Eating disorders have one goal, and it’s not to get you thin. An eating disorder is trying to get you dead. There is no weight, no body shape, and no silhouette that is acceptable. The goals constantly shift.

Additionally, recovery requires that you still engage with all the things that are problematic, and that are killing you. You cannot give up eating. You cannot give up wearing clothes. You can’t stop personal grooming, and all of these are co-opted by the eating disorder. Recovery means you explode your life and change everything. This is why it’s not completely the same as addiction, though it does share much.

You have to eat, and your disease doesn’t want that.

You have to wear clothes, but the disease uses that to attack. The sizes are too big, the fit too tight, and the flesh too abundant. Skeletal is the desire, but skeletal is mostly dead. It’s not unlike hypothermia, which I’ve also experienced. Most of your higher thinking shuts down. You fight to survive the thing that you’re also in love with, the thing that’s trying to destroy you from the inside out.

Hope Whispers has written a beautiful essay, Body Acceptance, about these challenges.

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Header photo credit: Advenium

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