6 minute read
Recovery
Growing up everyone had stories about my eating habits. How I would hide food in corners of the house, only eating chips for years in the cafeteria, the panic in my eyes at an unfamiliar restaurant menu, it was just a “thing” in my family, in my neighborhood, and during school lunches. Now I’m taking control of my narrative. I’ve come to realize that recovery is a choice. Even if you’re not where you want to be yet, even if it’s incredibly hard, and even if you just had a setback. It is a choice you make to get better. Recovery also doesn’t look the same for everyone. What you need to do may not look like what someone else needs to do.
My first suggestion is to get a journal. I do not mean a diary. I get it, I’m not one of those people either no matter how much I’d like to be. This journal is for mindful writing and the processing you will have to do as you face mental and physical work during recovery. Some prompts I did in IOP were writing letters to the ed, writing to past me about forgiveness, writing to future me about who I hope to be, and processing how I felt about food-related episodes. It was a release and a great way to understand what I was feeling.
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With that being said, you also need to figure out what recovery even means to you. It can be one big idea or many things such as survival, a hospital discharge, eating 3 meals every single day, expanding your diet from 5 meals to 10 meals, maintaining gained weight. The list is endless and all goals, big or small, are important. A large part of successfully treating ARFID and working with a care time is setting appropriate goals for the changes you’d like to see.
Before recovery and even during recovery, I couldn’t shake the anger of feeling like I had no control over my life and as if the life I wanted was on pause or out of reach. It felt like the rest of the world was far ahead while I am still trying to find a way to normalize eating. Another feeling nobody mentions in this process is grief. Grief for the life you could’ve had if you didn’t have this eating disorder. It hit me. Hard. It caused a long pause in my treatment and recovery because it was too difficult for me to look past everything I could’ve been or had.
At some point when I decided to take steps towards getting better, I realized it isn’t healthy to hold onto these feelings. It’s not a competition when you accept that everyone goes through different things and I could make the best of things for myself. And the grief will come in waves until you remember that you still have the rest of your life to be who you want to be. It’s never too late.
I’m lucky to even be alive and once I accepted all of those “why me” feelings, I was ready to take the next step. Of course it isn’t easy but it helps to allow myself to feel any feelings without judgment. I learned about that in my IOP at Prosperity. How can you accept a feeling if you’re judging yourself for having it in the first place?
Sometimes there can be external forces that prevent you from beginning the journey of recovery. One being the lack of awareness not only in the general public but in the medical field as well. not all practitioners know about ARFID and not all eating disorder centers focus on ARFID. In my case I ran into that issue but my individual care team was more than accommodating! It helps to ask for what you need and research as much as possible. Qualified professionals in your area can be found through the Academy for Eating Disorders website’s (aedweb.org).
Another issue you may come across in recovery is that one of the more prevalent medical effects of ARFID is the inability to gain weight. Gastrointestinal Issues (GI) are a large part of the effects of all eating disorders and especially arfid. In many cases the GI issues of ARFID and Anorexia overlap. It took a lot of time and a lot of trial and error, with the guidance of my care team, to figure out what worked for me so that I could begin healing. Relapses, setbacks, and bad coping behaviors can crawl back in when you’re in recovery whether they’re intentional or not. Recovery isn’t linear but you have to know when to be kind to yourself and when you need to push yourself.
I can’t begin to say how important it is to be around people who support you. Having a good support system is key in recovery, but that doesn’t mean your loved ones instinctively
know how to help or don’t need instructions and reminders. It is crucial to learn your needs and teach them to your loved ones. It may be uncomfortable but it makes all the difference.
Even with a support system, recovery can be lonely. Eating disorders cause an isolating experience and with ARFID it’s especially alienating even within the eating disorder community. Eating disorders have a way of pushing you to live a way that doesn’t align with your values, making you feel like you’re not in control of your life. And with ARFID being so unknown it can also be a very invalidating and confusing experience. Despite the undeniable effect ARFID has had on my life, I struggle with the legitimacy of this disorder. My therapist reminded me that the difference between ARFID and “picky eating” is the intensity of the negative feeling and how it takes over your life and development.
It’s important to know that once you move past the initial focuses like nutrition, eating,and weight that in treatment you start to address identity, values, coping mechanisms and other predisposing or contributing issues that were lost or negatively affected in all that time you spent suffering.
In my experience, the process is difficult, some parts more than others especially when it seems like no one understands your specific experiences. That first day of being in IOP was incredibly difficult, especially meal support. I wasn’t sure if it was worth getting better because it seemed so out of reach and it was a life I couldn’t even imagine having. But with all of the support, skills, and guidance I received and the strength I installed in myself I’ve found that the more I ate the more I wanted to eat the more I actually could eat. I have so much more time to actually live my life instead of letting it pass me by as I did for most of my life before recovery. Not only that but my purpose and drive as an artist have never been stronger, and I am able to live a life I know is worth living. I also don’t feel nearly as tied to the distress of my eating disorder. My anxiety is significantly reduced and manageable, and I am able to approach food with more flexibility. I am proud of the work I have done in treatment, processing, and my ongoing recovery. I hope my experience can provide you with the information and proof you need to begin working through this eating disorder.
Recovery from ARFID is possible and although I still have a ways to go, it’s worth it and so are you.
