It Took Me Nearly 30 Years to Recover - And I’m Not Ashamed Anymore

There was a time I felt ashamed about how long it took me to recover from my eating disorder.

I'm 40 now. My lived experience spans nearly three decades of navigating some form of disordered eating. When I think about that timeframe, starting from around the age of six, it’s wild, really. It was only in the last few years that I started coming to terms with the idea that this wasn’t just about food. This was complex trauma.

And I don’t feel ashamed anymore.

Sure, sometimes I still get those intrusive little gremlins whispering: “People won’t take you seriously, you had it for so long.” But I’ve come to see the truth: recovery isn’t a performance or a race. It's a journey. Mine just happened to be long and winding. That doesn’t make it less valid, it makes it deeply human.

There were so many maintenance factors that kept me stuck. One of the biggest? Overworking. I was functioning in systems that taught me to abandon myself. Working in healthcare, we’re subtly conditioned to sacrifice our needs again and again. That was especially true for someone like me, a sensitive, empathic person who was praised for being calm, capable, and endlessly accommodating. On the surface, I looked like I belonged. But underneath, I was crumbling.

I often wonder whether I entered the right career in the first place. But the truth is, I wouldn’t be the therapist I am now without that journey through the NHS, universities, private services, and even the fitness industry. The detours shaped me. They gave me perspective.

The final layer of my recovery, what I call “the chocolate piece” took the longest to unpick. I used chocolate and Nutella like a stress relief valve. It was my emotional regulator, my comforter, my secret ritual. I had to get really curious and compassionate about what was habit, what was urge, and what was compulsion. I needed to experiment, to make mistakes, to let things “go wrong” and see what that brought up emotionally.

For a long time, I couldn’t have Nutella in the house. Now? It’s just a thing in the cupboard. Sometimes I want it and have a few spoonfuls. Other times I don’t even think about it. What’s changed isn’t willpower—it’s self-trust. I trust myself to start, and more importantly, to stop. That wasn’t possible before.

A lot of that transformation only became possible after I left the systems that kept me stuck. It was only then that the final pieces of the puzzle could fall into place.

And when I look back, I can see just how early this all began. I have vivid memories of compulsively eating chocolate as a child. Creme Eggs and peanut butter sandwiches were my secret stash. I experienced food scarcity, sometimes even food poverty. And in parallel, I was being raised in an environment that feared fatness. There was a constant competitive edge around weight and eating. Judgments were flung casually at bodies, both others’ and our own. Being “fat” was framed as the worst thing you could possibly be. (That’s sarcasm, by the way. Imagine if that were true….)

This moralising of weight is everywhere. It’s why things like Ozempic are booming. It’s why people fear “failing” at being thin. The idea that you’re somehow a bad person for not being thin enough, not controlling yourself enough… it's exhausting. And it's not true.

Recovery meant unpicking a lot of that conditioning. It also meant leaving behind rigid therapy models that didn’t work for me or my clients. I’m trained in CBT and EMDR, but I’ve moved away from the tick-box, outcome-measure culture of services that treat recovery as a “marker” you should hit within six sessions. That kind of rigidity often misses the point.

Because here’s the truth: this stuff is slow.

Recovery can be long. It can be nonlinear. It’s messy, frustrating, and often deeply emotional. And for many of us, it’s not about “fixing” disordered eating, it’s about processing memories of trauma, of disgust, of shame. It’s about gently reconnecting to a body you were taught to distrust. For some, it's the memory of choking, or being judged. For others, it’s the earliest time you felt unwanted in your body.

This is why we can’t rush it. Weight loss medication doesn’t address these roots. You can't heal trauma by shrinking your body.

And sometimes, in EMDR, progress stalls because dissociation shows up. It’s not a block, it’s your body protecting you. We need to honour that. That’s why recovery work has to be trauma-informed, spacious, and human.

Eating disorder recovery isn’t about discipline. It’s about self-trust.

It’s about being able to say: “I don’t need to finish this jar of Nutella. I’m full. I’m okay.”

And more importantly: “I’m allowed to heal in my own time.”

If this resonates…

If you're on your own healing journey and find yourself stuck in old habits, harsh self-talk, or people-pleasing patterns, I want you to know you’re not alone. I work with clients who are navigating eating issues, ADHD, and trauma—not just to manage symptoms, but to truly feel safe in their bodies again.

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