Story Is Just as Meaningful as the People Around You. There Is No Race.
There was a time when I looked at my friends and felt behind because my life didn't look exactly like theirs. Somehow, I interpreted being on a different path as being less than them. I saw what I believed my life was "supposed" to look like and compared it to where I actually was, and that gap felt like evidence that I had fallen behind. It took a lot of time to heal from that comparison, but eventually I started noticing something that seems so obvious to me now: everyone is on their own timeline, not just me. There wasn't one universal schedule that everyone else had successfully followed while I somehow missed the memo.
My days were allowed to look different. My path was allowed to be different. And eventually, that became one of my favorite parts of recovery because I had choice back. I got to decide how I wanted to fill my time and how I wanted to rebuild my life. Instead of trying to catch up to everyone around me, I could start asking myself what I actually wanted. There is no prize for following the "expected" path or hitting every milestone in the order you think you're supposed to. There is no award at the end for having the most predictable timeline. If your life follows that path, that's wonderful. If it doesn't, that's wonderful too. Neither story is more meaningful than the other.
I wish I had understood sooner how special it can be to have a story that is completely your own. Now, I actually love talking about the ways my story looked a little different from the people around me because I genuinely believe those experiences helped build me into the person I am today. The years I once viewed as evidence that I was "behind" are now years I can look at with so much more compassion and gratitude. My path gave me experiences, perspectives, relationships, and eventually a career that I couldn't have imagined at the time. I wouldn't trade my story for someone else's anymore.
It's Okay to Want Recovery, Even When Giving Up the Eating Disorder Feels Like Giving Up on Yourself
I had devoted so much time, energy, and so much of myself to my eating disorder that letting it go felt incredibly complicated. I had fought for it for so long that at one point I viewed it as one of my greatest accomplishments. I felt safe in it. I felt successful. I felt in control. I felt "calm." When something has taken up that much space in your life and you've worked that hard to protect it, turning around and choosing to walk away can feel almost like you're betraying yourself. I had invested so much into my eating disorder that recovery sometimes felt like admitting all of that effort had been for something that was ultimately hurting me.
I can now see just how deceptive those beliefs were, but at the time they made recovery feel like I was being asked to give up a part of myself. And I think this is one of the reasons people can feel so conflicted about genuinely wanting recovery. You can know that your eating disorder is hurting you and still feel attached to it. You can desperately want a bigger life and still be terrified to leave behind the life you know. Those things can exist at the same time. Wanting recovery doesn't mean you're suddenly going to feel completely comfortable with everything it asks of you.
What surprised me was how quickly parts of my authentic self started coming back online once I genuinely decided I wanted to let the eating disorder go. I began to see through the cloud of deception that had kept me blinded for so long. There were parts of myself that hadn't disappeared at all; they had just been buried underneath everything the eating disorder demanded from me. Giving it up didn't mean giving up on myself. In so many ways, it was the first time I truly started choosing myself. If I could tell my younger self anything about this part, I would tell her that there is nothing on the other side of recovery that requires her to become less of who she is. There is actually so much more of her waiting there.
What I Would Tell Her Now
If I could sit with that younger version of myself today, I don't think I would try to explain exactly what her life was going to look like. Part of what made recovery scary was not knowing what I was working toward, and I know now that no one could have completely shown me that life ahead of time. I had to build it. I had to experience the friendships, freedom, independence, creativity, laughter, purpose, and ordinary little moments that eventually made my world feel like mine again. I had to learn for myself that the eating disorder wasn't the thing that made me interesting, successful, worthy, or safe. And I had to give myself enough time outside of it to discover what actually did make me feel like me.
But I would tell her that there is so, so, so much to live for past the eating disorder. I would tell her that being scared of an unknown future doesn't mean that future is something to fear. I would tell her that choosing recovery will be one of the greatest decisions she ever makes, even if she can't understand that yet. I would tell her not to worry so much about whether her timeline looks like everyone else's, because one day she is going to be incredibly grateful for the path that became uniquely hers. And I would tell her that the pieces of herself she is terrified of losing aren't going anywhere. If anything, she's going to meet more of herself than she ever knew existed.
Maybe most importantly, I would tell her that her story matters.
I couldn't have known then that the experiences I was so ashamed of, frustrated by, or desperate to get past would eventually become pieces of a story I am incredibly grateful to have lived. I couldn't have known that one day I would get to sit across from other people who are scared, stuck, frustrated, or unsure and understand a little bit of what that place feels like. The lessons I carry into my work as a recovery coach didn't begin when I became a coach. Many of them began years earlier, when I was learning how to choose recovery myself.
There is so much beautiful living to do beyond an eating disorder. I know it's hard to believe in a life you haven't gotten to experience yet. You don't have to know exactly what that life will look like today. Sometimes, you just have to give yourself enough time, enough patience, and enough of a chance to find out.
