It is reasonable to presume that a person's behaviors will stop and that weight will normalize to whatever it should be. At its most basic level, recovery should include both of these expectations. Without these changes, a person is still dealing with having an eating disorder on a daily basis. After weight has normalized and behaviors have ceased, the concept of recovery begins to change. The order of these changes will be different for different people. As discussed above, there will be multiple stages of change, including: how a person thinks, how they feel, how they spend their time, what their comfort level is, and how they get comfortable with their bodies and minds. In general, recovery should be thought of as a journey, not a destination. Eating disorder or not, all of us throughout our lives will be working hard to be as psychologically healthy as we can. No one ever reaches a perfect state of enlightenment, in the same way that no one with an eating disorder should expect that their thoughts and feelings will attain a perfect freedom from their disorder. But it is very possible for eating disorder thoughts and feelings to move far from the center of a person's life. Many individuals reach a state of comfort around triggers, develop a healthy relationship with food, and eventually feel comfortable inside their bodies and minds.
In her book, Gaining, which is one of our favorite books about recovery from an eating disorder, Aimee Liu quotes Dr. Sheila Reindl by stating "Recovery is like a big old house. The anorexic or the bulimic is always going to live there. People sometimes think, I can evict her, I can get rid of that. But you don't develop an eating disorder for no good reason. Its a profound experience. So how could you wipe out that whole piece of your history? I prefer to think of it this way. She was in charge of the kitchen, in charge of everything. Now she still gets to live there and she may still have some of those old fears and vulnerabilities, but she's got only one room in the house and has to make way for more and more occupants as time passes."
Next week: What is orthorexia?
Contributions by Sarah Emerman