the recovery reality check nobody gives you | the recovered-ish podcast ep. 13

hello, lovely friends. welcome back to recovered-ish.

today we’re talking about the part of recovery that i think catches a lot of people off guard:

how long it takes.
 how messy it is.
 and how discouraging it can feel when you’re doing “everything right” and still not feeling better yet.

because i think a lot of people go into recovery expecting it to feel hard for a little while… and then eventually click into place.

and when that doesn’t happen, it’s really easy to spiral into:
 is this even working?
 why is this still so hard?
 am i doing recovery wrong?

this episode is the reality check i think a lot of people need.

in this episode, i talk about:

• why recovery often feels worse before it feels better
• the part of healing nobody really prepares you for
• why treatment is a beginning, not a magic fix
• how eating disorders create false safety
• why discomfort doesn’t mean you’re failing
• what actually keeps people going when recovery feels long and exhausting
• why you’re not behind just because it’s taking time

i also talk about the difference between wanting recovery and actually staying in it long enough for your brain and body to catch up.

if you’ve ever thought, “i’m trying so hard… why does this still feel awful?” this one is for you.

sponsor

today’s episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth — truly one of my favorite brands i’ve gotten to partner with.

if you want to romanticize your life a little and make your bed / pajamas / nervous system feel better, i highly recommend.

use code RECOVERY for up to 20% off
 👉 www.cozyearth.com

support beyond the podcast

💛 Recovery Skills Training — my step-by-step program for eating disorder recovery
 use code PODCAST for $57 off
 👉 https://recoverwithchloe.thrivecart.com/recovery-skills-training/

follow along on instagram:
 @recoverwithchloe

don’t forget to eat your food.

