Why I no longer focus on being recovered from my eating disorder

If you read my last post, you will know that Eating Disorders Awareness Week runs from Monday 26^th February to Sunday 4^th March 2018, so this week I wanted to share a couple of posts about my experiences of having an eating disorder. In the first post I uploaded this week, I talked you through my Eating Disorder story so you might find it interesting to read that first and get a bit of background before you continue with this one. But today, I wanted to chat to you about why I no longer focus on being recovered or ‘fixed’ from my Eating Disorder. Like with my other post, I want to add a quick disclaimer that this could be triggering, so only continue to read if you feel strong enough. And of course, this is just my experiences and opinions – it shouldn’t replace medical advice from your own doctor and I understand that what works for me won’t work for everyone.

I’ve been battling eating disorders in one form or another for a large proportion of my life. Although it didn’t become obvious until I was around the age of 15, I was getting negative thoughts around food, my weight and my body from a much younger age. As you will have seen in my other post, I have also been through a lot of different treatments over the years – inpatient, day patient, out patient; input from dieticians, psychologists, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, nurses and doctors. Some of these have been helpful, while others have often made things worse. But all of these treatments have taught me something and, whether good or bad, they have contributed to my overall journey and got me to where I am today.

For pretty much the entire time I was in treatment, my biggest focus was on reaching the point of being recovered or ‘fixed’ from my eating disorder. I think a lot of this was down to being in treatment – recovery was always spoken about and was always pushed as something we should be aiming for. Quite often, it was made out to be this amazing place where an eating disorder just didn’t exist any more. You were completely happy, could go out for meals without anxiety and loved the way you looked every time you saw yourself in the mirror. But despite being in treatment over the space of around ten years, I never managed to reach this Nirvana.

I would spend most of my time beating myself up mentally, asking myself “Why can’t I recover?” or “Everyone else is recovering, why can’t I?” It got to the point where my feelings of failure towards recovery were becoming triggers for my eating disorder thoughts and behaviours. If I can’t recover, then what’s the point of even trying to put on weight/stop using negative behaviours/learning to accept myself? I already felt awful about myself, so feeling like a complete failure was just another negative emotion to add to my overflowing bucket of negativity. It was just another thing that I was rubbish at – another thing I couldn’t do.

But it’s only now, after so many years of beating myself up, that I’ve come to the realization that the state of recovery I was trying to achieve is unlikely to actually exist. I was trying to get to an impossible place. Now before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that there are people that say they have managed to get to a place where they feel their eating disorder is completely gone – they can enjoy food without worrying about weight gain or calories, never think of using eating disorder behaviours and feel completely happy with their body. And that’s absolutely brilliant that there are people who manage this. But I feel like they are probably in the minority, and unfortunately aren’t people I am able to identify with. For me, I think obsessing over trying to get to a point where I am completely recovered from my eating disorder is unrealistic and therefore unhealthy. All it leads to is a negative cycle of feelings of failure, using eating disorder behaviours to deal with those feelings and therefore continuing to feel like a failure. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s no way to continue to live your life.

Once I realised that being completely recovered isn’t possible for everyone, I started to think more about what recovery could mean for me. I realised I preferred the word recovery to recovered, simply because it allowed me to see it as a process and a journey, rather than an end point that I would reach and then everything would be fine. When I stopped trying to reach that end point, and just took things a day at a time, life started to get a little easier. I stopped seeing myself as a failure every time I slipped up, and so stopped beating myself up too. I no longer compared my journey to other people’s, which allowed me to focus on my own journey and what is right for me. Little by little, I have made progress, and I’m able to look at that progress with compassion for myself, rather than feeling bad for not doing better.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t certain aspects of an eating disorder that you shouldn’t worry about recovering from. For example, it is really important to get yourself to a healthy weight, or to stop using harmful behaviours such as bingeing and purging. These things impact on your wider health, as well as your mind, which is often why, in eating disorder treatment, these are the first things you have to work on. I never understood this when I was really unwell – how was I meant to put on weight when no one was helping me with my thoughts? But now I understand that you simply cannot be moving towards recovery when you’re dangerously underweight or are using negative coping mechanisms. So whilst I don’t focus on being recovered any more, I do understand that I need to be in a healthy body to allow my mind to begin a process of recovery.

