Why I Created Healing With Niomi...

I didn't create Healing With Niomi because I had a perfect recovery, I created it because I know what it feels like to completely lose yourself.

For years I struggled badly with anorexia, bulimia, depression and anxiety. My eating disorder took my life slowly and then all at once. It stopped being about food, it became punishment, control, fear, exhaustion and trying to survive my own mind every single day. There were times I genuinely didn't think I'd make it through, things got so bad that I was sectioned. Even now, I still carry trauma from that time of my life, I remember feeling terrified, hopeless and completely disconnected from myself. I felt like I had become nothing but an illness.

Before all of this, I had started posting "what I eat in a day" videos on my TikTok, people loved them and supported me but the truth us... behind the camera I was struggling far more than people knew, I wasn't always honest. It wasn't because I wanted to lie but because I was ashamed of how bad things actually become. I wanted people to think I was doing okay, even when I was drowning. Eventually I stopped hiding it, I started sharing the real parts too. The relapses, the fear, the breakdowns, the sectioning, the reality of living with an eating disorder. I told the whole world what had happened to me because I thought honesty would finally help me heal.

Honestly, sometimes it made things feel even heavier... about a year and half ago, I made the decision to step away from social media for a while. I needed to stop performing recovery and actually focus on it on my own. Learning to eat in restaurants again was hard enough without a camera around me. My anxiety was awful and trying to film while panicking around food would have been too much, so i disappeared from the recovery content for a bit and put every bit of energy I had into getting better and slowly, recovery started becoming real.

I challenged fear food after fear food, I cried over meals, I sat through anxiety instead of running from it, I stopped going to the bathroom to purge even when It was the hardest thing to do, I stopped letting my eating disorder make every decision for me. That's also why I created the Fear Food Recovery Journal because I know how terrifying fear foods feel and I know how huge those little victories actually are. I wanted to create something that could help somebody else through those moments too.

During all of this, I also met someone who changed my life in ways they probably don't even fully realise, someone who didn't make me feel like the poorly girl... someone who saw ME. Someone who listened to me, reassured me, sat with me through panic, held my hand through recovery and reminded me there was still a person underneath all this pain and somewhere along the way, I slowly started falling back in love with life again.

Healing With Niomi was created because I know how lonely an eating disorder can be during and before recovery, I know what it's like searching the internet at 2am hoping somebody understands your thoughts. I know what it feels like to feel embarrassed of your struggles, I know what it feels like to think recovery is impossible for you.

I wanted to create the kind of safe space I wish I had during my darkest moments, a place of honesty instead of perfection, a place where recovery wins matter, a place where people can feel understood without judgement, a place where somebody can come to when things feel heavy.

This space means everything to me because recovery gave me my life back slowly, piece by piece and if my story, my journals, my blogs or even one sentence on this website helps somebody hold on a little longer, then every painful part of my journey was worth sharing with you.

With Love, Niomi 🤎

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