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"Sick Enough"

 You never fully recover. Thoughts still find a way to creep back inside your brain, like an ant sneaking into your house on a warm day. The house is your brain and the ant is the abominable eating disorder opinions. When your house is infested with bugs, you get rid of them. You don’t let the ants take over. So why let ED do the same thing. In the beginning, middle, and end of recovery it is hard to not listen to your eating disorder ways of thinking. It is scary to realize but even after years of being “all in'', there still might be days where your ED gets the best of you. But that is where you take the bug spray and get rid of them because they are not doing you any good. They are harming your body. Just like ants can invade the food in your house, the eating disorder thoughts can lead to more problems than just mental health issues. They could affect your physical health by causing amenorrhea, ostoperious, hair loss, liver damage, and even more.


My liver was failing due to my eating disorder. It made all my loved ones around me scared. But, even with my eating disorder I sat in the doctor's office and still didn’t feel “sick”.  Still I now struggle in recovery with my brain telling me I was never “sick enough”. I begin to compare my journey to other peoples. No, I wasn’t hospitalized. Looking back on it, I should have been, but I fought my parents on it. Now, it's almost as if you have to be hospitalized to get some sort of validation. Society glorifies hospitalization and it feels like a competition. There is nothing fun about being put in a hospital. There is nothing fun about being the lowest weight. There is nothing fun about IOP; I can tell you that. Your eating disorder illness is valid regardless if you never went to a residential facility, you never lost a lot of weight, you never were “diagnosed”, or you enjoy food. Living through the pain and mental suffering of any kind of disordered eating or eating disorder is proof that you are “sick enough”. 


Think about this, no well human wants to be physically sick with the cold or flu and be hospitalized for that reason, so why should you for your mental illness? Bottom line is no matter what your size is or how anyone else around you feels, if you have any misconceptions/

disordered beliefs about food you deserve recovery. Life is too short to withhold yourself from enjoying certain foods and creating memories. You want to look back on life and look at all the good times you had. Not all the times you were starving yourself, purging, etc. One of my favorite quotes I try to remember is by Lily Collins. She says, “ Asking for help is never a sign of weakness, it's the bravest thing you can do. And it can save your life”. If you don’t feel “sick enough” to recover or if you are struggling with thoughts. Reach out to someone you love. They are there for you more than you realize.



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