You Are More Than Your Body

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

I’ve always been more interested in what my body can do than what it looks like. Way back in biblical times, the Apostle Paul said, “Your body is your temple,”meaning we should cherish and care for our bodies. Somewhere between biblical times and 2020, we began treating our bodies not like the living, breathing human organisms they are, but like problems that needed to be fixed, or like a sleeping bag that needs to be pushed and prodded and smashed into the receptacle in which it came. If you’ve never had to stuff a large sleeping bag into a very small bag, you won’t know this particular struggle.

I recently stopped seeing a therapist for my eating disorder, and I’ve considered myself “recovered” for a long time in that I’ve stopped starving myself, binging/purging, and generally feeling miserable. But my dietitian had me read “Neural Rewiring for Eating Disorder Recovery” by Tabitha Farrar, which distills how deeply disordered habits become ingrained, and how difficult it is to fully break all of them, not just the really bad ones like starving or binging. This brings up the very valid question, “when are you ‘recovered’ from an eating disorder?” I’ll address that in a later post, since it will necessarily consume more space than a paragraph or two.