Eating Disorder Recovery & Why it’s Like Glitter from Your NYE Celebration 2 Years Ago
By Katherine Metzelaar, MSN, RDN, CD
While using and celebrating with glitter isn’t relegated to NYE celebrations (#glitteralldangyear), it’s a common time for many to celebrate with it.
And what a delight it is! You dance, you sing, you spend time with loved ones and you spread that glitter all over the place. It feels magical as it falls down over your head, sheds off of your shirt, or sparkles as decoration hanging from your ceiling/walls. The glitter gets everywhere.
If you know glitter, you know how fun, playful and annoying it can be. The celebration is great, but the clean-up is a bit different. Seems simple: You wake up the next morning, vacuum up the glitter mess, wipe down the counters and floors, take a deep breath and relax on the couch. As you sit scrolling on your phone, you see out of the corner of your eye something sparkling and to your horror you see tons of glitter that you missed when cleaning up. There is glitter stuck in the cracks of your floor, glitter hiding in the door handles of your fridge, and glitter in your clean laundry. So, you set out to clean again.
This process continues on until after some time it seems mostly cleaned up. You feel at ease, you get to clean less, you promise to not use glitter again because of how hard it was to clean up. And then, much to your dismay a month later, you find a pile of glitter hiding in some random corner of your house and you clean that up thinking, “how could there STILL be glitter in this house?!” Then, you go a much longer period of time without noticing any glitter or having to clean it up, but then a year or two later you find bits and pieces of it on your bathroom floor behind the trashcan or in a random shoe.
What’s glitter as an analogy got to do with eating disorder recovery? Quite possibly, everything.
The process of using and then cleaning up glitter is very similar to healing from eating disorders/disordered eating. At first it feels overwhelming, but straight forward: “I need to clean up this glitter” with the glitter in this case being tending to, dismantling and unpacking all the years of food rules and body hatred. You work toward challenging the food rules, eating consistently/rhythmically, integrate macro-nutrient groups at meals, challenge your family’s food environment and re-nourish your body. Over time it becomes easier; the glitter gets cleaned up... or so you think.
This is the part where you sit down on the couch after having done a big clean and see the glitter that you previously couldn’t see before out of the corner of your eye. This glitter often represents all the work that remains to be done with your relationship to your body. You start to see the layers of anti-fatness and weight stigma that may be left to unpack and understand. You see how systems of oppression are wrapped up in how the relationship to your body has developed. You see the long history of body hatred and dissatisfaction from the members of your family that you have inherited. So, you get to work to metaphorically to “clean it up,” which is to challenge it, unpack it, understand it, dismantle it and relearn ways of being in relationship to your body.
You continue to do the work on recovering from the eating disorder and address your body image concerns, and after some time you start to feel better.
You feel stable and have tackled some of the most difficult things in your life as part of the process of moving through eating disorder recovery and healing your relationship to food and your body. At this point, most of the big piles of glitter are cleaned up and even the more inconspicuous glitter is gone.
But then one day, you are in your bathroom and go to throw something out and you see the glitter from two years ago hiding there… in the corner! How could you have missed it? How did you not know that it was there? How did you not see it before considering you use this trashcan every day?!
This glitter represents navigating this diet culture that is filled with harmful food rules, diets and treatment of bodies.
It represents the things that pop up and that you experience that allow you to see the parts of your recovery and healing that are left to tackle, unpack and “clean up.” Parts that you just couldn’t see before because there was much healing and nourishment that needed to take place in order for you to be able to access the inconspicuous and hidden parts of recovery.
It also represents the long journey of recovery from the eating disorder. Recovery is not a quick fix despite the desire for it to be so and you will continue to find ways that the eating disorder shows up that surprise you, frustrate you and sometimes make you angry.
Like cleaning up the glitter, eating disorder recovery gets less exhausting over time. You start to see the eating disorder lurking less and less in places where you don’t want it to be or in places that you had no idea it was hiding.
And, it’s ok if you keep finding glitter over the years as you move through eating disorder recovery. It’s simply a sign that you are aware, present and curious about ways that the eating disorder can hide, shape-shift and hang around even when it’s not welcome.
It means you are doing the work. And one day, like the glitter, the eating disorder will all but mostly go away.
It doesn’t mean other people won’t get glitter on you or that things won’t come up where you have to get curious about how the glitter is showing up again and where the heck it came from.
What it does mean though is that you will be able to see the glitter faster, catch it when it’s showing up, and challenge it.
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Are you struggling with food or body image?
Whether it’s food rules, chronic dieting, body image concerns, or resurfacing eating disorder thoughts or behaviors, you deserve support to heal. At Bravespace Nutrition we work with clients virtually helping people who are struggling with food and body image. It’s possible to change your relationship with food and your body, free up headspace, and live your life with more presence, abundance and peace. Learn more about Bravespace Nutrition, our philosophy, and the services we offer.