QUESTION: Dear Shannon, I need your advice. I don’t know how to deal with the way my recovery process is going. So far I have done the necessary first step in finally opening up and seeking help from a counselor and to my dad, who has tremendously helped me seek out medical evaluation and a psychiatrists. I have lost so much weight in the past few months and noticed my growing problem with a normal relationship with food. I started to fear eating and felt like purging every time I did have any.

It’s been only a few months now that I've realized that I am going through a dangerous path while living with an eating disorder. I noticed that it has ruined my life and it has taken from me many things that I want back. The problem is that I am confused. Now, as much as recovery is always on my mind and something I struggle with everyday, I don’t know why I continue to dwell in the eating disorder patterns. I eat abundantly on some days knowing it’s the right thing to do for recovery and weight restoration but then I grow fearsome and then decide to starve myself and it’s grown into a cycle.

Why is it that I feel so confused? Like I am two separate people. As if I have two separate goals that I am both trying to do at the same time? I really fear that I'm dwelling in this disorder way too long and it'll soon be too hard to get out as I continue to try to please two sides of me. One that wants and is seeking for help to leave anorexia behind and the other who seems to want to stay in it.

ANSWER: What clarity you have about your disease and its effect on your life! I am proud of you for being so honest and humble about the severity of your struggle, and for opening up and asking for help.

What you describe is the pattern I myself endured on my way to lasting recovery. I liken the battle with my eating disorder to a mental battle of wills. One part of my brain is rational, sane, holding my best interests and health close to its heart. The other part of my brain just wants to be thinner, because it believes that is the only way to get what makes life worth living. So it doesn’t care if I die and it will do anything to lose weight.

That is why an eating disorder is classified as a mental disorder. It doesn’t make sense to the rational part of your brain. But it is very real to the part of your mind that is ill. You will ‘get’ that what you are doing is killing you a lot faster than you will learn how to not do those things anymore. In fact, that is how it should be – that is why it is said that knowledge is power. When you know what doesn’t work or doesn’t make sense, then you can make changes.

For more insight into this phenomenon, I always recommend watching the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’, starring Russell Crowe, to better understand how to successfully overcome the part of your mind that has turned into your enemy. In this movie, you can see how John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician, taught himself to overcome the effects of his schizophrenia. He debunked the lies his mind fed him as truth. He took his life back. He learned to manage his mental illness and go on to live a life of true greatness, full of love and accomplishment and meaning. But it was HARD WORK.

That is to say, those who recover are the ones who do NOT give up. The single most important determinant of success in healing is the refusal to give up. No matter how hard my day was, no matter how often I fell down in my attempts to do the right thing (eat, not purge, etc), I always got up and tried again. One day, the tide turned and the part of my mind that was fighting me suddenly started buying in to the benefits of recovery. I remember that day – when I realized I didn’t have coping skills to deal with my emotional life, so I would starve or purge instead. Once I knew what I lacked, I knew what tied me to the eating disordered behavior patterns, and I could work to develop other skills to turn to when I was feeling out of control, overwhelmed or unsure.

Relationships Replace Eating Disorders. So the decision you made to ask a counselor and your dad to help you heal is vital. The more loving, supportive relationships you have in your life, the more objective sets of eyes you have who can see in you what you cannot – your strength, your beauty, your courage, your potential – the less you will rely on the eating disorder for support.

Now, keep in mind that, statistically, for every year you have been ill, you can add one to five years of time that it will take to recover (the variance is due to the level of willingness to heal, and the level of care). I was sick for fifteen years and recovered in ten, so I beat the odds. You can too. I wanted to heal VERY badly. Like you, my eating disorder had taken everything that made life worth living away from me, so I became determined to get my life back. I figured that eating disorders are dangerous, often fatal, but if I was going to die, I was NOT going down without a fight, and certainly not without knowing if I could have survived!

That gave me the will to get up again every day and fight. I saw people around me who didn’t live like I lived – who could eat out and have normal friendships and laugh and go out without having to lose weight first. So I knew it was possible to live without the eating disorder. I wanted what they had – I wanted to know that it was possible for ME as well.

Just keep going. That is my advice. Do NOT psyche yourself out of your right to life and your ability to recover. Do not let your mind tell you how long it ‘should’ take. It takes as long as it takes – and that amount of time differs for each person. Recovery is SUPPOSED to be hard – that is why I always say that recovering from an eating disorder is the accomplishment of a lifetime, and that once you have achieved this goal, you will never again doubt that you can do anything you put your powerful mind and will to.

So keep fighting. Each day, try to accomplish just one thing to get you one step closer to recovery. Do not waste precious time and energy beating yourself up for the times when you don’t achieve your goals. Just say ‘I’ll try again. I’ll keep trying until I learn how to live without doing what I did today.’ Cultivate patience for yourself – it took you time to break, and it will take time for you to mend. Keep inviting more people in to support you, to walk with you, to help you, to teach you how to find healthier coping skills, to love you until you learn to love yourself with ALL of your mind, and make your choices accordingly. You can do it. You will get stronger each day – one step at a time.

Hang in there. I believe in you! Write again if you need to.

Warmly, and with HOPE,

Shannon

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