Body image in eating disorder recovery is one of the hardest things to work through — and not just in the way people assume.
It’s not just about looking in the mirror and not liking what you see. It’s feeling disgusted by your own reflection. Not recognising your face. Dreading comments from people you love. Grieving a body you used to have. And living inside a culture that never stops sending the message that weight gain is something to fear and fix.
These questions came directly from you. And I want to answer them honestly — not with toxic positivity, not with “just love yourself,” but with what actually helps.
Why You Feel Disgusted When You Look in the Mirror
The first thing I want you to understand is this: it’s not your body making you feel disgusted. It’s your thoughts about your body.
This can feel like a dismissive answer — and I get that. When the feeling is that strong, being told “it’s just a thought” can seem almost insulting. But think about it this way: if you woke up tomorrow with no memory of the beliefs you’ve collected — no diet culture conditioning, no running commentary about what your body should look like — would you still feel disgusted? Most people, when they really sit with that question, say no. The body would just be a body.
That’s not proof the feeling isn’t real. It absolutely is. But it’s proof that how you think about your body shapes how you feel in it — not the other way around. Which means the work isn’t to change how your body looks. It’s to identify the thoughts and beliefs you’re carrying, and begin to challenge them.
As long as you’re focused on changing your body so you can finally feel okay in it, you will never get there. Even people who used to be thinner often look back at old photos and remember they hated their body then too — the body changed, but the thoughts stayed the same. The feeling followed the thought, not the body. And that’s actually good news, because thoughts can change.
Facial Changes — When You’ve Accepted Your Body But Not Your Face
Recovery changes your whole body — and that includes your face. Many people find they’ve made a kind of peace with their body, but the face feels different. More visible. Harder to hide. Harder to work with.
But the way you speak to your face follows the same mechanism as the way you speak to any part of yourself. If you would never say to someone you love, “your face looks wrong, it’s changed, there’s something bad about how you look” — then saying those things to yourself isn’t neutral. It has an effect. It shapes how you feel.
The shift isn’t to make yourself like your face before you can treat yourself better. It works the other way around. You treat yourself better first — you change the self-talk, you practice compassion — and the feelings shift over time as the brain rewires.
I also want to say something that might feel uncomfortable: recovery shouldn’t have “having to like how I look” as the finish line. Because if your sense of okay-ness is built entirely on liking your appearance, it will always be fragile — because your appearance will always change. We age. Our skin changes. Our face changes. That’s just life. What we’re building in recovery is a self-worth that has nothing to do with how you look on any given day. Not forced body love. Body neutrality.
How to Handle Hurtful Comments from Others
Comments from other people hurt. And I’m not going to tell you they shouldn’t, or that you can just think your way out of feeling stung. On a purely human level, wanting to feel accepted — especially by the people closest to you — is wired into us. That’s not weakness. That’s just being human.
What I want to offer is this: the people making these comments — even the ones who love you most — can still be deeply conditioned by diet culture. They can support you in every other area of your life and still carry beliefs about weight and bodies that are completely disconnected from what recovery actually requires. Their comments are a reflection of their own conditioning, not a verdict on your recovery.
What you can do is set clear boundaries. Ask people not to comment on your body, your food, or your weight changes. They don’t need to understand why — they just need to respect it. And that’s what you deserve.
But the longer-term work is internal. Comments tend to hit hardest when part of us secretly agrees with them. When a comment triggers you deeply, it’s often because it lands on a belief you already hold. That belief is what to work on — because when you no longer hold it, the comment loses most of its power. Your brain is neuroplastic. You can change your beliefs and your world view, even if the people around you never do.
Missing Your Smaller Body and Clothes That Don’t Fit
Grieving your smaller body is real. I’m not going to minimise it. We live in a society that makes it genuinely easier — logistically and socially — to be in a smaller body, and it’s okay to acknowledge that without it meaning you’re doing recovery wrong.
But there’s a difference between acknowledging the grief and building a story on top of it. The story that says smaller was better, smaller was really you, bigger means something has gone wrong. That story is diet culture — and it’s worth questioning.
Here’s what’s also true: that smaller body required an eating disorder to maintain. It wasn’t a neutral version of you. It was a suppressed version of you — your weight, your hunger, your needs, all kept down by behaviours that cost you enormously. The body you have now is your body without restriction. And that’s not a body gone wrong. That’s your body finally living.
One of the most practical things you can do right now: change your wardrobe. I know the resistance is real. But so many clients have told me that once they finally did it — bought clothes that actually fit the body they have now — something shifted. When your clothes fit your body instead of fighting it, your daily experience of being in your body changes. It’s just fabric. But it matters.
Focus on what you can control. The body changing is real. Fighting that reality only causes more suffering. The question to ask isn’t “how do I go back?” — it’s “how do I make myself as comfortable as possible right now, as I move through this?”
The Cultural Programming That Weight Gain Is Bad
This one is real, and I won’t pretend the culture isn’t a problem. It is. But you cannot wait for the culture to change before you recover. It won’t change on your timeline. And holding your recovery hostage to what everyone else believes is, essentially, handing over your healing to people who haven’t even started theirs.
What you can do is recognise that these beliefs were learned. You weren’t born believing weight gain was bad. You absorbed it — from your family, from the media, from years of messaging. And what was learned can be unlearned.
You are also not alone in this. There are already thousands of people actively working against diet culture — choosing body neutrality, choosing recovery, choosing to opt out. You don’t have to change the whole culture to recover. You just have to decide which part of it you belong to.
Be the change you want to see. Because the one person you actually have the power to change is yourself. And that’s where real change always starts.
👉 [Download the Fear of Weight Gain Bundle] If the fear of weight gain and what it means for your body and your identity is something you’re working through right now, the Fear of Weight Gain Bundle walks you through exactly this — how to challenge the fear physically and psychologically, step by step.
Body image in recovery is hard. It was always going to be hard — because we live in a world that spent years teaching us our bodies are problems to solve.
But the shift that makes recovery possible is learning to separate your worth from what your body looks like. Your worth is not in your face. It is not in the size of your clothes. It is not in whether someone else approves of the body you’re recovering into.
You are not doing something wrong. You are healing. And that is worth everything.
