Your Recovery is About You: Maintaining Motivation in Eating Disorder Recovery
Written by CCTC Staff Writer
Recovery is exciting: it means everything from participating in social events to giving one hundred percent at your job, school, or extracurriculars. But it can (and does) get exhausting after a while — because recovery does take work.
So how do you stay motivated to recover when it becomes more challenging or tiring? The answer lies in removing barriers to positive change, as well as keeping up your willingness to change.
In this article, we will cover:
The stages of change in eating disorder recovery
How motivation to change affects eating disorder recovery
The factors that affect the motivation to maintain progress in recovery
Why you should focus on yourself when building and keeping up your motivation to recover
Practical tips on how to maintain your motivation
It’s entirely possible to recover from an eating disorder. Once you get past admitting you have a problem and getting help, the rest of your effort goes into maintaining your recovery.
How Motivation to Change Impacts the Recovery Process
Many researchers have found that the more motivated you are to recover, the more likely you are to respond to treatment and maintain your recovery post-treatment. This makes sense: if you’re reluctant to do something, it’s way harder to do it, right?
With this in mind, eating disorder treatment professionals focus on finding a way to motivate clients to really want recovery. This is done in many ways, from helping a client realize how damaging an eating disorder really is to helping them imagine a life without an eating disorder (which is always better than one with an eating disorder.)
A Distorted View of Change
A lot of people want to change more negatively portrayed eating disorder behaviors, but not the behaviors deemed “positive.” For example, many people want to stop bingeing, but not the restriction that leads to bingeing.
But the “positive” and “negative” eating disorder thoughts and behaviors are linked. You can’t just recover from some of your eating disorder. It’s crucial, then, to accept that the recovery process includes stopping all behaviors.
If you hold onto the idea that you can recover from certain parts of your disorder, or that you can recover and still remain in an underweight body (which is specific to every body and cannot be determined by BMI or some “target weight” based on height and weight alone), you will never recover.
Related: Weight restoration is necessary for many people with an eating disorder, no matter what their weight is at the start of treatment. Here are some tips to make weight gain easier as you progress in your recovery.
What factors can help your continued recovery? What puts your recovery at risk?
Factors that help your recovery:
Seeing yourself as separate from your eating disorder (and who you were while in your eating disorder)
Envisioning what your life could look like in recovery
Practicing gratitude for your body and for the positives in your life
Using productive coping skills when triggers or stressful situations arise
Having someone in your corner cheering you on in your fight
Recognizing how far you have come
Remembering how harmful your eating disorder really is
Factors that can throw you off the path of recovery:
Ambivalence about recovery: forgetting why you started recovery or not seeing the outcomes you were hoping for
Trying to maintain an underweight body
Trying to maintain certain eating disorder behaviors: excessive exercise, cutting out food groups, etc.
Facing unnecessary triggers: weighing yourself, comparing clothing sizes, holding on to eating disorder photos, clothing, etc.
External stressors, especially loss, failure, and rejection
A lack of support: losing a loved one, losing someone from your treatment team, perceived abandonment from friends and family
Huge changes: going to college, moving away from family, a new job, etc.
Not speaking up if you start slipping into old behaviors
Hot Topic: Internal vs. External Motivators
In many instances, someone with an eating disorder may enter treatment because someone else asked them to. Because many individuals don’t view their eating disorder as “that bad,” don’t want to let go of their coping skills, or don’t want to change in general, they are reluctant to start recovery because they personally want to recover.
In those initial, critical stages of recovery, use whatever it takes to stick with treatment. You can want to recover for your parents, siblings, even your dog.
But later on in recovery, it’s important to ask who you’re doing this for.
Research has shown that autonomous motivators — the internal things that motivate you to recover — are much more effective than external motivators. Autonomous motivators are things like following your personal values and achieving goals you set for yourself. External motivators are things like being shamed by family or friends to recover.
7 Tips to Maintain Your Recovery: Make Your Recovery About You
It’s been scientifically proven that we are motivated in the long-term by ourselves: our own interests, values, and goals.
So basically, your recovery should be about you and for you, in the long-term. Each one of the following tips to maintain your motivation in recovery focuses on you: what recovery can bring you, what your eating disorder takes from you, and how you personally can move forward in your recovery.
1. Define (and remember) the reasons you personally want to recover.
Name your autonomous motivators. What personally motivates you to change in the long run? Do you want to get back to your degree, have cake at every family member’s birthday party, play an instrument, or make the perfect latte?
It doesn’t matter what your motivators are, or how large or small they appear to be. Just make sure they benefit you. If taking care of others does make you happy, then that’s fine too.
