Even once you have an idea of what you need to do to recover your metabolism, it can still be hard to commit fully to recovery. Here are six common recovery traps that prevent those with an eating disorder from either beginning or following through with recovery.

1. Temporary Recovery Symptoms

A lot of mainstream articles portray recovery as solely a positive experience in which once you start eating normal, your life will be better right away. By doing this they fail to mention some of the roadblocks and symptoms that you may more than likely face along the way. I believe the reason that they don’t mention these negatives is that they don’t want to deter anyone from beginning recovery. The problem with this approach is that there are two aspects to recovery: beginning recovery and sticking through recovery. Many with disordered eating at some point or another get motivated to end their restrictive tendencies once and for all, only to second guess themselves when they experience negative symptoms such as bloating, edema, feeling tired, etc. I believe it is important to 100% transparent about what you may experience so you know what to expect beforehand. While some of these symptoms can be horrible, they are usually very short term and are nothing to the long-term effects that restriction has on your body, your relationships, and your sanity. I will write more about the recovery symptoms soon because I feel this are very important.

2. An Elusive Emotional Root Cause

If your disordered eating is the result of your body’s reaction to starvation, rather some deep emotion issue, then trying to solve your emotional troubles in an attempt to cure your eating disorder could go on for years. The possibility that your eating disorder has an emotional root cause is an attractive idea to many with restricting tendencies because it provides the hope that you can solve your eating disorder while maintaining your current restriction. While it is definitely true that many with eating disorders have emotional problems or depression, it is often the case that the eating disordered caused the depression, and not the other way around. Trying over and over again to take control and failing can make anyone feel depressed. If you want to read me about emotional vs physiological root causes of disordered eating, then check out this article.

3. Facing the Aftermath of Your Disorder

Any of you with a history of disordered eating knows that it can cause lots of problems with your relationships and life. You may not notice the effects while you are in a binge/purge cycle because you are constantly consumed with either the thought of food or with trying to make up for your recent binge. It is only once you begin to recover and these distractions subside, that you are left to observe the havoc that your disordered eating has caused in almost every aspect of your life. This is the moment can be a very sad realization–How could I have avoided my friends like that? Or how could I have completely neglected my studies? You realize that you have dug yourself into a whole and now you have to dig your way out. This can make you feel helpless and tempt you to go right to the distraction that disordered eating provides. My best advice at this crucial moment in recovery is to open up to someone close to you about how you feel as that can be very therapeutic.

4. The Allure of Covering up Symptoms

I’m not advising anyone to quit taking medication that you have been prescribed, but to recognize that similar to the elusive emotion root cause trap, the idea that you can fix your symptoms with meds without having to give up restriction, is an attractive one to many with a dieting mentality. You may imagine that thyroid meds will speed up your metabolism, sex hormones will bring your libido back, and appetite suppressants will eliminate your hunger. While this is true in many cases, if these symptoms are from dieting, then they will likely not produce these while still in restriction. I wrote a lot about the reason for this here. This trap could stall recovery for years because you may think to yourself, “If only I could find the right dose then I’ll be fine.” My advice: go ahead and experiment, but also make sure to stop the restriction as well.

5. Black and White Thinking

This recovery trap is similar to the previous trap regarding symptoms, however, this one considers that even after you are 100% recovered, there may be one or two things that you may actually miss about your restrictive past. I know that this is a highly controversial thing to say, but I thought I’d mention it because this one was big for me. We tend to see things as all good or all bad rather than relative to the situation. The problem with this thinking is that even if 90% of things improve, the 10% that gets worse will make you think that you are on the wrong track. To give you an idea of what I mean, I’ll give a personal example. I used to fast all of the time, and one of the reasons why I loved about fasting is how focused I felt. My black or white thinking at the time led me to believe that if this area improved, then fasting must be good for everything else as well. I eventually learned that this was not the case and that it’s all relative. This heightened focus might be great if I was starving and needed to find food, but it was not conducive to everyday life. I was essentially trading my sanity, digestion, and libido for focus.

6. Identifying as a Disordered Eater

This one might sound odd at first, and you might be thinking, “but Christophe, they do have an eating disorder?” What I’m referring to is defining the person you are by your eating disorder. Many with disordered eating spend so much time thinking about their disorder that it consumes their life. It can take away time from friends, family, and hobbies. This becomes a problem when you decide to ditch your disordered eating because it becomes a really big part of who you are and how you define yourself. For a while, I was proud to be known as the guy who could go days without eating, but at the same time eat much more than anyone else if I wanted to. It also felt cool to be the guy who my friends thought would skip weeks of classes just because I felt like it, and still get good grades, when in reality, I just felt too disgusted with myself to go. Not only do you see yourself that way, but your friends and family associate you with the behaviors of someone with an eating disorder. For instance, I am naturally an outgoing happy guy, but during periods of being in a binge/purge cycle, I was very non-social. If people came to our apartment for a party, I would often sneak off for a long walk sometimes for hours just to avoid people. This makes it even harder for you to change because you begin to see yourself as that person, and people begin to treat you like that person, when that is really not who you are.