Fully recovered

"I have fully recovered from Anorexia"

If I am completely honest, I never really knew if I would ever be able to honestly say these 6 words but today, that is exactly what I am doing! I have recovered from my eating disorder and I AM SO PROUD OF MYSELF FOR DOING  IT! Even though it was the most terrifying and difficult thing I have ever had to do, I stuck at it anyway and refused to give up. It is just over 4 years since I was first diagnosed and even though those 4 years were painful, they were so worth it! As now I get to live the rest of my life the way I deserve to live it; happily, healthily and to the fullest

There isnt a single thing that I ever miss about my life when I was anorexic. Not how I looked and definetely not how I felt. I remember feeling as though I would never be able to accept my body at a healthy weight but I love my body now! It is healthy and strong and I love how happy and healthy I feel with my body the way it is! So please, if you are too frightened to start gaining weight as you dont think you will like your body when you recover, just do it anyway! I promise your mind will recover as your body does and you WILL be able to love yourself and your body at a bigger weight.

When I was sick, I liked how I looked and didnt want to change. Now however I can see how terrible I looked back then wouldnt go back to that for anything! Like me, you can recover too. You just have to believe it is possible and believe you can do it! Stop allowing your ED to consume your life, take control of it and live the life you deserve to live!

Gaining weight is essential

When I was underweight, people often said that it was impossible to get better mentally until I firstly got better physically. To be perfectly honest, I was quite reluctant to believe this as I could not see how weighing more would help with what was going on in my head. I didn't understand how gaining weight would magically make my anorexic thoughts go away but that really is what seems to have happened.

Since becoming weight restored I now fully believe this theory that the key to recovery is to eat and gain weight. To me, it seems as though the anorexic part of your brain is most powerful when the rest of the brain is malnourished and weak. And it is not until the rest of your brain gets stronger and repairs whilst you are becoming weight restored that your thoughts get better and healthier.

I know it feels impossible to recover and that you cant ever imagine a time when your anorexic thoughts wont be as strong and loud but I am begging you to trust me and take this chance. Gaining weight IS necessary in order to recover from anorexia. I know that this is probably the last thing you want to hear right now but sadly, you will not recover otherwise.

I waited around for years in the hope that my anorexia would go away and that my thoughts would get healthier but they never did. Even once I started eating a 'normal' amount, my anorexic thoughts and behaviours didn't get better at all as I was still at a very low weight. It was only once I started eating recovery amounts of food and started gaining weight that I have been able to start getting my life back and moving foward from my eating disorder.

While I may not be fully recovered, I would consider myself to be 80% recovered and I can still feel myself getting better everyday. Without gaining the weight I have, I know that I would still be exactly where I was a year ago, extremely anorexic and extremely unhappy. I know the prospect of gaining weight seems far to painful when your mind is still so unhealthy however you need to remember that as you gain weight, your mind gets better which allows you to accept the weight gain a little more easily.

I found the following article which explains why gaining weight is such an essential part of the recovery process at this website;

'So why the heck do people seem so impervious to the message that without weight restoration you get nothing?  And I do mean nothing: no physical recovery AND no psychological recovery.  Remember: psychological recovery is about the brain.  The brain is an organ of the body; like all other organs it needs fuel to replace broken or used-up cells, and for functioning cells to communicate with each other.  Starvation is as bad for children and for any other living thing.  This takes no great leap of intellect:  you can’t become psychologically normal in a state of malnutrition. You don’t (or shouldn't) need access to all “latest science” to know this.'

After hospital (Part 2)

I know that it has been a while since I wrote the post After hospital (Part 1), but I have finally decided to continue my story. So this post is all about the time leading up to when I actually decided I wanted to turn my life around and recover.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, when things got to hard with mum at home, I moved in with my dad and brother. It was awful having to leave my sister but Ireally had no choice but to leave. My dad was managing a farm in quite an isolated part of Tasmania and my brother was living with him so he could travel to college in the city each day. I have always been extremely close to my dad so was happy to be moving in with him.

A typical day for me

8:00 Get up and make Breakfast
8:30 Go back to bed and eat my breakfast while watching a series on my laptop
10:00 Get up and go for a shower
10:30 Read
11:00 Go for a very brisk walk around the farm
1:00 Have lunch and watch another series
3:00 Fill in my food diary
4:00 Have something for afternoon Tea
4:30 Write in my diary
5:00 Go for a drive to find phone reception so I can check facebook ;)
6:30 Have Tea
7:00 Watch Telly with dad and luke
9:30 Go to bed

As you can see my days were extremely boring and didn't change all that much for the few months I was living down there. I was only eating 5500 KJ a day and was exercising so I was obviously losing weight. At the time I honestly wasn't trying to lose weight anymore, but I was too terrified to eat anymore as I though it would make me gain weight.

A typical days food intake

Brakfast: 3 sachets of oats prepared with water
Lunch: 2 Mountain bread wraps with ham, lettuce, 1 slice of fat free cheese, redbeet and capsicum and a Soliel diet chocolate mousse
Afternoon Tea: 1 chicken noodle cup of soup (only 180 kJ) and a small packet of rice wheels
Tea: 1 cup of terriyaki flavoured rice with pumpkin and frozen mixed vegetables (carrot, peas, corn, potato, broccoli and caulliflower)

In my diary entries from this time I wrote alot about exercising and trying to increase my metabolism. I never had any energy at all but would still force myself out into the freezing cold each day to walk. In one entry I wrote;
'I have become a bit of a fanatic when it comes to exercise. If I don't get some decent exercise I feel really guilty and feel as though Ineed to make up for it by lowering my food intake for that day. I couldn't do much exercise yesterday as I had to drive to the ity so ate less than I usually do. I also made sure I went for a really goood walk today even though it was absalutely freezing. I went for a brisk walk up and down lots of steep hills and it only took me 47 minutes, even though it ususally takes me 50. I planned to do 13 minutes of skipping this afternoon so that I could get my daily exercise up to one hour but my dad came home early so I couldn't :(

My brother found a baby Pademelon wallaby while I was living with him and dad who I rared. He needed lots of attention and was absalutely gorgeous. I had to feed him every 4 hours, even at night but he gave me a reason to get up out of bed in the mornings and always managed to make me smile.
















My dad had given up on trying to give me advice or trying to make me eat as he knew there was no use. He knew that he couldn't help me until I was ready to help myself. One night while I was lying in bed I checked my heart rate and was shocked to find that it was only 30 beats per minute which is much lower than it should have been. Suddenly I was terrified as I didn't know if I would actually wake up the following morning or not. That is the moment that I realised that I needed to change if I wanted to survive.

I moved back home with my mum and sister as I knew that my dad was going to be moving home shortly after. From than on I was actively making some effort to recover although it proved to be an extremely slow process for me. My plan was to try and get to a healthier state before starting university the following year. I will share the rest of my journey since deciding I wanted to recover in a later post! :)