But that’s what my life is now – a process of recovery – and I don’t think there will ever be an end point. I still struggle with thoughts about my body and my weight, I still get times when I have to eat and really don’t want to and I still get anxious every time I put weight on/a buzz if I lose some weight. But I’ve accepted that it’s OK for me to still have these anxieties – it doesn’t make me a failure or a bad person – it just makes me a person that is battling an eating disorder (and winning). I’m winning because I keep trying. I’m winning because, overall, I feel like I’m in control more than my eating disorder is. Yes, I might sit in front of a plate of food and have thoughts about not wanting to eat it. But I am able to challenge those thoughts and convince myself that those are my eating disorder speaking. And I sit there and eat that food, no matter how anxious I feel. Yes I still weigh myself once a week, and when I see my weight go up, I automatically start thinking about what I can do to bring it back down again. But that’s where it stops – at thoughts. Because most of the time, I fight against those thoughts and give myself a positive pep talk about why listening to those thoughts is a really bad idea.

No, this isn’t what I imagined being recovered would be like, but that’s OK because every single day for the rest of my life, as long as I am on my recovery journey, I am OK with that. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing. You just need to do you, and as long as you are fighting that eating disorder in whatever way you need to, then you are doing a damn good job.

If you’re reading this now and think you might have a problem with your eating, thoughts and behaviours, my biggest piece of advice would be to talk to someone and start your journey of recovery. Whether that’s your parents, a friend or your GP – just starting that conversation is a massive step on the journey towards you getting help and living a life where your eating disorder doesn’t control your every move. I know how scary starting that process is (and hell, even continuing with that process however long you’ve been on it), so if talking to someone you know feels too hard, Beat have an amazing helpline and will listen to you in confidence, giving you the support and care you deserve. You can find them on:

Helpline – 0808 801 0677

Youthline – 0808 801 0711

As well as some posts on my blog, I have also got a video going up over on my YouTube channel, which I would love you to check out. And if you would like to share this post to raise awareness during Eating Disorders Awareness Week, it would mean the world to me.

What are your thoughts on being recovered from an Eating Disorder (or any kind of mental illness)?

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Little Things to help your Mental Health - Making a Good Things Jar

I thought I would start a new series of posts on my blog, talking about some of the little things that I’ve found can help with my mental health. Whilst it’s important to seek professional help for mental health problems and access treatments like medication and therapy, sometimes it’s the little day-to-day actions that can get us through the hard times. So I wanted to start by talking to you about something I’ve been doing for quite a few years now, which I find really helps with my depression and anxiety. A Good Things Jar!

I originally got the idea to make one of these from browsing on Pinterest and have been using it ever since. You might see it called a few different things – a Good Things Jar, a Happy Jar or a Jar of Gratitude, but they’re all pretty much the same idea, so you can call it whatever you fancy. All you need to make it is a glass jar (or any kind of tub – whatever suits you best), some paper and a pen. It’s as easy as that! I started off by decorating my jar to make it look a bit more pretty and also so that I could immediately tell what it was whenever I looked at it. I found the ‘Good Things’ label again, on Pinterest and just stuck it onto my jar with a bit of invisible tape. You can find all sorts of printable labels to choose from, or if you’d rather make your own that would work just as well. I also decided to tie a bit of ribbon around the neck of the jar, just because I thought it made it look pretty, but you can decorate your jar in whatever way you fancy.

When you’re struggling with your mental health (or even if you don’t have a mental health condition but are prone to feeling a bit glum) it can often be difficult to see the good things in life. I know when I’m going through a down patch with my mental health, my brain automatically focuses on the negatives – it’s been such a bad day, I haven’t got any friends, I’m such a failure for getting a bad mark on my work… it goes on and on. But actually, even if it has been a bad day, more often than not there will still be something positive to come out of a negative situation. For example, I may have received a bad mark on my essay, but I also received a nice text from my best friend that really made me smile. Or it’s been a really crappy day because I’ve been in hospital having an operation, but actually, that cup of tea I had after surgery was the best cup of tea I’ve had in a while! But it’s these good things that will often go straight over our head, and get forgotten in the space of a few minutes. For some reason, it always seems to be the bad things that we remember and focus on. If I look back at the last week, I can probably tell you everything that went wrong, every time I felt more unwell and everything that I regret doing/not doing. But off the top of my head, I’m struggling to think of anything particularly good that happened. And that’s where your Good Things Jar comes in.

