The Ingredients For Eating Disorder Recovery

Eating disorder recovery is a creative process, unique to each person.

It’s a process that organically unfolds. It is the process of breaking out of habitual ways of thinking, feeling and believing and trying on something different, connecting new dots, and making fresh associations.

Like a creative process, recovery cannot be rushed or forced as it moves at the pace and capacity of the nervous system.

It is useful to know what the basic, overarching ingredients are as we enter the recovery journey. Similarity, like in any creative process, it is useful to have a framework or a scaffolding to hold and trust the unknowns that come with the territory.

The four foundational ingredients include social connection, sensory nourishment, interoceptive awareness and resting and digesting.

With these four ingredients to form the base, there is a lot that we can explore in eating disorder recovery.:

Social connection, established through co-regulation, is the process of regulating our nervous system with the support of someone, either through trusted friends, a therapist, attuned group support healing spaces, and even pets.

When the nervous system is in a state of regulation, the process if ingesting digesting is more neurologically accessible, and the eating disorder voice is quieter.

You can read more about the impact that co-regulation has in this article. Whilst it is focused on the importance of psychedelic guides, it has relevant gems pertinent to this first ingredient.

Sensory nourishment is the exploration of resourcing the body in different ways so that it feels regulated enough to engage in the complex process of eating.

Some people with eating disorders have sensory sensitivity so when we support from a bottom-up, body-first approach we integrate the sensory system in order to take in food in a regulated way. Supporting what is either overwhelmed or underwhelmed by adding in nourishing sensory-based resources, fortifies the whole body-mind, softening the edges around eating in general.

There are many ways to resource the body that doesn’t only involve food. Working with the far senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste) and near sense (vestibular, proprioception and interoception systems) are ways to support the modulation, discernment and responding processes that happen when someone comes into contact with information/input from the outside and inside world.

To read more about how recovery is an additive process, head this article for further reading.

Since there is often a disconnection from the body and often a focus on the outside image of the body, practicing interoceptive awareness is fundamental to reconnect from inside-out.

Many people with eating disorders are often energetically sensitive so the boundaries between self and other are blurred, making it challenging to distinguish what is theirs’s and what is someone else’s stuff. Practicing different ways of clarifying one’s own inner cues is part of establishing healthy boundaries.

If you are curious about the link between interoceptive awareness and recovery, this article on cultivating self-intimacy goes deeper into this fascinating topic.

Resting and digesting includes exploring our relationship with rest (not always easy in a world of diet culture!) and our sense of worth that is not based on achievement or performance.

Spending time in Nature can remind us that there are cycles to life rather than one monotonous hustle culture drumbeat. Mother Nature can invoke a deep remembrance of our enoughness, belonging and worth.

This article on slowing down and this article that goes into my personal journey with relearning how to rest speaks further to this ingredient.

These four ingredients when added appropriately provide a delicious scaffolding for creative, sustainable eating disorder recovery, allowing for greater cognitive flexibility, emotional intelligence, somatic safety, nervous system regulation, and a sense of hope, possibility, clarity and direction.

What ingredients or elements have helped you in your journey of shifting out of rigidity to greater flexibility, and exploring new patterns or trying new things? I would love to hear from you!

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