When I was battling anorexia on a regular basis, I remember constantly asking myself when I would finally recover. When I could stop worrying about the numbers, whether on nutrition labels or the scale. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be capable of letting go of something I had become so attached to. But the fact was that I’d managed to live the first 14 years of my life without being concerned about the numbers, and it was my mind that was refusing to give in to recovery – to let me truly let go of everything that anorexia had so desperately tried to latch onto.
I’ve now been in recovery for four years and haven’t weighed myself or fixated on calories for the past three. Although I occasionally feel the urge to check the nutrition label on certain foods or weigh myself after a large meal, I constantly remind myself that those are simply intrusive thoughts – remnants of my past trying to regain a false sense of control.
Harmful habits are difficult to break, and the new healthy habits we develop to counteract those harmful ones are even harder to maintain. The same often applies to eating disorder habits, rituals, or thoughts. Even people who have been in recovery for years may occasionally experience urges or temptations to slip into disordered habits that they worked hard to break. This is part of the reason why relapses among individuals with eating disorders are fairly common.