Any time anything good happens, you simply write it down on a piece of paper, fold it up and pop it in your jar. I like to use rainbow coloured paper – a different colour for each month – to make my jar look particularly happy. But you can choose whatever you want. Some people even put other bits and pieces in their jar – cinema tickets, a note from a friend, or a train ticket from your day out. The main thing with this is that it doesn’t have to be big events (although you can put those in there too!) – it’s the little events that you would normally forget that really need to go in your jar. Something as simple as feeling the sun on your face, seeing some beautiful daffodils starting to bloom or enjoying a bubble bath after a stressful day. Then, at the end of the year, you can empty out your jar and remind yourself of all the good things that have happened throughout the year. I’m still trying to decide what to do with all my bits of paper after the year is over, so if you have any ideas please let me know! It’s also a lovely thing to look at during the year whenever you’re feeling down – simply glancing over at my jar helps me to realise that however bad things are in that moment, I know that there is always light in the darkness.

There’s been a lot of scientific research into the power of gratitude and it’s amazing how simply being thankful for the good things can have such a positive impact on our lives. It’s been found to improve our physical health, improve our psychological health, help us to sleep better, improve our self-esteem and increase our overall mental strength. Just by being thankful for what we do have and noticing the good things in our lives! And the great thing is, anyone can do it! I particularly like the idea of a Good Things Jar because I’m quite a visual person and like to be able to have a physical representation of my gratitude. But other people prefer to use a gratitude journal instead, and write three things they are grateful for before going to bed each night. However you decide to notice the good things, the most important thing is that you keep doing it. This quote from Harry Potter is one of my favourites, and I think it really fits with the idea of looking for positives amongst the negatives:

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of places, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

Albus Dumbledore

Do you have a Good Things Jar or Gratitude Journal? Or is it something you might do after reading this post? What other little things help you to manage your mental health that I might be able to blog about?

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New Year Anxiety

We’re two weeks into 2018 now – the excitement of Christmas is long gone and the positivity and motivation of a fresh new year lasted about two days before we started feeling flat again. I don’t know about you, but it’s around now that I start to get New Year anxiety. Sure, in the first few days of a new year I feel that pressure that ‘this year is going to be MY YEAR!’ But in that first week, I actually believe that! But now, that positivity and excitement has turned into anxiety and I’m feeling pretty wobbly about the prospect of having to make it through another 351 days. So I thought I would share a few little tips that I use to ease that anxiety and help myself manage that overwhelming expectation of making it a year to remember (for all the right reasons!) 

Take it a day at a time

I think this is the biggest tip I turn to whenever I’m having trouble with my mental health, and it’s something I would recommend time and time again. The worst thing you can do when you’re feeling overwhelmed and anxious about the future is to look too far ahead. When your brain is doing somersaults wondering how you can possibly get through to December, fit in all the necessities and do all those amazing things that everyone else is doing (they’re not, but you think they are!) it can often feel like you’re running out of time before you’ve even started. Either that, or it can feel like you’re looking out at an expanse of desert that goes on and on and you wonder how on earth you’re going to reach the end when there’s so far to travel. Obviously some things need to be planned in advance, like hospital appointments, work commitments etc, but as long as those are in the diary when you need them to be, I find it a lot easier to just get through one day at a time. Generally on a Sunday I will look at my week ahead, just so I’ve got an idea of anything that’s coming up, but after that I will just think about my Monday. What things do I need to do – do I have any appointments or deadlines that have to be met? And what things would I like to do? If I’ve got a completely free day, I like to try and plan something, even if it’s just small, so that I have a reason to wake up in the morning. Doing things this way makes me feel much less anxious and much more in control of my ability to keep going.

Make mini goals not huge resolutions

Especially at this time of year, it’s really easy to set yourself big resolutions like eating more healthily, exercising more or being tidy. There’s nothing wrong with resolutions like these if you feel able to keep to them, but for a lot of people setting goals this big just ends in feeling like a failure after two weeks. It certainly does for me! I find it much better to set myself smaller, more achievable goals either daily or weekly. They can be as tiny as going to bed before midnight or eating one piece of fruit a day, but usually I will only set a week’s worth of these little goals because I’m more likely to keep to them and therefore end up feeling better. I like to use things like a weekly planner or post-it notes like these where you’re able to make daily to-do lists – I do much better when I have tasks written down in front of me, and there’s no better feeling than being able to tick things off (does anyone else ever make a list of things they’ve already done, just so they can tick them off?!) I think it’s also important to try and make your goals positive ones as well. It’s all very well writing a list of things you don’t want to do or can’t do any more (Don’t go to bed late, don’t eat junk food etc.) but how rubbish does it feel having to follow all these instructions not to do the things you actually want to do!? So I try to reframe them and turn them into a more positive goal – instead of saying ‘Don’t go to bed late,’ why not say ‘Go to bed earlier so I can read my book for half an hour?’ Instantly it feels more appealing – one, because you don’t feel like you’re being told off every time you read it, and two, because you’ve given yourself a positive reason to go to bed earlier. Just little things like this can really help with sticking to your goals.

