Having a boyfriend has really helped me in the final stages of my recovery

While this may not be the case for everyone,  my boyfriend has helped me enormously to overcome the last few stages of recovery. I think that this has been the case for me because he is such a wonderful person who I have developed a very special bond with so quickly. While it has helped me a lot, it is very important to note that having a boyfriend is not necessarily always a positive thing in recovery. This depends not only on what stage of recovery you are at but also the type of person your boyfriend is.

Although I was already weight restored when I met my boyfriend,  my mental state has continued to improve in leaps and bounds. When we began going out for dinner all the time, drinking alcohol  and enjoying food together, I really was still scared of all of those things. But just being with such a wonderful person really did help me to get through all of those things and eventually enjoy them with no fear at all. Now I have completely overcome the fears of eating extra food on some occasions and also eating out and consuming liquid calories. In fact, I now enjoy doing all of these things!

The fact that my weight has remained constant since I have started going out and eating more sometimes, has really proven to me that its perfectly fine to eat more sometimes and that doing this won't hurt me. No matter how many times I read or was told this was the case, I never truly believed it. Nathan has helped me to really start living and in the process has helped prove to me that eating extra doesnt necessarily lead to weight gain and is not a bad thing. It has also shown me that missing meals sometimes wont hurt me either. I know now that our bodies are not calorie counting machines and our energy requirements are not an exact science.

Having someone who loves and accepts me completely for who I really am really has helped me to accept myself too. I really do think that my low self esteem and poor confidence is what caused my eating disorder in the first place and it was also preventing me from making a full  recovery. For a long time I knew that learning to accept myself was an essential part of my recovery and I was right, because it is only through learning to respect and appreciate myself for who I truly am have I been able to overcome the final few stages of recovery.

Occasionaly, I still have moments when I wish to be thinner or am not completely satisfied with how I look but I think that this is all just a normal part of being a girl and I never act on these thoughts. The main reason being that I know my boyfriend likes me just the way I am and there is therefore no reason to change. Also, I know that if I got sick again I would hurt my boyfriend and possibly lose him, which are two things I couldn't bare to do. So not only has my boyfriend helped me to make recovery progress, but it has also stopped me from slipping backwards in my recovery too.