︎

SOPHIE HARRIS-TAYLOR



This series is exploring what it means to be in recovery from an eating disorder.



I just got tired of the fight and recovery became natural, I think physically yes I’m recovered if that’s possible, but mentally no, I don’t think I ever will be. Really the one thing that has always been true for me is that, I can manage my stress and my emotions, I channel it all into my eating disorder. It was my only coping mechanism that I ever developed…. Carrying a baby was really painful, with Dylan my eldest, two of my ribs cracked, because my body was not equipped, because I developed anorexia so young my pelvis never widened properly. So I had really complex pregnancies that were really hard and it was difficult knowing no matter what I did, I couldn’t make them not high risk, the damage was done years before. Being pregnant did make me want to get better, because I didn’t want to be unwell and I didn’t want to be a bad mum and I worried what impact having my eating disorder would have on my children. I had this intense guilt that what I was doing wasn’t enough. But its so hard to recover whilst your pregnant because you have zero control over what’s happening to your body; its doing the thing your most scared of, expanding way beyond your control. I think recovery is going to be getting to a place where I’m totally mentally recovered, where the obsessions with food has gone, just eating in the way that is intuitive and doesn’t come with any sort of emotional attachment. When you are an inpatient you don’t have the choice, so you can’t address the reasons why you do things when your not allowed to do them, you can’t say hypothetically I would probably restrict now. When I was an outpatient and I was left on my own, and things got more stressful in my life again, I just went back to old behaviours. I think the misconceptions of eating disorders that its all very young girls and its all about not being able to eat food, when actually it has nothing really to do with food, if it was to do with food it might be easier, but its not because its all in your head. Food is just a way to have some control. There are some days when I will wake up and look in the mirror and just wish I could claw it all off. I wish I could get a giant dyson vacuum and just suck it out. Especially in the evenings if I have managed to eat relatively well in the day, in the evenings my body image is horrendous. Having a shower in the evening I find the most disgusting thing, I feel like fats everywhere. I really dislike my body a lot of the time. I know its not really related to weight, I pretend its related to weight and I pretend that I would feel better about my body if I were at a lower weight, but I know realistically all I’m doing is trying to numb the inside thing by treating it externally which doesn’t make much sense.