Dear readers, Today in writing this post, I’m left feeling bittersweet. For the last 18 months or so, this Surviving ED blog has proven to be a wonderful opportunity for me to write about my eating disorder recovery. Throughout this experience, I’ve met wonderful people, both via comments to my posts and also in working with my amazing co-author, Jess Hudgens, whom I respect and admire more than words can say.

I was hospitalized in an inpatient facility for a few days recently (not for my anorexia, but a comorbid condition). I was there long enough to see some patient turnover and was reminded just how much the attitudes of people you are in treatment with can affect you. In school, we call this the "therapeutic milieu." I prefer to think of it as the general "vibe" of the unit.

Recently, my work sent me on a training which entailed a road trip with colleagues and three days of intense meetings. Our training was supplemented by many meals and social gatherings between and during those planning sessions. Despite an abundance of food, I realized when I got back home that I hadn't really thought of food or the process of eating all that much through the entire trip. I equally realized that despite there being many new people there, I also hadn't felt compelled to share my eating disorder history with any new colleagues I was meeting. When I got home and thought about all of it, I was surprised. Why, for the first time in recent memory, did I not find myself thinking about food or feel compelled to discuss my history with others?

Most people who know me today know that I’m a food enthusiast -- I love food in eating disorder recovery. When those people become aware of my past and try to reconcile those two experiences, they tend to be confused. How can someone both be enthusiastic about food and also have suffered an eating disorder? From my perspective, this is actually quite a natural progression. Though I may have some anxiety around food, my eating disorder recovery taught me that confronting that anxiety head-on and embracing food as nourishment is part of recovery.

In the last six years since the start of my eating disorder recovery, I've been pretty diligent in trying to make an effort not to skip meals along with the inevitable emotions that will surface at times when I interact with food. However, lately with the stress of an active lifestyle, I have found it harder to remember to enjoy and relax while eating, as it feels like it takes away time from other important things. Realizing that this could lead to falling into old patterns, I recently decided to take a mindfulness workshop whose topic was the art of eating with a clear mind, three times a day.

When it comes to my recovery from anorexia, like in a lot of areas of my life, I strive to be fiercely independent. Imagine a petulant toddler yelling, "I do it self!" at the top of her lungs and pushing people away while simultaneously crying because she can't actually "do it self." Excellent. You have just drawn yourself a picture of my first three years of recovery failures.

In my last post about being 24 and having an eating disorder, I looked back on my years in graduate school where I felt very lonely, even though I was often surrounded by many of my peers. Over time, and shortly after I started to get some help to manage my anxiety about food and body image, I had to understand why I had a tendency to engage in self-harm by binging and purging when I found myself in stressful situations. I thought I'd share some simple ways which might help you gain some understanding of your eating disorder, though by no means do I claim that this might be the right way for you to go about your recovery process. This is simply me sharing my experience with you,and I do invite you to reach out to an eating disorder professional for support in your journey to recovery.

Many times throughout the course of my eating disorder, I found myself listening to music that encouraged my disordered behaviors and thoughts. These songs are still indelibly marked in my brain and I can sing every word of them when they turn up on my iPod. The problem with this is that singing them only serves to cement the messages in my head. So when I started down the road to eating disorder recovery, I needed a new set of songs to sing along to.

Roughly 10 years ago this week, I was moving out on my own and attending graduate school. Many other big changes were happening at the same time in my life, but looking back, I can honestly say that those two had the biggest impact on my eating disorder spinning out of control around that time. It is no surprise that major life changes or transitions can, unfortunately, be triggers for a number of events or conditions in one's life, including eating disorders. Here's a bit about my experience on this and how it related to my mental illness.

As a mental health advocate, I would like to share with you how it has been important to me to engage in conversations with other like-minded individuals suffering from a mental illness, and, in turn, share with them some of my own experience in battling my eating disorder, bulimia. I do not think it would have been possible to maintain my eating disorder recovery for a few years by now, without having shared some of my struggles with other people who could relate to my journey simply because they have had to cope with their own issues when it comes to mental health.