Everything My ED Promised Me Was Waiting In Recovery...

My eating disorder promised me a lot of things, confidence, happiness, freedom and more and more.

It promised me that if i just listened to it for a little longer, everything would finally fall into place... so i listened. I actually listened for years, i followed the rules, chased the goals and i sacrificed parts of my life believing it would all be worth it in the end but the end never came.

Every time i got closer to what my eating disorder told me i wanted, it moved the finish line. There was always another reasons why i wasn't enough, another rule, another goal and another thing to fix. Then something happened that i never expected... i chose recovery and slowly the things i'd spent years searching for through my eating disorder started showing up. Not through weight loss or through control, through recovery.

Recovert gave me things i never expected, not overnight or all at once but little by little, life started getting bigger again. I started saying yes to things i would have once avoided. Meals out? "YES." Coffee dates? "YES." Spontaneous plans? "YES." Taking photos without spending hours criticising myself? "YES." Makign memories instead of calculating calories? "YES." For so long, my world had become incredibly small. Everything revolved around food, my body and whatever rule my eating disorder had created that week.

Recovery didn't just change how i ate, it changed how i lived. Looking back now, that's what i'm most grateful for because when i think about my favourite memories from the past year, none of them are about my weight. They're about the moments i was finally present enough to enjoy. The things my eating disorder told me were less important than being smaller turned out to be the things that mattered most.

Perhaps the greatest thing recovery gave me wasn't food, it wasn't the abiliity to eat out, it wasn't the fear foods i can now enjoy and it wasn't even the freedom from behaviours that once controlled my life... it was me. Somewhere along the way, my eating disorder had taken so much of who i was.

Recovery helped me find pieces of myself i thought were gone forever:

🤎 The version of me who laughs without guilt 🤎

🤎 The version of me who built Healing With Niomi 🤎

🤎 The version of me who now gets to help other people find hope in recovery too 🤎

If you'd told the version of me who was deep in my eating disorder that one day I'd have this life, i wouldn't of believed you. That's the thing about recovery, sometimes it gives you back things you didn't even realise you'd lost.

If you're reading this whilst feeling scared of recovery, i understand. I know how convincing an eating disorder can be when it tells you that recovery isn't worth it. I know how loudly it speaks about everything you might lose but what it never talks about is everything you might gain. The life waiting for you, the memories waiting to be made and the version of you that exists beyond food rules, fear and constant self criticism.

Recovery didn't take things away from me, it gave things back. It gave me the chance to build a life that felt bigger than my eating disorder and no fear food, number on the scale or eating disorder behaviour could ever compare to that. So if recovery feels impossible right now, please keep going because one day you'll look around at the life you've built and realise something incredible. The things your eating disorder promised you were never waiting on the other side of weight loss, they were waiting on the other side of recovery and trust me when i say, they're worth fighting for.

With Love, Niomi 🤎