Something that’s been important for me to remember is the peaks and valleys of recovery. I remember one of my therapists showing me an actual chart of self-reported peaks and valleys from ED patients in recovery–after starting treatment there were huge spikes, and then some downhill slopes and plummets, but then toward the end of the graph there was a slow, steady uphill progression. That was important for me to see and keep in mind as I experienced my own peaks and valleys.

I also didn’t realize until one of those valleys of my own that I was applying a disordered mind-set to recovery. I was only in treatment for a short while but in the first three weeks I was letter-perfect as far as my meal plan went–even when it was difficult, I followed it to perfection and would panic if day’s end came and I hadn’t, say, had my full number of grain/starch servings, or was unsure of how many fat servings were in a restaurant meal. Sound familiar? I was determined to be the perfect ED patient. And when I lapsed–which was inevitable–I was ill-prepared to know what to do with having “failed,” even though it wasn’t a failure at all but pretty par for the course in ED recovery.

Along with that, I’d say that you need to trust the experts. It can be empowering to think of yourself as the expert on your own body, but when you’re in recovery or have an eating disorder, the fact is, you are NOT the expert on your body, because your eating disorder lives there too and is a pretty loud tenant. For example: I am still sometimes tempted to take my meal plan to, say, a raw foods specialist and ask for a raw version of my meal plan–even though I know that for my particular symptoms, the farther away I am from any sort of extreme eating, the better. I have to humbly accept that sometimes I don’t actually know best; that that’s what ED experts and treatment teams are for, and that that’s why I sought out recovery in the first place. It can be difficult to accept that, but for me it was necessary.