What I Wish My Younger Self Knew About Eating Disorder Recovery
Sitting at my kitchen table in Melbourne with a flat white going cold beside me, I tried to write a letter to the girl I was at seventeen. She measured her breakfast on a digital scale, wore long sleeves in thirty-degree Brisbane heat, and believed recovery was something you finished like a school assignment. I wanted to tell her it was not, and what I now know about living on the other side of an eating disorder.
This piece is that letter, of sorts. It is not advice dressed up as wisdom, because I am still figuring it out. But if even one sentence reaches someone hiding lunch in a Sydney schoolyard, or scrolling on a phone in Adelaide at 2am, then writing it was worth it.
Eating disorder recovery is a topic the world loves to flatten into before-and-after pictures. We rarely talk about the long, unglamorous middle, or what it actually feels like from the inside. So here is what I wish someone had told me, written for the version of me who believed she had to earn the right to take up space.
Recovery Doesn't Move in a Straight Line
The most important thing I wish I had understood earlier is that recovery is not a ladder. It is not a series of boxes to tick in order. There were months when I felt genuinely well, then weeks when the old thoughts came back so loudly I was sure I had imagined the healing. Relapse is not proof that you have failed; it is a signpost that something needs more attention.
In the eating disorder world, professionals often talk about the stages of change model, and it took me years to stop beating myself up for being stuck longer than I should have been. Healing happens in spirals, and you will revisit the same fears at new altitudes, but each time with more resources than you had before.
I used to think I had to reach a finish line before I could call myself well. Now I think of recovery as the daily choice to keep showing up, even on the days when the only thing I did right was eat lunch without compensating afterwards.
The Body Doesn't Lie, But It Doesn't Tell the Whole Truth Either
For a long time, I treated my body like evidence in a court case. Every meal was a piece of testimony. Every number on a scale was proof, one way or the other. It took me a long time to realise my body was not lying to me, but it also was not the whole story. It was simply trying to survive in the conditions I had given it.
Living in Australia makes this harder in some ways. The country runs on beach culture. Summers in Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast mean swimwear is unavoidable, and the conversation around bodies is loud and relentless. I remember buying my first pair of jeans that were not goal jeans, just jeans that fit my actual body on an actual Tuesday.
The work of recovery has been learning to listen to my body without treating every signal as a verdict. Hunger is information. Fullness is information. Neither is a moral judgement. That reframe has been the slowest part of all, and I am still in the middle of it.
What Australian Healthcare Actually Offers
One thing I did not know when I was younger was how much the system here has changed. In 2019, the Australian Government introduced the Eating Disorder Treatment and Management Plan, often called the EDTMP, which gives patients up to twenty Medicare-subsidised sessions of psychological treatment per year, with the possibility of twenty more. That was not available when I was seventeen. Knowing it exists now feels like a quiet gift for the teenagers currently going through this.
There are also dedicated services across the country. The Butterfly Foundation runs a national helpline and online support, and their free webinars out of Melbourne helped me more than once. Eating Disorders Queensland offers counselling and group programs in Brisbane, and the Centre for Clinical Interventions in Perth provides free downloadable workbooks anyone can use without a referral.
Australian support services worth bookmarking
- The Butterfly Foundation national helpline (1800 33 4673) and online chat
- Medicare-subsidised Eating Disorder Treatment and Management Plans through your GP
- Eating Disorders Queensland counselling and family programs in Brisbane
- The Centre for Clinical Interventions in Perth, with free evidence-based workbooks
- Eating Disorders Victoria peer support groups, online and across Melbourne
The People Who Actually Stayed
Most of the recovery advice I was given focused on food, but what kept me alive were people. Specifically, the people who did not try to fix me. My friend Maddy, who ate lunch with me in hospital without comment. My mum, who learned to ask "what sounds kind?" instead of "what have you eaten today?" My dietitian in Sydney who never once weighed me in front of her.
There were also the people I met online. Recovery communities on Tumblr, then later on Instagram, then later still on Discord servers. The first time I read someone else's story and thought "that is me, that is exactly me," I cried on a tram from Carlton to Brunswick. I had no idea recovery had a community. I thought it was something you did alone in shame.
If I could give my younger self one instruction, it would be to find those people earlier. The professionals matter, but the friends who sit with you in the mess matter just as much. There is a piece on surviving and laughing that captures something I struggled to name for years: you are allowed to be funny and broken at the same time.
Things I Wish Someone Had Said to Me Earlier
If I could press a note into the hand of my seventeen-year-old self, this is what it would say. None of it is original. I heard each sentence from a different person at a different time, and they have slowly stitched themselves into something I now believe. When the eating disorder voice gets loud, I read these out loud in my head, usually while making tea in my Melbourne kitchen.
Lines I keep returning to
- Your worth is not measured in what you eat or do not eat, and it never will be.
- The voice that says you are not sick enough to need help is the illness talking.
- Rest is not a reward for being good. Rest is a basic human need.
- You will have days when you hate your body. You will also have days when you forget to hate it. Both are progress.
- Recovery is not the absence of difficult thoughts. It is the ability to let them pass without obeying them.
I have a sticky note version of these on the inside of my wardrobe door. They are not magic. Some days they barely make a dent. But they are sentences I did not have when I needed them, and now they are the scaffolding I lean on.
Writing as a Way Back to Yourself
Journaling was the first thing that helped. Long before I could afford therapy, I had a green notebook with a broken spine, and I filled it with food logs that slowly, over years, became feelings logs. The day I wrote "I am angry" instead of "I ate a piece of toast" was the day something shifted. The act of naming an emotion, rather than a meal, gave me somewhere else to put the intensity.
Writing publicly was harder. I worried about being judged, or worse, being congratulated for being "so brave" when I was simply trying not to disappear. But blogging about it changed my life. I started writing at Life Starts With Coffee precisely because I needed somewhere to put the sentences that were too long for a therapy session and too honest for a text message.
If you are reading this and you are in it right now, please consider writing. Not to be read. Not to be good. Just to get the thoughts out of your body and onto a page, where they can exist as words instead of as the whole sky. A cheap notebook is enough. A notes app is enough. Privacy is allowed.
The eating disorder wanted me to be silent. The most radical thing I do these days is keep speaking. Some mornings in Adelaide, when I am sitting in a café with a long black and a friend who knows my history, I want to stand up and tell the room that this ordinary moment is the whole of it.
The practical truth is this: recovery is built in the smallest, most unglamorous choices. The meal you eat when you have been dreading it. The text you send to the friend you have been avoiding. The appointment you book even when you are not sure you are ready. You do not have to feel ready to make any of these moves. You just have to be willing to try.
