Why Health Feels Hard After Disordered Eating Recovery

Recovery from disordered eating is hard work.

You had to unlearn distorted beliefs about food, metabolism, and weight regulation. You faced fear foods and reincorporated them. You rebuilt hunger and fullness cues that disappeared through restriction, bingeing—or both. You let go of all-or-nothing eating and learned moderation.

And that doesn’t even touch the work of learning to live in a body at the weight it landed in recovery.

You did all of this while swimming upstream in a culture that still rewards thinness, despite real progress in body acceptance. Along the way, many people arrive at something that once felt impossible: normal, effortless eating. Trusting appetite. Enjoying food. A relationship with eating that is no longer dominated by anxiety, shame, or obsession.

With that hard-won peace, it makes sense that many people become fiercely protective of their recovery.

You develop a kind of mental immune system—a sharp radar for diet culture, healthism, moralized food language, and subtle body shaming. You can hear restraint disguised as “wellness” from a mile away, whether it comes from media, health professionals, or loved ones. Thinking about food and your body no longer occupies every waking moment.

Finally, there is space to just be a person in a body in the world.

For many, that immune system is strengthened through community—online body acceptance spaces, Health at Every Size, and anti-diet frameworks. These voices have provided essential scaffolding while people’s own internal trust was still forming. Many go on to become advocates themselves. I’m deeply grateful for this community—both for my own healing and for my clients’.

And yet, a gap has quietly formed between eating disorder recovery culture and physical health care.

On one side, some voices within the ED recovery and HAES world frame physical health as largely out of our control—or suggest that trying to influence it risks relapse. Medications are often positioned as the safest way to manage symptoms like blood sugar issues, inflammation, pain, or GI distress. Mental, social, and spiritual health are rightly elevated—but sometimes physical health is treated as secondary, or even suspect. For some, attempting to care for the body can feel equivalent to submitting again to oppressive systems that caused harm in the first place.

On the other side of the divide sits the wellness world.

Here, health is something to optimize. Perfect eating, supplements, biohacks, detoxes, red light therapy. The body is seen as fully controllable—if only you find the right protocol, practitioner, or guru. Beneath the surface is often an unspoken moral framework: that health is a personal responsibility, and illness a personal failure.

Both sides hold pieces of truth. And both sides distort the truth when taken to extremes.

Some people do find their way to peaceful eating and physical wellbeing with relative ease. But many don’t. Instead, they land in the in-between—socially pressured from both directions. On one side, they fear betraying recovery or body acceptance. On the other, they feel judged as undisciplined or negligent.

This is the gap.

Many people with a history of disordered eating still carry remnants years—or decades—later. All-or-nothing thinking lingers.GI symptoms flare, but fear of restriction keeps them eating foods that don’t serve them. Exercise still feels like punishment, so movement is avoided altogether.

I see people fall into this gap every day.

Parents who are exhausted and use food as their only reward. Parents of teens with eating disorders who put their own health entirely on hold. Empty-nesters who fill boredom or loneliness by baking for others. People whose bodies are suffering after years of misguided nutrition advice, who keep getting sicker despite “doing everything right.”

These men and women feel unseen by both worlds.

Too “health-conscious” for ED recovery spaces. Too “undisciplined” for wellness culture.

Their weight complicates things further. Having found freedom from that three-digit number, they’re understandably wary of making it important again—yet unsure whether it means nothing at all. (I’ll explore weight more in future articles.)

So what is the path forward?

Some call it the middle path. Balance. Moderation. Shades of gray. A dialectic.

I prefer to think of it as synthesis—a way of honoring recovery and caring for physical health, without turning the body back into a battleground.

I delve into what this is in my next post.