When you have an eating disorder, you need to know what to tell an eating disorder treatment decision-maker. After all, having an eating disorder sucks and being worried about affording, or being denied eating disorder treatment, adds to the suckiness. During my stay at an inpatient facility, one of the girls threw up blood, and still, her insurance kicked her out after 11 days. Another girl with anorexia was there before I arrived and stayed after my release. To insurance companies, people are words on a page. They don’t know us. Even if they saw a picture, they might think we’re fine when we’re not. What they don’t know, is that just because we don’t look like a skeleton, it doesn’t mean we’re not at risk of dying. Here's what eating disorder treatment decision-makers need to know.

Why would anyone resist eating disorder recovery? Wouldn't eating disorder recovery be better than an active eating disorder? Afterall, when we think about eating disorders, the terms laughing, cheerful, bright, glad, or content don’t make the list. For those of us who’ve been living with our disorder for a while, there’s a helplessness, hopelessness and self-doubt, which kicks us down the stairs of depression with an eating disorder. We’re not stupid. We know we’re missing out on life. Yet fear pokes us with a sharp stick taunting, “What if you never recover? You’ll get fat. You’ll spiral out of control.” Terror of the unknown keeps us frozen in place, or moving with icy limbs. There’s a simple reason we resist eating disorder recovery. Once we hear it, eating disorder recovery won’t be the same.

I’ll be honest, when I was faced with buying a new phone a few months ago, a major factor in my decision was the selection of phone apps available for eating disorder recovery. I’d previously had a Windows phone, which offered very little in the way of available apps of any kind, much less for eating disorder recovery. So I finally joined the rest of the world and bought an iPhone. I’ve spent the last month or so downloading different eating disorder recovery apps and trying them out – here’s what I have found.

There are a lot of things I wish insurance companies knew about eating disorders, but the reality is, the people who are deciding whether or not to pay for our eating disorder treatment are not always our doctors. They can be case managers, or people whose first priority is to make the company money. If the insurance company can reasonably deny your claim, they will. And this makes me unbelievably angry. Here's what I wish insurance companies knew about eating disorders.

Around Christmas, I invited you guys to consider whether or not you are putting your recovery from an eating disorder as your first priority. I hope you were able to take some time and really sit with that question and come up with an honest answer for yourself. I have. That’s the thing about putting your eating disorder recovery first – you need to regularly check in with yourself and see if you are still putting your health and recovery first. And if you’re not, you need to figure out how to change that.

I was hospitalized in an inpatient facility for a few days recently (not for my anorexia, but a comorbid condition). I was there long enough to see some patient turnover and was reminded just how much the attitudes of people you are in treatment with can affect you. In school, we call this the "therapeutic milieu." I prefer to think of it as the general "vibe" of the unit.

In the last six years since the start of my eating disorder recovery, I've been pretty diligent in trying to make an effort not to skip meals along with the inevitable emotions that will surface at times when I interact with food. However, lately with the stress of an active lifestyle, I have found it harder to remember to enjoy and relax while eating, as it feels like it takes away time from other important things. Realizing that this could lead to falling into old patterns, I recently decided to take a mindfulness workshop whose topic was the art of eating with a clear mind, three times a day.

When it comes to my recovery from anorexia, like in a lot of areas of my life, I strive to be fiercely independent. Imagine a petulant toddler yelling, "I do it self!" at the top of her lungs and pushing people away while simultaneously crying because she can't actually "do it self." Excellent. You have just drawn yourself a picture of my first three years of recovery failures.

In my last post about being 24 and having an eating disorder, I looked back on my years in graduate school where I felt very lonely, even though I was often surrounded by many of my peers. Over time, and shortly after I started to get some help to manage my anxiety about food and body image, I had to understand why I had a tendency to engage in self-harm by binging and purging when I found myself in stressful situations. I thought I'd share some simple ways which might help you gain some understanding of your eating disorder, though by no means do I claim that this might be the right way for you to go about your recovery process. This is simply me sharing my experience with you,and I do invite you to reach out to an eating disorder professional for support in your journey to recovery.

Throughout my numerous trips to treatment for anorexia, I have had the opportunity to connect with some amazing women. (While I have never been in a treatment facility with men, I have also met some amazing men through the course of my recovery.) Some of these women I met while they were still adolescents -- 14, 15, 16 years old. And this week, many of them are headed to college -- moving into dorms, meeting new people, taking harder classes. I'll be honest, I am scared to death that many of them are going to suffer an eating disorder relapse.