Maybe you’ve been in recovery for a while now. You’ve started eating more, skipped some of the old behaviors, challenged a few fear foods. Months have passed, maybe even years, and you still feel like something isn’t right. Extreme hunger won’t settle. The eating disorder thoughts are still loud. You’ve put in so much effort — so why does it still feel like nothing has really changed?
Looking back at my own eating disorder, I can see now that I spent a few years thinking I was recovering when I was actually still stuck in it. The problem wasn’t a lack of effort. The problem was that I had the blinders on, and I genuinely couldn’t see that some of the behaviors I was still holding onto were restrictive — because they were normalized by society, by wellness culture, by everyone around me telling me I was doing the healthy thing.
My eating disorder didn’t start with wanting to lose weight
It started with stress. Chronic stress caused real physical symptoms — my hair was falling out, my digestion was a mess, and I developed severe acne that destroyed my self-esteem. A doctor prescribed medication that just dried out my skin further, and I understood it was going to be a long road before things actually improved. I hated the symptoms, and more than that, I wanted to heal myself from the inside out. So I started changing my diet. Cutting out sugar. Dairy products. Then more foods. Eventually I was fully raw food vegan.
For a while it seemed to work. My skin cleared up, my digestion improved. But looking back now, I think a lot of that had to do with lower stress, not the food itself — because today I eat all kinds of foods, including sugar and processed food, and my skin is clear, my hair is growing, my digestion is fine. The food was never the real cause. The stress was. But what I went through caused so much brainwashing, and so many limiting beliefs, that I was convinced this was the only way I could eat and stay healthy.
How “healthy eating” became my new eating disorder
One thing I did get right early on: I understood that restricting calories fuels binge eating, so I stopped doing that. For a while I followed a high-carb, low-fat raw vegan approach that encouraged eating 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day and didn’t push calorie restriction — which sounds like progress. But the diet itself was deeply restrictive in its own way. No fats. No salt. No oils. Vegan only, whole foods only, heavy on raw food. And the community around it exercised constantly.
So many people in that space had a history with eating disorders, and I think it attracted them because the people promoting it were lean and fit — the message was still, underneath it all, about how to eat a lot of food and still stay small. Despite eating “enough” calories, I still had bulimia. I still had regular urges to binge on junk food, in secret, buried in guilt and shame, convinced something was deeply wrong with me. That’s the part of the story that kept me in quasi-recovery — I wasn’t restricting calories anymore, but I was still restricting entire categories of food, still terrified of bread, or oil, or anything that wasn’t “clean.”
Exercise can be restriction too
The other blind spot was exercise. Because that community was so into it, I was too — and since society doesn’t see anything wrong with exercising, especially for a “healthy person,” it never occurred to me that it might be the problem for me specifically. My eating disorder came from restriction, and healthy eating had become a safety behavior: eating any other way caused fear, guilt, and a complete sense of being out of control. If I didn’t exercise, I felt an urge that something was wrong, like I had to move, like I couldn’t sit still with the feeling of fullness. My relationship with exercise wasn’t healthy, even if it looked that way from the outside — and after years of bulimia and stress, my body needed rest, not another workout.
If any of this sounds familiar, Why Eating More in ED Recovery Feels SO Wrong goes deeper into why doing the right things can still feel like you’re doing something wrong.
The binge that finally broke the cycle
My full recovery started after another 30 days of raw eating, followed by a massive binge and purge episode that left me feeling horrible — completely done. During that process I remembered a book on intuitive eating I’d read before, one that talked about stopping all restriction. It described the author’s day, including going out for hamburgers and fries with friends, and at the time I dismissed it. I told myself I could stop restricting calories, but I wasn’t going to eat “junk food.” That dismissal cost me another full year stuck in quasi-recovery.
After the next binge and purge cycle, I stumbled on the same book again, and only partway through realized I’d already read it. This time, because I was finally desperate enough to take the blinders off, that hamburgers-and-fries example landed differently. I finally understood: no matter how many smoothies or low-fat salads I ate, I would never feel satisfied, because I was still restricting the exact foods I was secretly bingeing on. That day — October 1st — I stopped purging for good, once I understood that purging is just another form of restriction that feeds the next binge instead of relieving anything.
What actually got me unstuck
Around that time I found the MinniMaude recovery guidelines that later became the Homeodynamic Recovery Method, which reshaped how I thought about how much I should be eating, and introduced me to the concept of bulimia athletica — purging through exercise, not just through vomiting. That was the moment I finally saw my own exercise habits clearly, and stopped.
What made the difference wasn’t more information. It was being willing to question everything I believed about food, identity, and what “healthy” meant, and to let go of it if it was standing in the way of full recovery. I was so involved in the raw food community, and I let that go too, because nothing — no eating style, no exercise routine, no community — was more important than getting free. The friends who mattered stayed. They were never there for how I ate or how I looked.
If you know what to do but can’t stay consistent
You might already know the steps. You might even know more about recovery than most people do. But if fear keeps pulling you back the moment things get uncomfortable, that’s a different problem than not knowing what to do — and it’s exactly what From Fear To Action was built to address: five short videos on why fear shows up in recovery, how to keep taking action anyway, and how to stop it from quietly running the show.
