Recovery Journal - 1 month
If you’re jumping into this post and curious what this is all about, I encourage you to check out my Recovery Journal which has been documenting the daily ups and downs of my addiction recovery. This first post is going to be a little bit longer as I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive on how I got here in the first place so if you want to jump in right here… welcome!
Trigger warning: this post will talk deeply about suicidal thoughts, self-harm, eating disorders, and addiction.
If you suffer from or are triggered by any of these things, please proceed with caution.
I’ve been open about my struggles with weight, food, and eating disorders in the past, but what happened this summer, well… that took another turn.
During most of 2020 and into the first half of 2021, I was leaning very heavily on food for comfort, for companionship, for anything really. I kept trying different things to stop my bad behaviors, but nothing stuck because I hadn’t figured out what was wrong. I was eating so much and ended up getting up to the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was going through periods where I would eat everything in sight until I made myself sick followed by 2 weeks of starving myself. If I was in starvation mode and I ate something, I would punish myself… literally. I was cutting up my arms again just like I did when I was a teenager. It was horribly self-destructive and I was at the very tip of my rope.
By mid-July 2021, I knew I couldn’t live like that anymore. I started confiding in friends, but I was saying things like, “I’d rather die than live like this,” and I meant it. I truly felt like the body I lived in was a cage and that it didn’t belong to me, but I couldn’t find a way out. It seemed to make more sense to just keep hurting myself over and over again than deal with anything else that was going on.
I finally opened up to my therapist and we made a plan. It was simple: don’t order take-out for 30 days. Now, this may not sound like much, but I was ordering delivery almost every night. I would eat dinner… and then order a 2nd dinner. I was eating pizza 4, 5, 6 times a week. Pizza, I’d learned, was my #1 trigger food. What’s a trigger food, you ask? Well it’s something that if I have even a single bite, I won’t be able to stop. Think of an alcoholic when they talk about their “gateway” or “go-to”. For some it might be beer, or others wine, etc. My go-to, my gateway, my trigger is pizza.
My therapist and I started talking in terms of addiction. We started treating my food issues like she would with an alcoholic who was trying to quit drinking. We talked about going to the grocery story like “going to the bar” because it’s exposure either way. We started using words like “food sobriety” and I began counting days. Every day that I didn’t order food was counted.
Here’s where the problem lies…
That’s all I was doing. For the first couple of months I was ok and had actually stayed away from most other “bad” foods but then one night in October I decided to have some pizza. What harm could it do, right? It was just pizza and I’d done so good! Well, that one night of pizza turned into two which turned into many many more. Before I knew it, I had a stack of boxes piled up in my kitchen and no idea how it got that bad. The end of 2021 was really rough for me as I battled with a terrible job and some crazy personal revelations, and once again I turned to food. By the end of December, while sick with Covid, I made a decision: in 2022 I would fully commit to myself.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, I stop using words like “sobriety” because it’s impossible to be sober from something that you literally need to live. I switched to using terms like “recovery” because that’s what it is. It is an active process of adaptation and reflection and it gets really messy sometimes, but I started with a few simple goals: in January I would cook more, take vitamins every day, and have absolutely no pizza in any way shape or form (that includes frozen!). Today is January 31st and I can say that I stuck to every single goal I made.
Just those few some steps have made me feel so proud of myself. I’ve truly taken big strides in what will be a life-long change. Not every day has been easy and there are absolutely times when I want to grab for foods that I know will make me sick, but if there’s 1 thing I’ve really learned in the last month it’s that I know my body better than I think I do. More often than not, if I’m craving something it’s simply because my body is missing something so I can substitute with a healthy option instead.
I can say with certainty that I feel much more energized and in control of my life than I did a month ago.
Stay tuned for month 2 <3
- Danielle
