Eating disorders are all-consuming conditions. They impact not only your food choices and physical activity, but also your time spent with friends and family, your job, your education, your hobbies and your entire sense of self.
If you have been living with an eating disorder for a while, it can begin to influence every thought that you have, and every decision that you make. Eventually, you plan your entire life around your eating disorder. It makes sense, then, that you may find it difficult to know who you are without your eating disorder.
So, how do we begin to develop a new identity or sense of self?
Firstly, it can be helpful to understand that your identity is constantly changing and evolving, and is influenced by what you do. So, by changing what you do or your behaviours, you can begin to change your sense of identity.
During eating disorder recovery, we aim to eliminate eating disorder behaviours, to create space for new (or forgotten) behaviours. But what if you don’t know what to do instead of eating disorder behaviours?
It can be helpful to spend some time thinking about and answering the following questions, from the perspective of your healthy self, not your eating disorder:
What did you spend time on before your eating disorder?
What sort of books/music/art/hobbies/sports were you interested in before your eating disorder?
What had you planned for your future before your eating disorder?
Who were you before your eating disorder?
What people or activities energise you now?
What people do you admire and why?
What do you stand for/what are your principles and values?
When thinking about your future, what does it look like?
What activities do you see yourself doing in the future?
Who do you want to be after you’ve recovered?
What does a meaningful life look like to you? Define this.
Your answers to these questions should help you to begin to come up with some activities/behaviours/people that you might like to (re)introduce into your life. It can be helpful to begin by introducing just 1 or 2 new behaviours, and build up from there.
Changing perspectives
Secondly, it can be helpful to begin to change your perspective on what it means to have an eating disorder.
Consider this, when you have a runny or blocked nose, a cough, sneezing and a sore throat, your doctor will likely diagnose you with a cold. This diagnosis is a label used to describe your symptoms. An eating disorder diagnosis can be viewed the same way: it is simply a description of your symptoms, rather than a definition of who you are.
Seeking support
Lastly, getting help is the best thing you can do to recover from an eating disorder. It can help you rediscover who you are, and help you to achieve a meaningful and fulfilling life for yourself that isn’t clouded by eating disorder thoughts and behaviours.
If you are unsure where to start, book in a free introductory phone call today.
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