Resources + Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @recoverwithchloe
• Recovery Skills Training: use code PODCAST for $57 off!
• Leave a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe on YouTube! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When you expect, after such a long time of working towards recovery, to feel some degree of peace around food and freedom in your body, and it just isn't happening. It's like, is this even possible for me? We don't have eating disorders and keep our eating disorders around for years because they're ineffective. No, they're working in some way. My expectation was there's a way, one way, to recover from an eating disorder. And once I learn what that is, I will be able to recover and I will be fine and I will move on and life will look great. You're listening to the Recovered-Ish podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Cox. And yeah, I know a thing or two about eating disorder recovery. Between my own very complicated history with disordered eating and the work I do now, I've seen this thing from pretty much every angle. This podcast is where we talk about the messier parts of recovery that don't really make it online. No platitudes, no inspirational quotes, just the real, raw, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly liberating process of building a life beyond your eating disorder. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome back to the Recovered Ish Podcast. My name is Chloe. Thank you, as always, for being here. I just have to start today's episode by leveling with you all. This has been a crazy week. And I feel like the last, I mean, there have been a handful of episodes recently where I've been like, I feel terrible, I am exhausted, or like life has been nuts. Yeah, it just has. It's one of those seasons, I think, where a lot of stuff has been going on, good stuff, and also a lot of just challenging stuff. And I think one thing I've learned in my recovery is that just because you recover doesn't mean that life gets totally easy all the time. For one thing, I guess I'll just share a little bit personally about what's been going on. If you don't care about my personal life and you're like here for the recovery stuff, I get that too. And you can totally skip ahead. But just to explain why I might be kind of exhausted today. Oh, it's a Friday, the Friday before this episode goes live. I normally record a week in advance, just so I can not record too far in advance, but enough that I can prepare and edit and do all the stuff I need to do. Didn't happen this week. And I guess we can rewind to last weekend to explain why. As many of you may know from listening to my past episodes, my son has a very rare genetic metabolic condition. It's called very long-chain acyl coa dehydrogenase deficiency. And I'm sure pretty much no one has heard of it because it's extremely, extremely rare. But one of the things that this disorder means is when my son gets sick, his body doesn't really have the reserves to process that very well. And what it can lead to is what's called a metabolic crisis. And that essentially means that his organs start to break down and it can become life-threatening. So the fun thing about that is that when my son gets sick, sometimes he's fine, but other times it means that we spend a couple of days in the hospital. And that's what happened this weekend. My son just got a regular old cold. We thought it was gonna be fine, it was not. So my weekend was spent chilling at the hospital, and I'm just I have such an amazing son who is the sweetest thing and so resilient, and he doesn't even know he's two, he doesn't even know how strong he is. But he did great, he's much better now. We came back on Monday, and then my husband had a little dedication planned, which is so deserved, and he needs it. And I'm so glad that he went. But that meant that I was solo parenting this week and also, you know, running my business and doing all the things that I needed to do and taking care of a kid that's recovering from an illness. And so I'm just tired, guys. I'm just tired. It's been a long week. My husband's back today, and truth be told, this is the second time I'm trying to record this. The first time I actually tried to record this sitting at home in my living room while my son was napping, but that was the day that he decided to take a very short nap, which didn't very much help me. I got 10 minutes into the episode and then he woke up. So there we are. It's the end of the week, and I'm just getting to this, but this podcast is important to me, and you all are important to me, and I wanted to make sure that it still went out as planned, as expected, and hopefully offers something that somebody out there needs to hear this week. All of that said, I'm happy to be here sitting in this chair, peacefully talking to myself in an empty room. It's kind of nice, not gonna lie. There's other stuff happening that I'm probably gonna announce in the next couple of weeks, so definitely tune in. Sorry to keep you on the hook like that, just to kind of give you a little bit more insight into the things that have been kind of running in the background, both personally and impacting my own recovery. So not to like clickbait you or tease this. I'm not even gonna say anything more about it. You'll figure it out in a bit. Last week's episode was on food guilt. So if you haven't listened to that, I would go back and give it a listen. I am proud of that episode in the sense that I feel like you got a bit of a glimpse into sort of what I do with my one-on-one clients and my sort of philosophy in approaching eating disorders in my own recovery and in working with clients. I think so much of eating disorder recovery is it is about the food and it's not about the