Our Stories of Hope are meant to explore the many different paths and journeys in the road to recovery. Each person has a different experience to share, creating insights and experiences for others to feel inspired from. The Stories of Hope remind us that full recovery is possible, and there is help and support available to those struggling with an eating disorder. Here are some of our favorite quotes of recovery from the writers. 

The 2016 National Eating Disorders Awareness Week was an enormous success. The campaign reached nearly 200 million people with information and resources through social media alone, and close to 40,000 people took the online screening. Another bright spot was the number of generous landmark buildings that were iluminated in green and blue in observance of NEDAwareness Week.

I have been doing a lot of reflection lately about my eating disorder journey, and what it was exactly that made me come to my senses and recognize that I needed to start recovering before it got as bad as it could have gotten. I read a lot of books, blogs and emails written by others who have suffered and in many ways dealt with their illness for much longer than I did, and it has caused me to stop and think — what was it that made me come to my senses after two years of intense restriction? What caused that shift?

For years, my body didn’t belong to me. It was my disorder’s. Signed and paid for with my own self-hatred; countless hours at the gym on almost zero food; a scrap of paper I kept in my calendar to proudly mark the number of calories I’d burned, far greater than what I’d consumed. My anorexia had had her brittle hands on me for years, and I didn’t want to admit it. She was with me when I tried on wedding dresses, forcing me to choose the one I felt least fat in. She would whisper in my ear every time I bought groceries.

While both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are associated with a litany of medical complications , with timely and successful treatment the vast majority of these complications do not leave permanent residual sequelae (conditions that are the result of a previous disease). 

Early intervention. The phrase can sound like a negative judgment to a parent whose child has been in treatment for an eating disorder for multiple years. The mind returns to the time that the clues began appearing and wonders anxiously, “What if I had done x or y then? Would I have staved off the ED?  If I had been more vigilant, more protective, stood like a demon mother with a pitchfork outside my daughter’s bedroom door, would I have prevented the eating disorder from getting in?

In November 2007, sitting alone in my cluttered, overly crowded and chaotic shared dorm room, huddled under mounds of blankets with a random episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer playing in the background, I opened my laptop and set out on a journey to put a name to what I had been silently suffering from every day for months.

I took the screening  and it told me I could be at risk for an eating disorder...what do I do now?

In thinking about trying to alleviate some of the tremendous suffering that comes with struggling with an eating disorder, there is nothing more urgent than earlier recognition and identification of those at risk. Early intervention is essential to a better prognosis for those affected—and nowhere is this more important than those struggling with eating disorders who are further marginalized by virtue of not “looking” like the typical someone with an eating disorder. Which brings us, obviously, to papyrus.