Factor in self-care

When you’re setting yourself goals, it can be easy to forget looking after yourself. And especially when you’re feeling anxious about getting through a whole year and making it the best year possible, you can become so busy trying to cram everything in that self-care doesn’t even factor in your day-to-day life. I feel a little bit hypocritical talking about self-care, because it’s something I still struggle a lot with. But at the same time, I’m beginning to understand how important it is. I used to believe anything to do with self-care was just self-indulgent and a waste of precious time and energy. But actually, now that I’ve started to make a bit more time for it, I realise that it actually puts me in a better place for everything else I do. I’ve seen what happens to people who focus solely on everyone else and neglect themselves – they’ve become run down to the point they can’t help anyone. So it’s really important to make a bit of time for yourself regularly and look after your needs as well. When you say self-care, people often think of painting your nails or going for a massage. And while these things are most definitely self-care, it can also be more every day things like making sure you eat three meals a day or ensuring you get a decent night’s sleep. Anxiety can feel so much worse when you’re feeling burnt out, so looking after yourself as well as those you love can really help you to address the year feeling a little more equipped.

Reflect on the good things from last year

When you’re looking at a whole year ahead of you with anxious anticipation, I find it can really help to look back on the year that’s just finished and remember the good times from then. One way that I like to do this is by looking back through my photos, mainly because the majority of my photos are of nice, happy moments that I don’t want to forget. If I just reflect back on the year, I will often go straight to the bad times – my mental health crisis, being in hospital… But if I look at my photos, I realise there were so many good things, little things, that got me through those difficult times. And remembering all of those good things help me to believe that, even if 2018 isn’t ‘The best year of my life,’ and even if I have some really difficult times, I can still get through it and there will still be light in the darkness. Because I find photos so powerful, one of my goals for this year is to get a lot more of my photos printed off and put some time in to starting a Project Life album. Ideally, I want to have an album for each year – that way I have something physical that I can look back on whenever I’m feeling doubtful about how I will manage to get through another year.

Plan some things to look forward to

I think it can be really difficult to look at a year ahead and feel like you have nothing to look forward to. Now, I know my earlier point talked about taking things one day at a time, but I do think there is an exception to that tip and that is planning some things to look forward to. Depending on how you best like to manage your time, you can either do this for the whole year or just do it for a week at a time. I tend to sit in the middle though. I like to try and have a few bigger things set up throughout the year to look forward to – so things like a holiday, perhaps a few days out, visiting friends that don’t live near-by. But then I will also look a couple of weeks/a month at a time and plan some smaller things to keep me going. So, if I look at my calendar on a Monday and see I have a quiet day on the Friday, I might see if my Mum fancies going for a coffee or if my sister-in-law is free so I can go and visit her and my new nephew. Plans don’t have to involve other people either – sometimes I might just plan a film or TV programme I would like to watch, or put a morning aside to write a couple of penpal letters. But knowing I have these little treats to work towards helps me to get through the days that perhaps aren’t so fun.

Use something like a Happiness Planner

If you’re not a planner person, then this last tip probably won’t be your kind of thing. But, if like me, you’re a bit obsessed with planning and journaling, you’re going to love using something like the Happiness Planner. This is just an example, as there are so many planners and journals out there to choose from depending on what sort of thing you want to record. But I find it really helpful to have a place where I can just do a bit of a brain dump – whether it’s a blank page notebook that I can just write essays in, or this Happiness Planner, which asks you all kinds of questions to help you get a better idea of what makes you happy (and sad) and how you can plan around this. If you love this kind of thing and are looking for a journal or planner to try out, I found so many options simply by typing in ‘journal’ or ‘planner’ into the search bar on Amazon. As well as helping you gather your thoughts together, these can also be a great distraction when those anxious thoughts take over.

I hope these little tips will help if you’re struggling with New Year anxiety, but I think it’s important for me to acknowledge the fact that this doesn’t have to be ‘your year’ or ‘the best year ever!’ There’s so much pressure, especially when you look at social media, for everyone to be doing amazing things and living their best lives, but sometimes simply getting out of bed and getting dressed is enough. Chances are, most of the people you see posting amazing photos on Instagram have pretty dull lives, just like the rest of us!

How do you cope with New Year anxiety? I’d love you to share your tips for managing anxiety and getting through another year

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