For most of us recovery means committing to weight gain. Learning to accept our bodies unsuppressed natural weight. Getting there has for me been far harder than simply just putting on weight. It’s weight we were never meant to have lost, our bodies didn’t want us to lose this weight but learning to accept this doesn’t happen overnight. We taught it that losing weight feels good, gaining weight feels bad. We taught our brains to believe “skinny = happy” but we know this isn’t the truth. I was never more unhappy than when I was at my sickest. My emotions blunted, isolated from friends, family and bound by strict rules that my life revolved around. No I was not happy. I was a ghost.

But that doesn’t mean accepting weight gain was/ is easy. It’s going against everything I’ve taught myself to believe is ideal. The weight restoration phase on ED recovery is a small part but is so painful because of our neural pathways and our beliefs and distortions.

Weight restoration is messy. I think if no one has told you, now is a good time to tell you. When you gain weight after waging war against your body, your body no longer trusts you. Whether this is from diet cycling, restriction, purging or over exercising. Your body likes to be in homeostasis and sits at a steady weight when left to its own devices. But when we intervene everything slows down, the body has a massive freak out. It thinks its starving (which in many of our cases it literally is) and when we start eating again the body is like, oh thank fuck. It holds on to everything initially in case we are cruel enough to inflict war on it again. The most common place this extra weight/ fat goes to is the tummy a.k.a the “recovery belly”. You can easily look 6 months pregnant. I look pregnant now. Staving off unwanted comments can be an unwanted side effect. But if this happens it’s because you are recovering and doing well so don’t give in. This is hard. My belly has been here a while and likely It’s here to stay for a while yet. I have made peace with it, doesn’t mean I don’t freak out when I see it in reflections some days. Today has been a hard day. But I know it’s keeping me alive and acts as a reminder to not go backwards and the progress I’m making. I know it will redistribute and if it doesn’t well then I’ll learn accept that too. I did a lot of googling when I started my weight restoration journey and so I expect with time my body will trust me once more, so long as I am kind to it.

Doesn’t matter how much I hated how I looked at my sickest, I was still terrified of weight gain. I have had to and am working very hard on rewiring this fear. By challenging it every day. This has involved many melt downs, sobbing in the shower but it’s so much easier with time as your brain shifts with you. This takes a bit of time.

Ditch the scales..

Ditch the scales. They are not your friend. You should break up with this unloving/ non compassionate partner, it’s a one sided relationship. ( *There may be times where you have to be weighed for medical reasons) this does not mean YOU need to know your weight. If this scenario occurs request it to be blind, because no matter what the number, it will not serve your recovery but it will fuel your ED.

My relationship with the scales was messy, unforgiving. In my depths of my ED, I would live my days by the number in the morning. It would stipulate whether I was going to have a good day or bad day, whether I deserved to eat. I would weigh myself multiple times a day and go to great lengths to do it. In early recovery I used it as an excuse I was making progress. BULLSHIT, I was still using it as an excuse not to gain “too fast”, “too much” this is not recovery.

You do not need to deserve to eat. Eating is a necessity every one shares. Your weight does not define you. It is a number. It means nothing in relation to health, your worth. So ditch them. I binned mine. I have no idea what I weigh now. It’s not relevant because I am getting healthy. Sure in early recovery teams may need to know our weights. We do not. Be free and kind to yourself.

Ditch the things that are holding you back in ED recovery

Fitness trackers. These are not our friends in ED recovery. I do not think anyone with an ED history should EVER wear a fitness tracker watch etc. similarly to the scales my day revolves around steps, calories burned, moving raising my HR bla bla bla. Why would you need it unless training for an Olympic event? I don’t even really see the necessity for my patients because if they have problems with HR etc it’s monitored formally. So like my scales I binned my watch. It wasn’t easy but it will be liberating I assure you.

So I hope if this resonates you can make some changes and move forward. You deserve better. Your worth cannot be defined by a number.