I felt like my recovery had been wasted, Id re-learnt how to eat all the 'unhealthy' food and now I wasn't allowed them again.
Having a restrictive diet when in recovery for an eating disorder is something that likely isn't going to be recommended but when the diet is for your health is it okay?
I suffered with a restrictive eating disorder for around 7-8 months before starting my recovery. In the beginning of my recovery I suffered with extreme hunger, which is where your body craves a large amount of calories, this can happen in any eating disorder recovery whether you lose weight or not. Having extreme hunger I had to put my mental health over my physical health, I craved soooo much food, from chocolate, biscuits, bread and I could consume jars of peanut butter and still not be full. This lasted for around 6 months,which was super scary and I thought the extreme hunger would never end, but thankfully it did.
I do still consider myself to be in recovery from my eating disorder but now have a healthy lifestyle and balanced diet. Now that my mental health is in a better place I had to start to work on my autoimmune disease and improving my joints. So many people recommended a vegan diet so I quickly cut out all meat and other animal products, I actually did this over night. Honestly I didn't really struggle with this. I found that there were a lot of vegan products and substitutes so my mental health did not suffer a lot. When I began to research more into how your diet can help autoimmune diseases even more people recommended that I should cut out gluten too, This made my diet extremely restricted.
There are quite a few gluten free substitutes however some shops do offer less variety, so I quickly found myself eating a lot of low calorie food. It's such a strange thing to explain, I felt like my recovery had been wasted, Id re-learnt how to eat all the 'unhealthy' food and now I wasn't allowed them again. In my head I had to try and make sure I was doing this for the right reason and wasn't doing it to restrict my intake and some days I still second guess this, however I now just eat a larger quantity to make sure I'm getting the right amount of calories my body needs.
I'm not totally against being on a vegan/vegetarian diet in recovery because there are loads of other reasons people have restrictions on their diets and that is completely normal however I feel like you have to make sure you're doing it for the right reasons, which can be difficult when your in recovery. Even though I'm on a 'redistricted' diet I still work on my recovery by eating intuitively and not counting calories or macros. I think you just have to find out what works best for you.
