Hand on heart, chocolate digestives are up there with the greatest of my discoveries from the last three months. Only the dark ones mind you, the gingerbread ones at Christmas didn’t quite hit the same spot.

I have also learned that I did have anorexia, and that I have been battling it to varying degrees for a long time. I was very poorly and I most definitely needed treatment. Not a once a week CBT session to be squeezed in around work, and all the exercise that I would have continued to do, likely whilst still restricting my eating in some shape or form. No, what I needed was full time, intensive psychoeducational and therapeutic intervention alongside a meal plan dictating that I eat chocolate digestives and other processed foods. Foods that I now accept I feared. And that eating them was crucial to rewiring my brain. All of this, I was in complete denial of. I now thank the stars every day and appreciate, more that I could ever convey, how fortunate I am to have been given the opportunity of the lifechanging treatment I have received.

Among the pivotal lessons I have learned, is that eating disorders are complex. Incredibly complex. I am a factual type of person and I like a bit of science behind a theory. To discover the school of thought which suggests that the cause of the actual eating disorder is rooted in biology, and that it is a primitive survival response to energy deficiency, was a game changer for me. The need to begin treatment by quite simply eating food, nutritionally dense food, came to make sense. The more complicated aspect for me was figuring out what had led me to a state of energy deficiency. Well actually no, scrap that. Not eating enough food and exercising myself literally nearly to death, is what got me there but what had driven that behaviour? This has taken longer to figure out and I may still not have it nailed on, but my insight is now much deeper and I understand the changes I need to make. It transpires that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution but rather recovery depends on finding the right therapy for the individual.

And so in the blogs to follow, I will delve a little deeper into the therapies I have explored, how they have helped me understand the development of my anorexia and what I need to do to recover and most importantly, to maintain that recovery.