If you’re considering or actually working through recovery, eating disorder recovery weight gain might be your greatest fear. Even for people don’t have eating disorders, diet culture and society at large send the strong message that weight gain is something to be avoided at all costs.

It’s no wonder that fear of weight gain can often show up as one of the most challenging roadblocks in recovery.

Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses with potentially severe physical consequences. Remember that you definitely can’t tell if someone is struggling based on the size of their body. People of all sizes can be struggling with an eating disorder. This also reinforces the fact that that body size is not an indicator of health.

However, the reality is that for many people, fully recovering from their eating disorder will involve weight gain. This may be especially true if you primarily struggle with restricting your food or engaging in other behaviors to suppress your weight, such a purging or compulsive exercise.

If this is the case, your eating disorder may have taken you below your the natural, healthy set point at which your body wants to be.

Eating disorder recovery weight gain is a key element of recovery in order to improve both physical and mental health.

Body Image Healing Takes Time

So how can you recover and also build a peaceful relationship with your body? Many times I’ve heard throughout my years of treating eating disorders that “body image is the last to go,” or some similar mantra.

But what does it even mean to have a better body image? There’s a common misconception that to heal from an eating disorder, you need to be able to look in the mirror and fall in love with the body you see, but that’s really not the case.

Body image healing is about learning to respect and accept your body, not about loving the way you look. It means the ability to simply BE in your body without engaging in destructive efforts to change it. And yes, it may be the case that this process does take time and can be one of the last elements of recovery to solidify.

However, just because this process requires a lot of persistence and patience, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t internal shifts that can take place along the way to allow for a smoother ride. There are, without a doubt, some practices that you can put into place to help in accepting your body, even if it means that achieving a healthy mind and body means eating disorder recovery weight gain

5 Tips for Managing Weight Gain Discomfort in Eating Disorder Recovery

It can feel scary and especially difficult to focus on eating disorder recovery in a culture that can feel so disordered as a whole.  You might be anxious about other people watching you and your changing body and judging what’s going on.

But the good news is that if you’ve made the huge decision to tackle eating disorder recovery, you really only need to concentrate on you and your own recovery.

Read on to find out how you can cope with these sometimes uncomfortable and intolerable changes to your body.

# 1 Remember why you are doing this

At the beginning of the recovery process, there are many ups and downs to how you’ll be feeling on any given day. The reality is that you may find yourself, though solidly committed to giving up the eating disorder, really struggling to accept what you see in the mirror and how you feel in your pants.

In these challenging moments, it can be incredibly helpful to have a clear picture of what you are truly fighting for in recovery. This might mean writing down your strongest recovery motivation and keep it in your wallet or somewhere else you’ll easily be able to access it when you need to see it.

#2 Remember you are gaining what you should never have lost

Weight restoration can often feel like a lengthy and arduous process.  Your eating disorder voice is probably loudly shrieking at you in discontent the whole time.  It can be helpful in these moments to remind yourself that the weight you are gaining is a part of you that should never have left.

The eating disorder behaviors led you to lose pounds that your unique genetics have dictated are apart of your healthy set point.

You are not meant to be at that lower weight and eating in a way that truly nourishes your body and soul will not allow you to stay at that size.

Therefore, recovery must mean gaining weight.

#3 Shop for new clothing

Shifting body size is a part of eating disorder treatment and many people will find that they have very few items that fit and feel comfortable. However, you may come to a point in recovery when you realize that you want to wear something new that fits and allows you to express your personality and sense of fashion.

It’s a good idea to shop for clothing in sizes to fit your frame, as soon as you really need them. Make an effort to shop for what truly fits you. You’ll likely find that it helps to have a support person with you to help you with this sometimes-challenging task. As far as labels go, don’t be afraid to cut the tags out or ask someone else to do that for you.

 #4 Work on shifting your idea of the ‘ideal’ body

Yes, eating disorders are not simply about trying to look like the models on magazine covers.  However, diet culture and its emphasis on the thin ideal have an inextricable connection to eating disorders.

You can work on challenging your internal idea of beauty through a careful edit of your social media, TV, magazines, and the internet.  Find and follow some of the many amazing accounts on Instagram that depict a wide variety of body shapes and sizes.  Be mindful of and unfollow any accounts that are reinforcing the idea that ‘thinner is better’.

It’s really pretty amazing what can happen when you inundate yourself with body positive imagery.

Repeat exposure to diverse images can slowly shift how you come to see yourself and others.

 #5 Give yourself time

Just as you didn’t develop an eating disorder overnight, the process of recovery, and especially feeling comfortable in a higher weight body, will take time.  Weight gain is often one of the first and most challenging steps to recovery, but the more you are able to push past the discomfort, the easier it will become.

A nourished mind and body will have a far easier time with all of the emotional challenges recovery will ask of you.  Make an effort to accept in each moment how you are feeling at that time without judgment.  Recovery will be uncomfortable at times, but learning to sit with the discomfort is a skill that will prove invaluable in establishing lasting recovery.

I hope these tips help you cope with weight gain in eating disorder recovery, regardless of what stage of change you are in: whether you are just considering recovery or actually maintaining progress after treatment.  If you haven’t already picked up the book Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon, I highly recommend learning about and embracing this philosophy. It was truly a game changer in my personal journey.

Lastly, no one should be going through this process alone.  As an eating disorder and body image therapist for nearly a decade, I work with clients at my office in Agoura Hills, CA and provide online therapy in California and New York.  If you want to learn how I can help you, give me a call now or click on the button below to get in touch to schedule your free 15-minute phone consultation.