food. That's really just the truth of it. We've got to address the food component, but that's not everything that it's about. And so learning that separation of I am feeling this way as a response to food, but it's not really about the food. So I don't need to change the food. That's a big lesson that we have to learn again and again and again over the course of recovery. But I think that last week's episode really touched on an important piece of that cycle. So, again, if you haven't heard it yet, I'd go back and listen to that. But today, this episode was inspired by, as many episodes are, my work with clients and what's just been coming up kind of consistently lately, because it's very hard to prepare a person for the journey that they're about to go on when they embark on eating disorder recovery for a few reasons. I think number one, when we first think about, okay, I have an eating disorder, I have a problem, I need to figure this out. Getting even that far is big. I know that for many of us, and I'm one of those people, it took me a really long time to even say the words, I have an eating disorder and feel comfortable saying that. I felt like I didn't deserve to say it. Like, uh, it's not that bad. It's not bad enough. I have an episode on that, if you haven't heard it yet. Or people that have eating disorders, I'm just not one of them. Like it's not me. And then there was a degree of if I say I have an eating disorder, I can never unsay it. If I admit that I have this problem, then I have this problem. There was a part of it that was really just like admitting it to myself and then knowing once I'd admitted it that I'd have to take responsibility for it and actually have to maybe change. And so that's scary. And so if you've even gotten to that point where you're like, okay, there's no questioning, I have an eating disorder and I need to do something about it. That's a big part of the battle one. I'll also say with that that there can be negotiation back and forth. One day you wake up and you're like, I have an eating disorder, help me. And then the other days you're like, I'm fine. And so it can be, it can be different. And of course, we've talked about before the space of when you're just in such complete denial with the eating disorder, it's impossible to have insight around it. And that is just a wonder to break out of. I know I've talked with some parents recently whose kids have eating disorders and are in that sort of space where they don't see it as a problem yet. And my heart just goes out to both the people living through that and caregivers of children and adult children alike, and friends of people with eating disorders in that space, because you want to help them. You know that it's a problem, but they're just not in that space. And the truth is, there's you can do a lot, but you can't change a person until there's a part of them, even a small, even if it's just a small part, until there's a part of them that's also willing to accept it. Topic for another day. But uh all that is to say, if you've even gotten to the point where you're like, I have an eating disorder and I think I need to do something about it, that's a big deal. But then it's like, okay, now what? I know I have a problem, but now what do I do to solve it? And everyone has their opinions in your life, I'm sure, of like, well, it's simple, just eat. Eat more or stop binging or stop throwing up. Like, duh, that's how you that's how you recover. So not that simple, and we know it. I mean, it starts a whole slew of questions of like, okay, eat more, but how much more and what foods and when. Those are not the questions I'm answering today, specifically because it's different for everyone, and also I'm not a dietitian, I'm a licensed therapist. When we think about beginning a recovery journey, we think about okay, I know I need to get better. And maybe we have an idea of what getting better might look like or feel like. I know that I did. When I was thinking about starting recovery, I just wanted to not feel the way that I was feeling anymore. I just wanted to be able to eat freely again. And I'm fortunate enough to have had a part of my childhood where I did have food freedom and I didn't obsess over calories in the same way that I did in my disorder. And I could remember a time where I could just, you know, have an in-and-out burger and not have a second thought about it. And that was joyful and fun. And I just wanted that back so badly that that's what I thought recovery might bring me. And I hoped recovery would bring me. I pictured just cutting out this evil part of my brain, leaving it in the past and moving forward. Did I know how to do that? Absolutely not, but I knew that's what I wanted. And then I guess when I was recovering, social media looked different. It was the early days of Instagram. YouTube had been around for some time. I think that was more prevalent, but I remember eating disorder Instagram was just like a little baby back then. And I would look up accounts of people that would post their recovery food, which looking back now, bad place to look, the internet for those sorts of recommendations. But it already was like, you know, I had an eating disorder, and now look at me eating all of this food. I'm healed, I'm free. And so I had this idea that once I started, that I would be able to do that too, and that it might be just simple like that. I just needed to give myself permission to do things differently. I remember thinking, okay, I'm gonna go to therapy and talk about my feelings and talk about the food stuff, and this therapist is gonna have something to say to me that is going to make it go away. Now, as a therapist, I'm like, wow. If only we had the exact magic words to say to just disappear someone's eating disorder. I wish that we