I’m proud to say it’s been over two years since I started my journey of recovery from anorexia, but I won’t sugarcoat it—it’s been tough. Many people think that recovery is a straightforward process of gaining weight and healing your relationship with food, but it’s so much more complex.

Recovery isn’t just about weight gain or overcoming obsessions with restriction, exercise, and “safe” foods. It’s about confronting fear foods one by one, rewiring your brain to heal deeply ingrained beliefs, and resisting the diet culture messages that bombard us every day. This rewiring process can take years, as we’ve spent so long believing in the harmful lies about food, like the myth of “good” and “bad” foods or the fear that missing a day of exercise leads to weight gain. Recovery means sitting with the discomfort, going through therapy, and challenging those thoughts, day after day.

I’ve noticed a troubling trend on social media: “fake recovery accounts.” These accounts showcase people swapping one obsession for another, trading their pursuit of thinness for obsessive weightlifting, macro counting, and maintaining an ultra-lean physique—all under the guise of a “healthy lifestyle.” But let’s be clear—true recovery isn’t about switching obsessions. It’s not about trading cardio for weightlifting or running while still clinging to restrictive behaviors.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to recovery, promoting these unhealthy behaviors isn’t beneficial to anyone. For some, an all-in approach works best. After trying “pseudo-recovery” with weightlifting and macro tracking, I realized I needed to go all-in: stopping exercise, eating freely, and listening to my body. Though it’s been effective, the journey is still filled with challenges.

Relapses will happen, and that’s okay. Each setback teaches you to listen to the positive voice within you, reminding you that you deserve more than a life consumed by the pursuit of thinness. The truth is, the negative ED voice doesn’t just vanish; even after two years, it lingers. But every day, I choose not to listen to it. Recovery is a choice—a daily decision to choose life, health, and self-love over the empty promises of an eating disorder. And that’s a choice worth making, every single day.