You Are NOT Alone!

Hi Everyone! I hope you are all doing fabulous this weekend!

This is going to be a short blog but I think it is an important one.

One of the reasons I chose to start writing this blog was because there was nothing on the internet that spoke to how my recovery was going.

What I mean by that is, everything I read was about a much younger woman, who had been anorexic for a summer, and recovered relatively quickly and maybe gained and overshot by ten pounds over their set point. This was NOT how my recovery was going at all and I felt it defeating and isolating to have no one to relate to and no one to tell me what I was going through was normal. It felt the opposite of normal because according to google normal is, eat a lot, gain, and in three months you will be back to your set point and winning at life.

WHELP, my recovery was more like, I’m in my 30s, was anorexic for far longer then a summer, afraid to go all in, every time I ate I would get sick, my body swelled and gained, it felt completely out of control and oh, I gained FAR past 10 pounds over my set point and it’s taken 5 YEARS for my body to start going back to normal. My type of recovery was NOT represented on the internet. So I decided to blog. For myself to be able to look back at my recovery and for anyone else that might find themselves in the hellish place I was and needed to know there is someone else out there like them. Also, I knew God would help me through this and it was important to me to share this so others can lean on Him throughout recovery as well.

So, if you are reading this or any of my other blogs, YOU’VE FOUND ME! We can relate! You are not alone! Overshooting a massive amount isn’t as rare as you think! Long recoveries are more normal than not, and you aren’t crazy. Being angry at God over the situation is real and dealing with diet talk while you force yourself to eat a bagel is not for the faint of heart. Eating disorder recovery is real and REALLY hard.

What I want to tell you today is that my story and what I blog about is WAY more common then you think. I don’t know why my kind of recovery isn’t spoken about more, but I’m here to speak about it. My guess is it will scare people out of recovering. I mean, who wants to gain a bunch of weight and wait for years for the body to heal? It does truly suck. But, some of us DO choose to recover fully and go through the whole gruesome process of healing, so we also need to talk about it so we don’t feel so stinking alone and crazy going through it!

How do I know recovery like mine is more common then most think? Well, because you, my readers write to me literally weekly! I would say every week I get one or two new messages from people that have found my blog and cried thank you to God that they stumbled upon another person whose recovery has mirrored their own. This is not just in Ohio. These are readers from all around the world! I cannot count how many of you have shared with me that you have gained 100 pounds in recovery, have a real problem with God about it, pray the weight will come off and question your recovery constantly because it is HARD. Recovery like this is well........its COMMON!!! It’s just not talked about openly.

I need to figure out a way to connect all of us that have gone through recovery this way through my blog. If you are interested in that please let me know and I will get it going!

When someone writes to me thankful they found my story, I just want to let them know that the two of us are not alone. There are other people that write me that have had the exact same experience in recovery that I have and that you have. Honestly, at this point, because of all the people I have spoken to through my blog, I believe that the type of recovery I have had is more common then the short ones we read about online.

If you are feeling alone in your recovery. You think it’s just you and me overshooting our set points by an ungodly amount and have no idea what is going on, I’m telling you there are 50 other men and woman I’ve talked to personally going through the same thing. I’m sure there are WAY more then that out in the world because it’s not like my blog is the New York Times :)

So today, rest in the peace that you are not alone. Your recovery is not abnormal. Your body will heal. If you have gained a lot you have many other brothers and sisters out there going through the same thing. That doesn’t always make it better, I know. BUT, it does give some comfort.

Love you all and let me know if you want me to make some sort of way to connect with each other through my blog!! I’d love for all of us to support one another!!

xoxo

- Sara -