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Relapse Prevention

I’ll be honest, when I was faced with buying a new phone a few months ago, a major factor in my decision was the selection of phone apps available for eating disorder recovery. I’d previously had a Windows phone, which offered very little in the way of available apps of any kind, much less for eating disorder recovery. So I finally joined the rest of the world and bought an iPhone. I’ve spent the last month or so downloading different eating disorder recovery apps and trying them out – here’s what I have found.
My anorexic brain is positively screaming at me not to write the next sentence of this because it is so shameful. I have gained weight. Don’t be mistaken – I have been maintaining a healthy weight for my body for almost a year so this weight is extra, unnecessary, too much. My brain is shouting, “Fat!” at me almost 24 hours a day. Right now, more than anything, I’d love to scrap my recovery and throw myself headlong into eating disorder behaviors. But I have to focus on recovering from my eating disorder even when I want to quit.
Around Christmas, I invited you guys to consider whether or not you are putting your recovery from an eating disorder as your first priority. I hope you were able to take some time and really sit with that question and come up with an honest answer for yourself. I have. That’s the thing about putting your eating disorder recovery first – you need to regularly check in with yourself and see if you are still putting your health and recovery first. And if you’re not, you need to figure out how to change that.
When I first embarked on the long road that is recovery from anorexia, I did so half-heartedly. It was something I thought I "should" do, so I just went through the motions. I saw my therapist. I saw my dietitian. I went to a support group. But aside from that, very little changed.
I was hospitalized in an inpatient facility for a few days recently (not for my anorexia, but a comorbid condition). I was there long enough to see some patient turnover and was reminded just how much the attitudes of people you are in treatment with can affect you. In school, we call this the "therapeutic milieu." I prefer to think of it as the general "vibe" of the unit.
In the last six years since the start of my eating disorder recovery, I've been pretty diligent in trying to make an effort not to skip meals along with the inevitable emotions that will surface at times when I interact with food. However, lately with the stress of an active lifestyle, I have found it harder to remember to enjoy and relax while eating, as it feels like it takes away time from other important things. Realizing that this could lead to falling into old patterns, I recently decided to take a mindfulness workshop whose topic was the art of eating with a clear mind, three times a day.
When it comes to my recovery from anorexia, like in a lot of areas of my life, I strive to be fiercely independent. Imagine a petulant toddler yelling, "I do it self!" at the top of her lungs and pushing people away while simultaneously crying because she can't actually "do it self." Excellent. You have just drawn yourself a picture of my first three years of recovery failures.
Many times throughout the course of my eating disorder, I found myself listening to music that encouraged my disordered behaviors and thoughts. These songs are still indelibly marked in my brain and I can sing every word of them when they turn up on my iPod. The problem with this is that singing them only serves to cement the messages in my head. So when I started down the road to eating disorder recovery, I needed a new set of songs to sing along to.
Roughly 10 years ago this week, I was moving out on my own and attending graduate school. Many other big changes were happening at the same time in my life, but looking back, I can honestly say that those two had the biggest impact on my eating disorder spinning out of control around that time. It is no surprise that major life changes or transitions can, unfortunately, be triggers for a number of events or conditions in one's life, including eating disorders. Here's a bit about my experience on this and how it related to my mental illness.
Throughout my numerous trips to treatment for anorexia, I have had the opportunity to connect with some amazing women. (While I have never been in a treatment facility with men, I have also met some amazing men through the course of my recovery.) Some of these women I met while they were still adolescents -- 14, 15, 16 years old. And this week, many of them are headed to college -- moving into dorms, meeting new people, taking harder classes. I'll be honest, I am scared to death that many of them are going to suffer an eating disorder relapse.