Rinse, Repeat, Recovery

What it took to move beyond relapse and begin real healing

Recovery is not a straight line. For years, I cycled through relapse and repair, convincing myself I was fine as long as I looked the part. This is the story of what finally shifted and why honesty became the foundation for real healing.

For decades, I tried to hide my eating disorder. Looking back, I can see it was my worst kept secret, but for years I would have done anything to conceal what I was doing to myself.

I first developed anorexia at sixteen. I recovered. Then, many years later, I got sick again. Just like shampoo instructions, it became rinse and repeat. Over the years, I’ve had three relapses between my teenage onset and my most recent one that began four years ago.

It is not difficult for me to talk about the early days of anorexia. In fact, I can talk about most hard things I’ve been through, with one giant caveat: I can tell the story easily if I have distance, or at least if I present it as though I do. When I am on the inside of a struggle, though, I usually find it impossible to share. At least that was true until my most recent relapse.

That relapse began in 2021. My oldest son had just left for residential treatment. We had survived the worst years after the plane crash that shattered our family. And ironically, it was the first time in years I could finally take a deep breath and begin to care for myself. Instead, I collapsed.

It wasn’t the first time my body had waited until I felt safe to fall apart. In college, I got sick almost every semester as soon as finals ended. I would push myself through weeks of pressure, holding everything rigidly tight, never allowing my body to break down. But almost without fail, as soon as I walked out of my last exam, my throat would start to ache and the sneezes would come. Within a day, I would be felled by a cold or fever. This relapse was no different, except instead of a cold I recovered from in days, recovery took me years. And that recovery, if I am being honest, will probably be ongoing for the rest of my life.

I think I inadvertently lied to you earlier. I told you I had recovered from my previous dances with anorexia. Retrospectively, I am not sure I ever really did. I know I never fully recovered, at least. I guess it depends on what your definition of recovery is. I got better behaviorally, without a doubt. I maintained a healthy weight for years at a time between each relapse. If you had observed me, I looked entirely “normal,” healthier than most, even. But I addressed the symptoms without ever really understanding what was underneath. I was like a dry alcoholic. I was a healthy-weight anorexic.

So when did true recovery start? Hard to say exactly, but I think it began with an app I hope to never see again: Recovery Record. Unless you are a clinician or someone who has undergone treatment for an eating disorder, I feel confident you have never heard of the app that was both my nemesis and lifeline in the first months of my most recent recovery. It is an app where you record everything you eat. No calories or numbers, just the content and the feelings you experience around eating. The app is shared between clinician and patient. Everything I recorded went to my nutritionist.

I don’t think I can overemphasize just how uncomfortable this app made me. I had spent thirty years hiding my eating habits from everyone, but especially from myself. I mean, obviously I knew what I ate every day, but there is a difference between knowing and really letting yourself know. Do you know what I mean?

Pushing through my discomfort was almost unbearable. Every time I opened the app, I could feel shame rising from just below the surface. My willingness to keep going anyway might be the truest mark of change. I trusted my nutritionist, which helped, but the harder part was not being honest with her, it was being honest with myself.

Putting my true feelings in the app meant I could not turn away from the fact that my life had narrowed to feelings about my body. I was a mother of three, a psychologist, and a friend to many, yet all I could feel was hunger in my body and fear of food. I hated myself for it.

And yet, I would have stayed stuck in that place forever if I had not admitted the truth to myself. Honesty, I now understand, is the only foundation that can support recovery. Of course, honesty alone is not enough, but without it, recovery is not possible.

The truth is, I did not stay with Recovery Record for more than a few months. But it was the first place I moved away from performing and started to show what was happening beneath the surface. And once I let a little honesty in, it was harder to go back to hiding.

Eventually, as I began to refuel my body and my brain came back online, I found another way to tell the truth: writing. Writing became its own form of Recovery Record, but one I did not dread. It was not about logging bites of food or checking compliance with a meal plan. It was about naming feelings I had spent decades running from. The page became the place I could finally admit what I had been too ashamed to say out loud.

At first I wrote just for myself. There was no reason and no way to hide when I was writing, and putting words down helped me start noticing what was happening inside me. Then I shared my words with my treatment team. I still could not put down my armor in the therapy room, but I could read about what I was feeling after I had taken the armor off in the privacy of my own space. And that is where I learned that the connection I found when I let go of my armor was better than any connection I had known before.

If Recovery Record was my first act of honesty, writing was the practice that made it sustainable. And sharing those words is what led me to the honest connection that now sustains my health. The closer I move toward health, the more I realize that recovery is not about perfect eating or maintaining a healthy weight. It is about dismantling the armor I carried for so long and learning how to live without wearing it every day.

For decades, my story was rinse and repeat. Relapse, repair, relapse, repair. But recovery is different. Recovery is more than repair. Recovery is neither a cycle nor an endpoint; it is a practice. It begins with telling the truth, and it continues every day I choose honesty over hiding.