Overcoming relapse in eating disorder recovery

Jenni Schaefer
Author of "Life Without Ed"

When I was still struggling to recover from my eating disorder, the word “now” did not roll off my tongue very easily. Instead, I said things like “tomorrow,” “next week,” and “next month.” It looked something like this:

If I relapsed today, I would promise to get back on track tomorrow. If I relapsed on Friday, I would take the weekend off and wait to do anything about it until Monday. I might commit to journaling over the weekend about how I planned to get back on track, but I would not actually get back on track. Keeping with the same thought process, if I relapsed in October, I might wait until the New Year to start over again. I thought, “I will start fresh with recovery as a part of my New Year’s resolution. Then I will be more committed.” Letting my relapses linger on and on never made me more committed, only more sick. I guess this could have gotten me committed --- into a psych ward.

My support team always talked with me about interrupting my relapses immediately --- now rather than later . Usually my lingering relapses had to do with the fact that I was trying to compensate for a binge, so my support team seemed to agree that a key to my personal recovery would be for me to stop any and all purging behaviors following a binge. After I binged, they said that I needed to do the next right thing, which meant not restricting, not over-exercising --- not purging in any way. Doing the next right thing meant eating the very next meal after a binge --- today, not tomorrow.

I still have an email that I received years ago from a woman in my eating disorder therapy group after I had binged. She said: “Don’t let ‘Ed’ (an insider nickname for “eating disorder”) have the rest of tonight! Don’t let him talk you into one last party tonight and starting over tomorrow! You can get back on track right now.”

I believed that this woman and everyone else just wanted to make me fat. I thought, “They don’t know my eating disorder, and they really don’t know my body.”

No one bought into my way of thinking except for me. Eventually I stopped buying into it, too. Despite my best efforts, my way was not working. Even though I could not fathom changing my relapse pattern, I eventually could not imagine living the way I was living anymore. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, so I gradually (and I do mean gradually) tried to interrupt my relapses right after they happened.

In the beginning, I felt like someone was ripping out my heart and soul out every time that I did not purge after a binge. Sitting with food in my stomach felt unbearable. But it really wasn’t unbearable: it just felt unbelievably uncomfortable. I felt like a failure and like I was disappointing people. But I was actually a success, and people were proud of me, even if I wasn’t feeling particularly proud myself.

To help get through these difficult moments, I reached out to trusted people in my life. I wrote about my feelings in my journal, and discovered that journaling was always more helpful when I was actually doing what I was supposed to be doing as opposed to just writing about what I was supposed to be doing. I connected with my higher power.

Unfortunately, there was no magic pill I could take to get me through these times with ease. I had to learn how to sit in the present moment and feel the pain. When I felt bad like this on the inside, people told me that I was doing well on the outside. It was one of those “doing good, feeling bad” parts of recovery. I didn’t quite trust myself, so I started to trust the people on my support team.

I hated to admit it, but my support team was right. A key to my recovery was, in fact, not purging after bingeing. For some men and women, the most powerful form of interrupting a relapse is breaking a period of over-exercising or even quitting eating in the middle of a binge. Unlike what I used to believe, it is possible to stop bingeing before Ed wants you to stop.

When it comes to eating disorder recovery, there is no such thing as later. There is only now.

Is there anything you need to do right now?