What Recovery Means to Hanne

We're gathering stories from the SWEDA community inspired by the prompt “What Recovery Means to Me”. We’re building this series as a resource: something for people affected by eating disorders to read, that can support them and inspire hope, or just hear that they are not alone. We also want to raise awareness about how recovery is not a fixed or 'one size fits all' concept: it's something unique to each person and their own hopes for a life in recovery from disordered eating.

What Recovery Means to Hanne: Recovery means reclaiming life

Hanne Arts is an Eating Disorder Recovery Coach with five years’ experience helping girls and women reclaim their lives after recovering from anorexia herself in 2015.

I spent much of my adolescence caught in anorexia. For six years, while I was supposed to be figuring out who I was and discovering the world and my place in it, my world shrank and I was a slave to my eating disorder.

It took a long time for me to realise that precious years were being robbed from me, and that this wasn’t the life I wanted to live at all. It was no life.

Yet even then, for a long time, I thought recovery meant getting to a point where I could eat normally again, stop worrying about food so much, and perhaps become comfortable enough with my body. That seemed sufficient for me at the time.

Little did I realise that recovery would become so much bigger than that.

At the height of my eating disorder, my world became incredibly small. Food and the rules I had created around it took up so much mental space that there was very little left for anything else. I could just about function (I went to school and performed well), but I didn’t know what it felt like to go to bed feeling satiated, to have a conversation with my best friends without mentally planning out my next meals, and to sit and enjoy a cup of tea or a film or a hobby without feeling torn apart with internal anxiety jitters.

It’s only upon looking back that I realise just how much the eating disorder took from me. And how much of life was unlocked once I finally fully committed to the hardest thing I’ve ever done: recovery.

So here’s what recovery means to me:

It means eating the foods I want, rather than the foods my eating disorder tells me I deserve.

It means having cake because it's someone's birthday, without replaying the situation in my head for days and weeks after.

Recovery means going out for dinner with family and drinks with friends, and being present for the conversation.

It means letting plans change without spiralling, and changing the plans without guilt.

Perhaps most importantly, recovery means having thoughts and feelings and hobbies and mental and physical capacity for all the things that have nothing whatsoever to do with food. Because there’s so much more to life than that, no matter what the eating disorder tells you.

That’s what I mean when I say I have gained so much more than food freedom through recovery. Where once there was calculation, restriction and overplanning, now there is space for relationships, love, experiences, opportunities, a career, a sense of identity… and honestly, I could keep adding to that list.

It’s all the things I didn’t know I was missing, because they hadn’t been part of my life for so long. I didn’t realise just how much the eating disorder had robbed me of until those parts of life were reintroduced to me through recovery.

I went from being someone whose world was dictated by an eating disorder to building a career around helping others recover from theirs. I became a Recovery Coach, an author and an advocate for eating disorder recovery. I found purpose. I get to have conversations about things that once felt impossible for me, and help others believe that if I could do it, they can too.
Recovery means believing that there is life beyond the eating disorder. And it’s a life you deserve to reclaim.