Any type of eating disorder takes your identity. The more you have an eating disorder, the more you lose your identity. There is a fundamental essence of you that is the same, but apart from that eating disordered people are very much alike during their illness.

What does it mean to be recovered?

Being recovered is when a person can accept his or her natural body size and shape and no longer has a self-destructive relationship with food or exercise.

When you are recovered, food and weight take a proper perspective in your life, and what you weigh is not more important than who you are; in fact, actual numbers are of little or no importance at all.

When recovered, you will not compromise your health or betray your soul to look a certain way, wear a certain size, or reach a certain number on a scale.

When you are recovered you do not use eating disorder behaviors to deal with, distract from, or cope with other problems.

We need to accept our core temperament traits and utilize them in positive ways – i.e. anxiety = high energy = how can I use my energy to make a difference?

When we engage in a self-destructive behavior we need to write down in that moment why we want to do it.

Never engage in negative talk about the eating disorder – but listen to what the eating disorder is telling you and let your healthy self deal with it.

The only thing you need to know to start the path to recovery is simply to be dissatisfied with where you are NOW.

You do not need to focus on recovery as en be-end. For many people recovery does not have a positive sound to it, and you can get better step by step just by deciding that you just don’t want to be where you are at right now without committing to recovery but rather simply committing to change.

The goal is not to get rid of your eating disorder self, but to learn from it, discover what it is doing for you, and then strengthen your healthy self to take over its job.

Change only happens when we feed our healthy, loving side more than our destructive, abusive and negative side.

We cannot evolve into loving beings who thrive in the skin we are in by hating our way out of it.

And that is probably the most difficult fact for us to accept: That we need to show up and love ourselves in the skin we are in right now --- before we can change in a sustainable manner.

Think about animals.

Animals do not change into something more lovable when they are abused, the hide, isolate and eventually die from a broken heart. Yes, animals need love to survive. Similar when we abuse ourselves; we allow for no room of growth to take place, because we are trying to hate our way into shell-perfection. We isolate and feed our negative side stronger.

The very definition of love is, that it has no demands, it is a matter of being.

If we can't learn to master that relationship with ourselves, every other relationship in our life will be unfulfilled, strained and demanding - nothing will ever be enough to satisfy.

Today I want you to find one thing about yourself that you are grateful for. One thing that you can say to yourselves every day when waking up and looking into the mirror.

And if you can't find anything about you that you are grateful for, then pretend.

Fake it til you make it. Just start - somewhere, anywhere matters not. Just start. Now do it.