Dear Tessa:

Welcome back!

You wrote that you want your life, your eating habits, to be like before, that because your obsession with food/ cycle of restricting and bingeing is relatively new, it is not “’ingrained’ into (your) psyche”-

it is now ingrained as any habit-of-the mind, actualizing itself in behavior. This is your new reality. The anxiety of the past, before the disordered eating focused on other things. A year ago, it discovered food as focus.

It is still the same anxiety that needs to be acknowledged, again and again, understood better, managed, dealt with.

Managing and healing from disordered eating is about correcting the eating behavior itself (avoid unreasonable restricting, for one, because such leads to overeating/ bingeing) AND the anxiety underneath.

anita