Aoife Henry

she woke up one day, 
        and shucked her armor of pride
                and map of false promises.

she took hold of the hands 
            that waited so patiently.

and started to climb out
            of the hell she had called home

quiet resolve, Aoife Henry

Towards the end of February 2024, with the unquestioning support of my father, I checked myself into an intensive outpatient program (IOP) for eating disorder treatment. Many a kind friend has congratulated me on this since. While I appreciate and will certainly not reject their affirmation and their pride, from my perspective there was no alternative option. After my upteenth rock-bottom, it was time. I have now completed 9 out of the recommended 15 weeks of program at La Luna Center, and this article is a summary of what I have learned during this process.

acknowledge the suffering you have inflicted upon yourself and others, grieve it, and move on

Eating disorders are a form of self-harm. If you have the capacity to feel emotions and pain, and there are people who love you who can feel your emotions and pain by proxy, then your eating disorder has hurt you and it has hurt the people who watched you suffer. Starvation, stress fractures, hours upon hours of rumination, physical pain, tears, shame, hopelessness, depression, rigidity, missing out on quality time with friends. All of these things and more have happened as a result of your eating disorder. You cannot reclaim that time or that pain from the past, but you can reclaim it from the future. This is not a case of simply “letting it go” because it is hard to acknowledge loss and it is harder to come to terms with it. But you must try to move on with your life.

allocate time and energy to specialized therapy

Changing your brain takes time and, in many cases, professional coaching. There are core beliefs, habits, thought patterns, and unhelpful coping mechanisms that you have honed for most of your life up to the point of getting help, and it will take momentous dedication and charged effort to change those. You will need to make sacrifices, putting a pause on ways you would have spent your time, removing extra stressors from your life, perhaps even distancing yourself from stressful people in your life. You must, for a finite stretch of time, commit time and mental energy to getting better. This is priority #1, #2, and #3 for now. This is worth every iota of effort. In making this short-term, intensive effort, you are enabling yourself to be happy and to contribute to the happiness of others.

Know that your brain is perfectly healthy, it learned to behave in these ways to survive, and it can learn to survive in a way that doesn’t result in collateral damage. To that end you must activate your full neuroplastic potential to change parts of that brain.

My IOP program consists of 3×3 hours of group therapy, 1 hour of individual therapy, and a 30 minute nutritionist appointment per week. This is emotionally draining and you just won’t have the juice to take on much, if any, additional emotional labor. Which brings us to our next point…

be honest

Anna Lembke, the author of the book Dopamine Nation, observes that, of the patients she sees who are trying to learn to moderate or eliminate their addictive consumption or behaviors, those who are most honest about their struggles tend to be the most successful in their recovery journeys. It can be intensely uncomfortable to admit to your friends and family that you too suffer from the human condition of imperfection, that you have failed to manage it on your own, and that you are leaning on supports to help you to get back to your feet. I promise that it gets easier. Try to be open about your eating disorder, your recovery efforts, your successes, your remaining challenges, and how your people can support you in recovery .

Be honest with your nutritionist, your therapist, your fellow group therapy friends, your friends, your family, your partners, your housemates, and anyone else who has earned the right to hear your story. You are not broken for suffering with this, and it is not a condition to be ashamed of.. Disordered eating, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and dysfunctional diet and exercise culture are pervasive and there are more people than you think who have succumbed to some degree.

Catch yourself clinging, Let go, Repeat

In times of insecurity, anxiety, and hopelessness, we cling to the old habits that we still believe serves us on some level. It is normal and expected that we will trip and stumble into these old habits during recovery. Recovery is not linear, and relapse is a part of it. The important thing is to recognize the behaviors that don’t serve you, to accept that it is for the better to let them go, to enable yourself to do that, and to practise catching yourself and walking away when you slip into it anyway. Throw away the scales, forget about a goal weight, catch yourself calorie-counting and body checking, notice when you are compulsively eating. Notice, say “whoops!”, stop, and move on. Learning how to regulate in helpful ways is like trying to learn how to hit a ball with a bat. Don’t ruminate in the misses, just keep practising.

Practise regular, unrestricted eating

All eating disorders involve some kind of restriction. Restriction, in the context of eating disorders, means forbidding yourself from eating when you hungry, or forbidding yourself from eating particular foods or at particular times. The cultivates a sense of deprivation, which, over time, teaches your brain that food is scarce and that when we eat, we must eat a lot, especially the “forbidden foods”. To break this cycle, it is critical to eat enough, to eat frequently, to eat with intention, to eat anything you want. Challenge yourself by creating rituals around eating “bad foods” with people who support you. Sit in the discomfort of that. Log everything you eat, intentional or not. I record everything I eat, along with notes regarding my hunger levels, emotions, and thoughts in an app called Recovery Record. I try to practise eating sitting down, logging before I eat, and logging dysfunctional thoughts before acting in the app. I don’t always achieve this, and I am not planning on practising these behaviours forever, but they do facilitate me, in this transitional recovery period, to “bring intention to the table”.

practise joyful movement

Compulsive exercise, or exercise purely motivated by the desire to burn calories, is often a component of an eating disorder. Depending on the severity of your condition and how compulsive your relationship with exercise is, itt may be necessary to cease all formal exercise, or at least to reduce it. For a competitive marathoner like myself, this was unthinkable at first. But in recovery, for every unthinkable action that may be hindering your healing, we must decide: “do I want to keep doing X, or do I want to get better”.

Get in the habit of asking your inner child – “what do you want to do today?” It’s unlikely that they want to get up before sunrise to run 10 miles in the cold and dark on an empty stomach. Get curious about what movement would bring you joy and try it.

practise new skills for old habits

As I alluded to above, we learned eating disorder behaviors as a response to difficult thoughts and emotions, and after sometime those behaviors beget more difficult thoughts and emotions. To stop feeding this spiral, we must learn and practice new mental skills to tolerate these demons. Recovery record helpfully offers suggestions for every meal you log, and different skills will suit different brains better. We need to check the menu of skills out, learn about them in therapy, and try the ones that sound useful to us. Some of my favorites include the three steps of.self-compassion (mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness); “unhooking” from, “giving space to”, and “making friends with” emotions, “safe space visualization”, connecting to your “wise mind”, recognizing “bullying thoughts”, and “burning bridges” to unhelpful behaviors.