did. But that's kind of what I thought therapy was going to be was I would talk about my feelings, I would talk about food, and then this person knew how I could recover, like the way, the steps, the manual, so to speak. And that's not what happened. Certainly not when I saw the therapist that wasn't really an eating disorder specialist quite at all. She didn't really know what to tell me. It did help to talk about my feelings though. I when I started working with a different therapist who was specialized in eating disorders, she did help me a lot and gave me a lot of tools to help with those thoughts and to help make different decisions around food and to empower me to do that, which is, you know, what therapy's supposed to do. But I still kind of thought, like, all right, like maybe this will take a month. Maybe this will take like three months, and then it'll click and then it'll all go away. Obviously, that didn't occur. I went to therapy and I saw a dietitian, and then you all know the story. And if you don't, there's an episode with my full eating disorder story. I eventually I went to treatment, and then I really thought, okay, I'm going to intensive treatment. I'm leaving my life. I'm going to do whatever they tell me. It'll get better, right? 30 days. I remember telling my sisters before I left, I was like, I'll see you in a month, and then we can go get milkshakes like we used to. I really remember thinking that, like being excited, even of this thing's not going to be here anymore. I'm so relieved. That'll be so good. A part of me was terrified of recovery and of course, resistant, not wanting treatment, fearful of the weight gain, all of that. All of that was still there. But there was a really hopeful part of me, or else I wouldn't have gone into treatment in the first place. That was like, okay, if this works though, everything's gonna be better. That was the expectation. And I didn't I didn't expect how long it would take. And I don't recall anyone ever telling me how long it was gonna take. It took a long time, guys. It took a really long time. And that's kind of what I'm speaking to with this idea of expectations versus reality and recovery. My expectation was there's a way, one way to recover from an eating disorder. And once I learn what that is, I will be able to recover and I will be fine and I will move on and life will look great. I will actually not hate my body anymore. I'll be able to have milkshakes again without fear. I was like, yeah, they wouldn't have eating disorder treatment if they don't have it figured out yet. But something I've learned from the other side of things, as a now therapist who's worked in this field for a long time, we don't have eating disorder treatment down perfectly yet. Just to be so transparent with you. There isn't one hard and fast way to recover from an eating disorder. And to be honest, to be so honest, I don't know if we're ever gonna find that fully. I wish someone had said, hey, this is where treatment begins. For you, you'll be here. This is where it starts. But you're going to need long-term support. You're going to need long-term care because eating disorders don't go away within the framework of treatment. It's a place to start and to stabilize. But, girl, you got a long road ahead of you. And maybe they don't say that now that I'm talking aloud about this. Maybe they don't say that because I maybe would have run screaming away. But I also think there's a degree of honesty that needs to be there. This is gonna take time, and you need to trust that. And this is where I want to segue into my kind of second point of this episode that was inspired by work that I've been doing with clients lately. One of the warnings I like to give in either an intake session or a first session with a coaching client is this is probably going to get worse before it gets better. And that is kind of the way things work when you're trying to recover from an eating disorder, because you have to make changes that require you to be uncomfortable and experience emotions that you've been avoiding, and experience fears that you've been avoiding, and that discomfort is actually a sign of progress rather than a sign that something isn't working. There is this sort of gap in space and time where you start to make a lot of changes, whether you're recovering from a restrictive eating disorder, or a pattern of binging and purging, or if you have binge eating disorder, whatever, a mix of a lot of different disorders. There's a moment in time where you are not doing those behaviors as much, or you are actively challenging yourself to change those behaviors, and it feels so bad. It probably feels worse. Your emotions might feel out of control, the fear is so overwhelming. Your brain is screaming at you all day long. You might have new urges popping up. I know so often you might swing from a place of restriction to suddenly having these binge urges coming up, and it's like, what the heck is going on? It feels horrible and confusing and scary. And in those periods of time, it is so hard to not just say, screw it, I'm going back to the eating disorder. Because at least I knew what to expect, and at least it was simple then. It wasn't a happy life, it wasn't an easy life, but at least it was something I understood, and at least I knew where it was going. With this, recovery can feel so unpredictable, so out of control that it's like, why am I doing this anyways? And the worst part about this is this is not a phase that lasts like a week. It could last months, much longer than we want it to. Because the active fighting stage of an eating disorder is something that does not happen quickly. It takes a lot of time. And I think that's what makes recovering from an eating disorder uniquely challenging. It requires you to