Relearning to Eat After an Eating Disorder

What helps—and what to look out for.

I developed anorexia and bulimia in my early teens. The ailments carried me until I was 19, when I finally agreed to get help. I’d gone down to a meagre 33 kgs (73 pounds) for my tall frame of 175cm (5ft7in).

When I was admitted to the hospital, I was fully cooperative.

On that morning, I had been unable to physically lift myself out of bed. I had become that physically weak. For the first time in a decade of self-annihilation, I felt scared for my life. I wanted to survive. So, I adhered to the rules of the treatment—regular feeding, no bathroom privacy, no visits.

After years of prohibiting my body from assimilating food, my digestive system was overwhelmed and confused by the food I was now depositing in my stomach—with no sign of voluntarily disposing of the food anytime soon. My body was so used to my compulsive punishment of it whenever I ate that it did not know what to do with this food being left idly there. Was it a trap? If my body chose to assimilate the food, would it result in even graver reprimands from my mind?

My body does not have consciousness. What it does have, however, is a capacity of adapting itself to whatever harm it’s being put through, and cleverly circumnavigating the harm in order to survive.

It took some time for my body to understand that the food I ate in the hospital was to navigate downward again, as it is customary, and not upward, as I had previously distorted it to act.

That was the first step.

Learning to eat again after an eating disorder goes beyond feeding oneself. It means learning to live again without the illusion of safety that the illness provided.

The more thorny step was the mental side of the equation.

Feeding oneself is relatively easy, but learning to feel comfortable withholding food in one’s system is a different matter.

An eating disorder (ED) comes to heighten or sublimate what food means to an individual. The total absence—or overabundance—of it becomes an emblem for a deeper ailment. Food no longer is something that merely acts as fuel to keep one alive. It becomes love, desire, refusal of desire, one’s mother, or father, the abuse one has experienced, the safety that was refused, the key to holiness, the answer to all of life’s problems. Food becomes everything.

Learning to eat again after an eating disorder goes beyond feeding oneself. It means learning to live again without the illusion of safety that the illness provides.

• With Anorexia, attempting to eat again is inextricably steeped in a sense of failure. It feels like breaking a secret code that you and your inner tyrant have been deeply invested in. Your phenomenal rise towards the ethereal and disembodied realms is catapulted back to mundane reality once you eat again. The shield that was so carefully built through a hunger creates a cottony boundary where the world becomes muffled out, breaks, and you are left feeling vulnerable.
• Learning to eat again after Bulimia is, quite simply, like telling a heroin addict that in order to get clean, they have to shoot up the smack three times a day, but not, under any circumstances, get high. It’s damn near impossible.

Through harm and healing, the body develops its own memory. It catalogues the instances when it is brutalized and crafts clever ways of avoiding the same harm from happening ever again.

In a primitive way, the body does have your back.

As you lay down the proverbial weapons of self-abuse, the body is ready to heal, but a tad withered from all the harm. It needs time to readjust.

Three ways I have learned to eat again

What follows are some of the resources that have helped me not only return to a healthy weight, but also reacquaint myself with satiety, hunger cues, and simply the acceptance of holding a (physical and metaphorical) weight in this world.

What has worked for me may not work for you.

Eating disorders are extremely complex and vary from person to person. I’m not a medical professional, I’m simply a survivor of these mental conditions. I also want to keep this article relatively succinct for ease of reading and application, but I hope to write follow-up articles. I’m also writing a book about the process of healing from self-abuse.

1. Switch the scene

Before my stay in the hospital, I had moved from France to London for my studies. It felt important to me to break away from a home setting that was increasingly claustrophobic.

My parents supported my choice to leave, although they were worried for my health.

Although I did end up losing much more weight in that year away than any time before, resulting in the aforementioned hospitalization, I still returned to the UK after my stay at the hospital.

What I did change, however, was the context. I quit my university studies and began working full-time in a restaurant.

While everyone around me lamented my choice of leaving higher education, it was a change of scene that benefitted me greatly.

What I had come to realize was that studying was not beneficial to my health. In fact, I could lose myself in the “ingestion of knowledge” and use excessive studying as a way of not feeding myself. I was physically inactive, my head buried in books and at the cinema. I was detached from my body, which facilitated my neglect of it.

Finding a job that kept me on my feet reacquainted me with the urgency of physical hunger—I needed to eat to have enough energy to work. That job also gave me the opportunity to break out of my shell and interact not only with the public but with coworkers who became my friends. Prior to that, my illness had left me isolated from people and that had made my inner tyrant more potent, as it was my sole company.

So, I changed the context into one where it was not so easy for the inner tyrant to dictate the rules.

WHAT YOU COULD DO :

• Find a new job, hobby, setting or activity that gets you outside of yourself and into a new community that inspires you to heal.
• In addition to the social aspect, find an activity in which you can contribute by sharing your knowledge or talent, or learning a new skill.
• Just make sure that the new context that you choose doesn’t put so much pressure on you that you have to resort to controlling your circumstances through food.

