Recovered Attitudes to Food: The Simplicity of Appreciation

"In this second part, I want to contrast those anorexic ways of thinking and feeling and behaving around food with how all that changes after recovery. As with everything else about the experiences that occur long after recovery from an eating disorder, it's hard to find detailed testimony about it-which is one major reason I keep writing this blog 15 years on from my own recovery. There's a lot of beauty that can come from having not just had an eating disorder but also having really escaped from it."

"I think what many of us aspire to when we embark on recovery is that food will be restored to the unremarkable status of "just food." And in some ways, that may be precisely what happens. Once hunger can just be hunger again, coming and going in predictable little undulations between meals that also come predictably, and once every inch of this body is not impaired by lack of nutrients and screaming out for more, then food can indeed subside into being nothing more than itself."

Anorexia creates intense, often paradoxical preoccupation with food driven by physiological and psychological effects of starvation. Recovery restores normal hunger rhythms and nutrient status, allowing food to become ordinary again for many. Post-recovery experiences often include a heightened appreciation and gratitude for food that differs from the undervaluing found in never-starved individuals. Many people struggle to find testimony about long-term recovery because cognitive impairments during illness obscure future possibilities. Recovery can reveal beauty in freedom from disordered eating, though remnants of altered attitudes—such as discomfort at the idea of disliking a food—may persist.

Read at Psychology Today