Make it easy to remember those reasons. Write them down and place them somewhere you can see them all the time. Stick the list to your mirror, write a letter to yourself, or make the list your phone’s home screen. Send yourself a daily automated email with your list of reasons to continue in your recovery. Do whatever it takes, no matter how ridiculous it seems.
2. Take off those rose tinted glasses. Your eating disorder was not that great.
When you feel stuck in your recovery, or the rest of your life feels stressful and messy, your eating disorder might look attractive again. You think about all the benefits of maintaining your eating disorder. If you have mementos of your eating disordered self, like old photos and smaller clothes (which you really shouldn’t) it’s tempting to “get back” to that smaller look or feeling of hunger.
But it really wasn’t all that great. You have to prove that to yourself, again and again.
If your eating disorder looks appealing to you, pull out a piece of paper right now. List all the pros and cons of your eating disorder. You may have done this before. But do it again. It helps to start fresh, to look at your eating disorder from every angle again.
If you’re making this list in a rational state of mind, rather than an emotional one, you should see how many cons there are to your eating disorder. Put that list somewhere in sight, too.
3. Keep using your coping skills out there in your “real life.”
Some of the most dangerous threats to your recovery come from external influences.
But many people forget all the coping skills they learned in therapy whenever those tough situations come up.
Make sure to have a self soothing box handy. Keep a list of distractions and things that make you feel better when you’re not feeling great. Don’t isolate — talk to your supports when you’re struggling.
Do whatever works for you.
4. If you are trying to express pain, or anger, or hurt someone else through shrinking your body, it’s not worth it.
Your body is not a good way to communicate your frustration, pain, betrayal, or any negative emotion you’re experiencing. If you are having interpersonal problems with friends or family, try using interpersonal effectiveness skills to manage them.
Related: Not sure what interpersonal effectiveness skills are? Click here to learn about them, and how to apply them to your relationships.
If someone is often hurting you or triggering eating disorder urges, it may be time to evaluate whether it’s worth continuing your relationship with that person. You can write a pros and cons list for continuing this relationship. If the person causes more harm than good in your life, it is not selfish to stop being around them.
It’s protecting your recovery. It’s empowering, for you to put yourself first.
And if you’re feeling hurt or stressed about something else in your life, let someone supportive know. Talk to someone who will listen, validate your feelings, and try to help in whatever way they can.
5. Strip away your eating disorder identity. You deserve to show yourself (and the world) who you are.
You can’t be your own independent, fully recovered person if you always connect yourself in some way to your eating disorder.
Look back at your goals. Think about the kind of person who does those things.
If you don’t have identity defining goals, just think about the kind of people you like. Why do you like them? Is it their fashion sense, kindness, willingness to adventure? Think about how to embody those features.
At some point, you have to fully let go of your eating disorder identity. At some point, you even let go of your “recovering from an eating disorder” identity. Once you get to that stage in your life, you have put in the work to recover, and now you get to just...be yourself.
Related: Not sure how to figure out who you are without your eating disorder? Click here.
6. Remember how far you have come. You’re pretty awesome for that.
You’re in recovery from an eating disorder. It’s a big deal.
While recovery may seem more mundane than being in the throes of a life-threatening disorder, it’s much more impressive and productive.
Remember how long you’ve been in recovery. Whether it’s been five years, five days, or five minutes, it still counts.
Write about your path to recovery. Draw it out like a timeline. Think about all those milestones, and how much more you can do in recovery.
Recovery may seem boring. But it’s not — living every day on repeat, pleasing an eating disorder, is boring.
7. If you notice yourself slipping back into old behavior patterns, don’t wait to “get worse” before telling someone.
Sometimes you may slip up. It happens. And slipping up once does not ruin your recovery.
The trick to preserving your recovery is to not let yourself continue slipping. Don’t give your eating disorder any room to crawl back into your life. Double down on your commitment to recovery. Use all the steps above to reinforce your motivation and ability to cope with life stressors.
If you find yourself slipping up a lot, you have to tell someone. Don’t think you need to “get worse” in order to get better. Don’t think your behaviors are not a problem just because you’re not at a low weight.
Once you give an eating disorder a little room in your life, it will try to take over. It’s up to you to protect your recovery by telling someone. You owe it to your past self, who worked so hard on recovery, and your future recovered self, to get help if you need it.
Don’t put your motivation into the disorder — put it into your recovery.
If you or a loved one is suffering from an eating disorder, take the first step today and talk to someone about recovery or simply learn more about the holistic eating disorder recovery programs we offer.