Your Eating Disorder Recovery Has To Come First

When I first embarked on the long road that is recovery from anorexia, I did so half-heartedly. It was something I thought I "should" do, so I just went through the motions. I saw my therapist. I saw my dietitian. I went to a support group. But aside from that, very little changed.

I continued to run. I continued to binge. I continued to restrict. I continued to take pills. I would do recovery if and when it was convenient for me. But I certainly wasn't going to rearrange my life. Recovery was on the back burner and would be dragged up front if I had a moment to do so. It was definitely not a priority. It was as if I were an alcoholic who faithfully attended meetings and followed them with trips to the pub.

Why Does My Recovery Have to Be a Priority?

Your recovery has to be a priority, in short, because your eating disorder was. You made sure to make time for your eating disorder and now you need to make time for your recovery. I say this with great confidence and mean it with every fiber in my being: Until you make your recovery the biggest priority in your life, you will never recover.

There is a story about a philosophy professor who brought an empty jar into a lecture hall and showed it to his class. He poured a bag of rocks into the jar, filling it to the top, and asked if it was full. The students, of course, replied that yes, it was full.

He took another bag with pebbles and poured them into the jar, shaking it slightly to fill in the gaps. He again asked the class if the jar was full and they replied, with understandable skepticism, "No?" He smiled and poured sand into the jar, which leaked into all the empty spaces between the rocks and pebbles.

Some people continue the story and add water, but the point remains the same: if you don't put the big things in first, there won't be room for them. And your recovery is a big thing. It needs to go into this proverbial jar first and fit other things around it.

Early on, there were a lot of things I put ahead of my recovery. To list a few: church obligations, friendships, family, work, career aspirations. And all of these are worthy things to value. However, my eating disorder was destroying all these areas of my life and more. If I wanted to keep the things I valued, recovery was the common denominator.

If you think there is an area of your life that your anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating hasn't affected, please comment and let me know. I would be happy to correct you. I have had to have people correct me over and over again when I was too entrenched in my illness to see clearly.

I don't want to beat this horse into the ground, so I will leave you with this question to ponder: Is your eating disorder recovery a priority in your life? If not, why not - and what would need to change to make it so?

We’ll talk later about how putting recovery first looks, exactly, but the first step is acknowledging where you are and what needs to change in your priorities.

(*I originally posted this Friday, but because of some server issues, it got eaten. Like the amateur writer I am, I had failed to save my own copy. So this is a re-write of that article. All of your comments were lost too, I am sad to say, so even if you commented before, please comment again!)

Jess can also be found on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.