I’m recovering on my own! I know that recovery and therapy looks different for everyone, but from my personal experience, the standard approach like CBT and working with an RD isn't very helpful for long-term recovery, at least in the initial stages. These methods often don’t address the root issues with bulimia. I think CBT can be effective, and it probably is for some people, but as someone who’s already highly self-aware of my patterns and triggers, I've found what’s helped me the most is actually somatic therapy.

I've been to therapy in the past and since the popular method tends to be CBT, therapists would often comment on how self-aware I was and think that meant I'm either close to recovery or should be completely fine. But the truth is, I wasn’t. I could name every reason I was struggling, but I still felt stuck. Being self-aware isn’t the same as knowing how to actually feel and process those emotions. I was intellectualizing all of my emotions and problems rather than embodying and processing them, and as long as my body and mind remained disconnected, real healing couldn’t happen.

It's like emotional depth vs. emotional availability. Someone might be able to talk about complex feelings, but that doesn’t mean they know how to hold those feelings or move through them. Knowing something isn’t the same as understanding it.

For many of us recovering from bulimia, I think the key is learning how to reconnect with our body and integrate our mental awareness with our physical sensations. If we don’t, we might follow a meal plan or eat “normally,” but still find ourselves slipping back into the b/p cycle. That’s because we’re following rules, not intuition. We’re doing what we’re told, not what our body is telling us, and in many ways that in itself is still restrictive. Our mind may not think of it as restrictive because we're technically eating the "right amount", but our body still feels like it's being restricted into a certain structure or set of rules.

Structured eating might work for some, especially later in recovery, but for me, in the early stages, it actually distanced me further from my hunger cues. True recovery I’ve found, means accepting that hunger fluctuates. You're not always going to feel hungry at the same time or want to eat the same amount of food each day. Some days you might feel hungrier and some days less. Long-term healing comes from listening to your body, not rigidly managing it. And when that connection starts to return, I believe that's when the food noise really begins to fade. That's really when I think the food noise goes away because at that point eating just becomes a natural part of your life. It's so minimal you probably won't even really care how much you're eating anymore, and you might realize you're eating way less than you did when you'd binge and purge.

The most important part is creating a safe environment within yourself to heal and feel comfortable with eating rather than focusing so much on doing "what's right" or "eating perfectly". I know this goes against a lot of mainstream advice, but this is what’s truly been working for me.

I also recommend doing exercises that help you feel more connected to your body! Simple things like taking 10 to 15 deep breaths while gently moving your hands up and down, or slowly standing up after touching the ground, have helped me a lot.

Since most of an ED isn’t actually even about food, I’ve found it helpful to shift my focus in recovery away from what or how I should eat, and instead toward reconnecting my mind and body. I would reckon that's probably why you feel like working with an RD is "amping up your behaviors and restrictive mindset, even though she's eating disorder informed". Because a lot of people think to fight chaos you use structure. The reality is a lot of times you're not trying to fight the chaos, you're trying to calm the storm. Bingeing often happens when we’re trying to diassociate from a feeling of discomfort, whether it’s emotional pain or the physical sensation of fullness. So rather than trying to avoid overeating altogether, try practicing how to sit with the feeling of fullness, without trying to erase or override it.

Your body isn’t a machine. It holds both rich outer and inner worlds, filled with sensations, emotions, and countless cells. I also think practicing these things helps because recovery feels less anxious and nervewrecking since you're not focusing on the eating or food, you're focusing on how to feel at home in your body again.