2. Develop your own preferences and routines

When you’re learning to eat again, it can be very easy to get caught up in other people’s diets or the diktats of society at that time.

You’re seeking order because all you know is order.

My own eating “disordered” life was actually very precise and regimented.

I knew what I would binge and purge, and when. I knew when I would ingest my only meal of the day (an apple) and how (very, very slowly, so as not to disrupt my sense of floating nothingness).

When you’re attempting to relearn the act of eating as a simple occurrence that happens 1–3 times a day, the process can seem at once completely confusing and grimly colorless as food loses the strong emotional symbol it may have held for you, and becomes mere physical sustenance.

Be patient with yourself.

At the beginning of my healing journey, I would write down the meals I had planned for that day, and I would prepare and eat these meals with care. I would usually eat alone because I was intimidated by non-ED people and their seeming insouciance at eating. Their ease with eating triggered me and made me feel like a freak, which then prompted me back to my old ways, ie. purging.

At the beginning, you may only see a reflection in others of your own inability to “eat normally” and this can be demoralizing. It’s easy to fall back on your ED as a trusted companion. Resisting this urge will require the close support system of 1 or 2 people who understand what you are going through, are compassionate, and understanding the highs and lows of your healing journey.

WHAT YOU COULD DO :

• Create a loving ritual for meals. Listen to music, use nice plates, source food that inspires you.
• Keep a “food-feeling” journal. Note down whenever you feel particularly good or bad either before, during, or after a meal. Exorcise or celebrate that stuff through writing. Vomit words on the page. There are no limits here.
• Be present. Say a prayer or a blessing for the food. Imagine all the people who were invested in making it possible for you to access this food, and celebrate that (without, however, veering into guilt-tripping yourself for having access to food and then feeling terrible about that!).
• Visualize the way the food it is lovingly transformed by your body into energy and think of all the ways you’ll be able to utilize this fuel.

3. Be mindful of your inner tyrant

An eating disorder leaves a lasting impact on all aspects of you.

Years of having invested my energy into not existing through anorexia has contributed to crippling insecurities that have left me cooped up inside my house for days, for fear of going outside, so ill equipped I felt with the mere activity of fully “existing” and being visible to others.

On the physical front, my teeth have bared the brunt of constant vomiting, and my bones and organs remember the torment of starvation. The body keeps score.

Nevertheless, the body and spirit have a magnificent ability to heal. It’s been at least 7 years since I last puked, 15 since I exited that hospital and I’m still here, healthy. I often think it’s a miracle.

But the inner tyrant remains. It doesn’t die with your illness. I don’t believe that we ever can expect to fully eradicate these so-called demons that reside within us. After all, they are but parts of ourselves that have been born out of pain and have been sullied by sustained hurt. I’ve learned to neighbour my inner tyrant instead of killing it, and offering it love—when I can.

The inner tyrant still shows its cunning head on occasion, attempting to trick me into bad things, but the mighty body and its potent memory usually come to counter the temptation of the inner tyrant.

For instance, I’ve experimented with veganism or cleansing juice fasts and the sensations I felt have come to remind me of my anorexia. In the midst of the euphoria that comes with a high intake of natural vitamins and radiant fresh foodstuffs, I could hear a somber voice emerging, one that I recognized from before. The voice, hypnotic, beckoned me to keep going, to eat less and less, and less. It called me to ascend towards the purity that these diets or rituals promise, and that anorexia fulfilled for me.

At first, the voice appeared like a long-lost toxic lover, seductive and alluring. With mindful practice, I learned to say no to the lure of the somber voice, and in time—I promise you this—the voice loses its power. It diminishes into a stereotype of itself. It becomes a worn-out shady car salesman. Or a cliche Mediterranean lover boy with fake teeth. In time, you learn to fear the tyrant less as it becomes an occasionally pestering amusement.

WHAT YOU COULD DO :

• Get acquainted with your inner tyrant. Don’t negotiate with it but speak to it in a loving and firm way. Acknowledge it with kindness but take back the wheels of your life. Healing modalities like therapy are a huge recommendation.
• Pay attention to moments when it points its head again. Don’t berate yourself for moments when you slip back into old tendencies, simply regroup and keep going.
• Honor your body and learn to regain its trust. You’ll have your own way of doing this, but exercise, stretching, meditation, and simply stillness have helped me.

Thank you for reading.

I have refrained from overpopulating this article with cold medical data because I’d rather rely on what is certain for me, which is my own experience. I truly hope that this article helps you, whether you are suffering from an ED, are in the process of healing, or know someone who is suffering from it.

I’m open to a discussion about this. Feel free to comment on any questions that you might have, which may result in further articles on this topic.

And wherever you are on your journey, I am wishing you well.