I loved this Tabitha video called Does Recovery Have to be Awful? https://youtu.be/l42ExdfiToI I especially liked the quote, "Unrestricted eating is for life."
I had a misguided notion that really tripped up my efforts to stop dieting and overexercising. It was that I could only eat freely or not exercise under certain conditions (namely, until I gained weight) and then I'd have to start restricting again. 🙄 No. Recovery means you never restrict again. This was a revelation, and it doesn't mean you gain and gain and never stop. I weigh less now than when I was exercising 2-3 hours per day 7 days per week and tracking everything I ate. I can see now that there was just a whole lot of anxiety there. I was SO tired, SO hungry, SO fearful. Of course I ate like a lunatic and felt like a bottomless pit. Committing to the idea that I would never restrict again really helped me start thinking in terms of, "So, now what?" If I'm not going to do fasted morning HIIT, and track macros, and ignore pain and fatigue, what will I do instead? Well, now I'll pay more attention to what my body is telling me. I'll notice how the food I eat and the way I move makes me feel. Now, I'll eat more in line with my own values, the ones that come from my soul and not Instagram. Now, I'll gain confidence in my choices and learn to trust myself. That shift in my notion of the possibilities was when eating more happily/intuitively really started clicking. As long as I thought I would have to restrict again in the future, I never got very far with trusting myself or hearing what my body was telling me. So, I really love that "unrestricted eating is for life" quote. It's an important notion. Without it, you're in that quasi-recovery twilight zone where you try to ease some restrictions, or exercise a little less, but then go right back to beating yourself up and counting calories or earning food.