sit in the space of discomfort and fear for a very, very, very long time, learning how to tolerate it and move through it. And that's why therapy is so important. And I know that I'm a therapist. Obviously, I'm gonna advocate for therapy, but I know that's not accessible to everyone, which really is a problem. It's a reflection of a broken system. If where you are located, therapy is not accessible to you or affordable for you, the system needs to change. And again, that's a rant that I could go on on another day. But what I'm trying to say here is eating disorder recovery is uniquely challenging because you have to learn, it is essential to learn how to tolerate long periods of distress without going back to the coping mechanism that you know actually works. We don't have eating disorders and keep our eating disorders around for years because they're ineffective. No, they're working in some way. And so when you're going through a period of time where you're trying to disentangle yourself from the disorder and it's like the worst time ever, it's natural to want to go back to it. So natural. So I guess the question then becomes like, what keeps you moving forward when what you expected was, I'm gonna work hard at this, it's gonna be tough probably for a little while, but then it's gonna start feeling so much better. It's not that that's untrue. It's just that the timeline is usually longer than people tell you that it is. And we're not given the proper tools very often to endure. That's the crazy part, is like recovery is an endurance sport. So what's really needed in these spaces is to learn not just how to cope in these small moments, but how to cope psychologically through pushing yourself again and again to approach these challenges when it feels like you're not making progress. I I have So many moments I can think of in my recovery where I felt like I'm just banging my head against the wall and I'm doing these stupid challenges again and again and nothing is changing and they still feel hard. And why am I still doing this? It's never gonna work. And the way that that can so quickly uh devolve into depression is wild. There were definitely some dark days of thinking, like, well, if this is never gonna get better, what's the point of all this? Uh if I keep trying so hard and I'm not making any progress, why am I still trying? What am I doing here? And my brain gets extremely existential, where I start to think about like the meaning of life, like very quickly in most situations. Uh and so I would start to think like, what am I actually fighting for when you expect, after such a long time of working towards recovery, to feel some degree of peace around food and freedom in your body, and it just isn't happening. It's like, is this even possible for me? And that's why I really wanted to talk about this today, because I imagine there are so many people in that space listening, because it does take so long, and nobody tells you that you're not doing it wrong if it takes this long. And I didn't even mean to rhyme, but it was a rhyme. So maybe you need to write that down as a little rhyme to remember. Doesn't mean it's wrong if it's taking this long. That's just kind of the way recovery looks. If you are deeply struggling with maintaining recovery over the course of years, you are so not alone in that. You all know I've been in recovery for 11 years, and there have been some massive ups and downs over the course of those 11 years. I mean, as recently as two years ago when my son was born, and every one of those has strengthened my recovery in ways. Do you hear that number? I've been working at this for 11 years. It's a long ass time. And I'm happy to say that where I sit now is the most recovered place I've ever been in, which feels amazing. But what I credit to this space where I am in right now is developing the skill of endurance and the ability to tolerate discomfort. And it's not just a skill, but it's also a matter of access to support. And that's the reality. So I suppose at this point in the episode, you're like, okay, got it. Recovery takes a long time. I hear you. How do we last through the challenges that take us so long to move through? How do you develop that skill of endurance? And how do you actually learn to tolerate discomfort? And so much of it has to do with nervous system regulation. Key theme on the show here, and uh a cornerstone of that is establishing safety within the self and within your environment. We so often, and if you've been in eating disorder therapy, I'm sure that you're not a stranger to this concept, but we personify the eating disorder in a lot of ways because it it helps to feel like okay, it's not me against me, it's me against the eating disorder. So sometimes sometimes it helps to place the eating disorder outside of you. And when I first did that, I started to realize like, okay, the eating disorder has an agenda. What's my agenda? What do I actually want? And when I started asking myself those questions, realizing that what I want is maybe different than what the eating disorder wants was a foreign concept. I really thought up until that point that I actually did want the things the eating disorder wanted. I wanted to restrict my food and I wanted to lose weight, and I wanted to be the smallest I could possibly be. And when I separated myself from that, gave me space to ask why. It's like, okay, why do you actually want to be so small? Why does that feel so important? And what I realized was there was something about it that made me feel safe. And there was something about having the eating disorder as a companion that made me feel like everything was going to be okay. There was something about it that brought me security, a sense of empowerment, and really a feeling of peace. But the more that I