We believe full recovery from an eating disorder is 100% possible for everyone. But recovery doesn’t end when you stop seeing your therapist and dietitian or leave residential treatment. Being fully recovered does not necessarily cancel out the possibility of relapse, so it’s important to pay attention to how your eating and exercising habits change throughout recovered life.
Stressful life events (including the current pandemic), major transitions (like moving, going to college, getting married), social isolation, excessive exercise, low self-esteem, and poor body image are all factors that can lead to relapse. Other mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can also trigger a relapse.
Eating disorder behaviors can serve as coping mechanisms that you might turn back to when life gets rough, so it’s not uncommon to fall back into old patterns of behavior during difficult times. Here are some ways you can maintain your recovery throughout life’s ups and downs:
Monitor your exercise
If you have a tendency to over-exercise, try scheduling workouts with friends or attending classes so that you keep a limit on your activity.
Engaging in joyful movement rather than intense calorie-burning focused workouts can also help you maintain a healthy relationship with exercise.
Checking in with yourself regarding your intention for exercise. If it’s to change the size or shape of your body, then it’s probably best to skip it all together. Jenni Schaefer offers a Compulsive Exercise Test on her website that is a great tool for evaluating your relationship with movement.
If the gym or class environment is triggering, explore your other options. There are some group fitness instructors and trainers who use a body-positive approach and understand how to coach people in a way that isn’t damaging to their mental health.
Some of Kindful Body’s weight-inclusive resource recommendations that we provide to our clients for reconnecting to their bodies and reclaiming movement are: Joyn, Decolonizing Fitness and Eat Breathe Thrive.
Practice weight-neutral self-care
Practicing daily weight-neutral self-care (getting a good night’s sleep, spending time outdoors, taking time for hobbies, etc.) can help you manage the stress of day to day life. For times that are particularly challenging, it’s good to also have a stress-relief plan. This can include soul-nourishing activities you schedule for yourself, a daily meditation practice, journaling, or the classic self-care prescription: a bubble bath.
When you have other coping tools, you’ll be less likely to turn to food and exercise to help you cope with life’s adversities.
Keep going to therapy
Too often, we only go to therapy when we’re in crisis, rather than stay in therapy to understand and heal from underlying issues such as low self-esteem, perfectionism or unresolved trauma. Continuing therapy even after you are done with treatment can help you keep tabs on any issues that may trigger your eating disorder.
Talking through your feelings in therapy will allow you to determine whether mental health struggles like depression or anxiety are under control, need to be monitored closely, or could be helped with medication.
A therapist can be an accountability partner in your ongoing recovery journey. If they’re aware of your eating disorder history, they may be able to spot signs of a potential relapse. Just because you aren’t “sick” anymore or are behavior free doesn’t mean you have to navigate your mental health alone.
Maintain a support system
It might be tempting to isolate yourself when life feels messy, but resist the urge to shut out the world. Maintaining a social life and knowing who you can turn to when faced with challenging circumstances is critical because eating disorders thrive in and are often triggered by isolation.
Healing happens in relationships, so it is very important to maintain regular connection with others through healthy relationships.
Relapsing in times of pain doesn’t mean you have failed at recovery. If you find yourself slipping into old ways, approach yourself with self-compassion rather than judgment. Learning how to replace old ways of coping is part of any mental health journey.
If you are a California resident looking for the support of an eating disorder treatment team, contact us for a free 15-minute consultation to find out how we can help you reach full recovery.
