Eating Disorders Can be Healed Fully – No Need for Management!

I can eat one chocolate
I don’t get on the scales every morning
I can say yes to sweets. I can say no
I maintain a healthy, relatively stable weight without thinking about it
Sometimes I train regularly. Sometimes I don’t
I don’t weigh my food
I don’t count everything I eat
I don’t look in the mirror and hate what I see
I can choose to lose some weight if i want
I don’t call myself a compulsive overeater
I don’t maintain a disease

Most Importantly
I am free

It wasn’t always like this
For around 37 years, food and my body occupied my internal world almost full time

I would wake up and weigh myself
The number on the scales could determine the quality of my entire day
Up meant one thing, down meant another

I checked my reflection constantly, mirrors, shop windows, I needed reassurance that I was okay!

I had an endless collection of supplements, some for what I wasn’t eating, others promised to change something about a body I couldn’t accept

I underwent seven cosmetic surgeries trying to change it, it was extreme

My struggle with my body went back to childhood, I was eight years old when I was first given diet pills without choice (tenuate dospan)

Food became control, relief, punishment, reward and obsession

And later, some of the things offered as solutions simply gave the obsession a different structure

Weigh the food
Measure the portions
Report what you ate
Tell your sponsor what you ate yesterday
Photograph your meal and send it to someone before eating it
Call it accountability

For me, these practices reinforced something I now see very differently
I couldn’t be trusted with myself
My own signals were something to override
My appetite required supervision
My body needed controlling
My wisdom couldn’t be trusted

Yet the behaviours I’d spent decades fighting were communicating something

They weren’t the enemy
They made sense!

That’s what I’m interested in now
Not – How do we control disordered eating?
But – What made this relationship with food and the body necessary in the first place?

What was it doing?
What was it regulating?
What did I believe about myself?
How had I learned to see myself?
What happened to those perceptions when they were genuinely seen rather than endlessly managed?

Today I don’t consider myself someone successfully managing an eating disorder!

I just don’t have one

It occupied about 37 years of my life
Now I rarely even think about it

That distinction matters enormously to me!

Im 70% through my 3rd book – The Unspeakable Hunger: The Intelligence of Disordered Eating

I don’t want to write another book about controlling food

I want to explore the human intelligence underneath it and help guide people to total freedom

Because perhaps the behaviour we’ve spent so long trying to silence has been trying to tell us something all along!