interrogated the eating disorder, I realized that it was a promise of those things that never was actually delivered upon. I never got to the place where I actually felt good about myself, where I actually felt empowered within myself. It was just the idea that if I keep doing these things, then I'll feel that way. Or if I did this thing, then that's an indication that you are powerful. And maybe it lasts a moment, but it was a fleeting thing. And it was always asking me for more and more and more. And so then I started to wonder like, if I have the endurance to follow the false promises of an eating disorder, this entity, this part of me that's telling me if I do all of these things, then I'll eventually feel happy. I've been doing that for years and it hasn't happened, but I still keep trying. Why do I believe the eating disorder, but I don't believe recovery? Why do I believe that continuing to harm myself would lead me to a place of feeling empowered and safe, even though it's been years and there's been no delivery upon that promise fully? I've never been enough for it. It gives me fleeting moments of empowerment, but never true lasting security. Why do I keep going back to an empty well that just is an illusion of safety? If I have the endurance to do that, to just keep following the hook of empty promises from my eating disorder, then theoretically I would have the endurance to do the same towards a path of recovery. The problem was I didn't trust it. And I didn't trust that the discomfort that I was getting in disobeying the eating disorder would actually lead me to a place of feeling happy. Because to fully trust and surrender to recovery, I also had to abandon and fully acknowledge that what I had been doing to myself for years was never going to work. And that was hard when it felt like it did work sometimes. But part of the reframe for me was okay, you have the ability to tolerate the discomfort of harming yourself and depriving yourself and punishing yourself every day. You can do that because there's a promise of something better. What if I turned that logic on its head and applied it to recovery? Can I tolerate this discomfort of disobeying the eating disorder for the promise of something better? Can I accept that this is going to feel all wrong until someday it feels right? And if you really think about it, when you are in an eating disorder, it's kind of the opposite of that. It feels right in the moment when you do the behaviors because you're you're so invested in the lie that eventually it's all gonna be worth it. That it actually feels good a lot of the times when you listen to the disorder. It regulates you in some way, but in the long term, we realize oh, this was all BS. Like, oh shoot, I'm ill. I have a mental disorder now. Okay, that was a lie, but you're so deep into it, and it still feels regulating to do those behaviors, so it's just so hard to disentangle it. Recovery is the opposite. The day-to-day does not feel good. The day-to-day is hard and uncomfortable and is dysregulating and makes you panic. The long-term outcome is the exhale. The long-term outcome is oh, okay. This was all for something, maybe I'm better than I was. And that's not to say life is perfect. Obviously, as I mentioned at the top of the show, life is still gonna be life. It's not perfect. There's so many outcomes outside of having an eating disorder that make life difficult. But going through life without the eating disorder on your back, if you can learn how to care for yourself truly, how to build a life outside of the disorder that feels fulfilling, if you have something to recover towards, recovery does eventually feel like, okay, that was worth it. Like, okay, those years of pushing through discomfort, recovery can actually deliver on that promise. Unlike the disorder that will lie to you forever. It's the opposite trade where the disorder asks you, where the disorder makes you feel good short term, horrible long term. Recovery makes you feel horrible short term and healed long term. So I guess the point here is recovery requires trust. And arming yourself with the knowledge that the discomfort, while it feels horrible, is necessary. I don't think you can go through eating disorder recovery without the part where it feels so messy and awful and like you're doing it all wrong. There's gonna be tears, it's gonna be ugly. It doesn't look like it does on Instagram. And so my question for you would be: what do you need in order to accept that? Can you accept that? Can you invite it in? I know you are built strong, whoever you are, listening to this, because people with eating disorders, we're a different breed. And I don't say that to like I don't know, glamorize this whatsoever, but we have a mental fortitude that is unlike most, which is why I feel like I have a spidey sense in a way when I'm like in my day-to-day life, and I like I don't know, I can pick up a vibe where I'm like, we're the same when I meet people in the wild. Sometimes I can pick up on a vibe of like, I think you might have an eating disorder or have a history, because there's just a certain flavor of temperament. I'm going on this digression all to say you have what it takes to tolerate that, whether you know it or not, right now. If you're strong enough to do these things to yourself that require so much mental energy, just imagine what the world would be like if we all used that mental energy towards good. I think we could kind of change the world. If all of us with eating disorders used that like genius, evil genius part of our brains to apply it to something powerful, that'd be wild to see. But I'm I'm certain if you are out there listening to this podcast, that whether you know it or not yet, you can use all of the parts of you that made you good at your eating disorder to push you forward through recovery. You can use all of those superpowers that were turned against you into self-harm. You can use those traits for building a really beautiful life. And I don't mean beautiful in the sense that it's all happy. My life is not all happy. A lot of it is hard and sad, but there's so much meaning in all of that. And I guess that's something I want to bring up too. One thing my therapist said to me back in the day that really changed my life when I was in this space. I came to session and I was just like, I don't know why I'm even doing this. I don't know what's out there for me after this, anyways. To be frank, I thought, like, we're all gonna die, anyways. Like, what's the point? I feel like there's no real meaning in any of this. I'm working so hard to what end? And she said to me, like, well, what if there is no meaning except for the meaning that you bring to it? Except for the meaning that you define. And I was like, Oh, that doesn't feel quite as bleak. That feels like I have a bit more control over this. That life does have meaning if we add the meaning to it, and recovery has meaning, and that's in our hands to determine. I see that illustrated so clearly in my life now. It's wild. I mean, if I'd never had an eating disorder, I would have never come back to California. I would have never studied psychology, I would have never met my husband or been a therapist or started this career. And to be frank, you guys, my own, I mean, outside of the work that I do, I don't really think about eating disorders very much, which is funny because it's like everything to me in my work, but it's not really what my life is about. My life is so full outside of this with my son and my family and the things that I enjoy. Uh like creativity and being outside and traveling, and you know, that's what my life is really about. But my recovery is to thank for it. And by proxy, my eating disorder is to thank for it. And there's so much meaning that came out of this experience that I had to write. I had to write that story and I had to choose that meaning. So perhaps this long ramble, there is a point to it, which is how do we endure the discomfort of recovery? We have to create meaning along the way. We have to believe that the long struggle is one that will be fruitful. No pun intended. The years of pushing and pushing and trying and trying, that we can create something beyond this. And that requires some deep, I think, inner work to see beyond the fog that the eating disorder has created. But there's something really cool about placing the power back in your hands and acknowledging, yeah, my eating disorder has taken a lot from me, but watch what I take back. Yeah, I've fought for so many years for a promise that is empty. And can I choose differently now? Can I arm myself with the knowledge that this is a long battle? And how can I create meaning along the way and fulfillment on the other side? Big question, I guess. And this is what I mean when I say I get existential pretty quick. Well, I think I have yapped enough for this day. To sort of circle back to the beginning, expectations versus reality and recovery. I think the expectation that recovery and eating disorder treatment is like going to the doctor and taking your medicine and coming out healed is just not the reality. And I think it's important to know that, but we have to know that and also hold hope. Or else, like, what? How are we supposed to do this? We have to hold the hope too. And that's no easy task. We have to accept that discomfort is a part of it, necessary, unavoidable. We have to learn how you can't expect yourself to just white knuckle it. You have to learn how to tolerate that. And what endures us through the battle has got to be trust. And if meaning doesn't show up on its own, it's up to you to create it. In reading through my eating disorder journals a couple weeks ago, it really had me thinking about as a narrative therapist, the power of like seeing yourself as the author of your own story. And I mean, there's just so many different ways that life can go, so many different paths, so many different decisions that can take you to completely different versions of yourself. So maybe just sit with yourself today and think about like, okay, this is the timeline I'm living in. How do I want to write the rest of the story? Okay. Well, thanks for listening. I'm really sweaty in here, not gonna lie to you. I'm filming at a later time of the day, and it just got so hot in my office. So I'm gonna go get unsweaty. And thanks for listening to this sort of existential ramble this week. I hope that it offered something that you can take with you and think over and mull over and remember next time recovery feels like it's never gonna end and it's really freaking hard. It's like, yeah, it is. You're right, but it will end. It will if you don't stop, if you keep going. I've been there, it's hard, but I'm thankful for this community of like-minded people that are just doing their best, and I know that you all are. So thanks again for being here. If you are listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, I would so appreciate a five-star review. That tells the algorithm that more people should be listening to the show, and I just hope to reach more ears that need to hear it. Would love for you to subscribe if you're on YouTube. And don't forget to check out today's sponsor, Cozy Earth. I'm like not even kidding when I tell you that they're the best sheets I've ever had in my most favorite pajamas, so you can get 20% off with my code RECOVERY. Anyways, I'll talk to you more next week when I'm hopefully feeling a little more grounded, a little less tired and crazed. And please don't forget to eat your food. We will talk more next week. Bye, everybody.