Hello and welcome back to my channel. In case you don't know, my name is Charlotte. Now, I wanted to make a video today about recovery. Now you may be thinking judging by the title of this video that I am talking about what recovery is. And if that's what you're expecting, then you're going to be bitterly disappointed because this isn't a video that is going to be giving you any answers. A lot of my videos in the past, I've tried to give advice or give my views and my opinions about like experiences and stuff. This is going to be a bit different because this is just going to be me asking questions and me thinking out loud about what is recovery. This is something that means different things to different people. I don't really want people to get involved and talk to me, leave comments down below and give me your opinions. I want this to be an interactive video. If you're watching this and you have an opinion or there's something you feel strongly about, if you disagree with something, I say, if you agree with something I say, then please let me know. Talk to me in the comments. I always try and comment back. We can have a discussion about this or talk to each other because I think it's something that's really important to talk about. So I'm just going to get started. The word recovery was not something that I had ever heard of until I joined Instagram. Bear in mind, at this point, I'd had an eating disorder for 14 years because I joined Instagram a couple of years ago. There was this massive recovery community on Instagram and that word was the word that was used. You were either in recovery or you were one basically. It was kind of something that everyone knew about. Everyone with anorexia or an eating disorder should know about. I was like, why have I never heard this word before? Obviously I knew I've heard the word recovery before, but not in terms of an eating disorder. In all my years, through going through eating disorder services, inpatient communities, nobody had ever used that word with me. I was just astonished because it was just something that every person that I followed or followed me, it's a word that they used in almost every post. And I had never come across it in 14 years of having an eating disorder. No professional had ever used it with me. Now, is it because they didn't think that I would ever recover from anorexia? Is it a social media trend? Why is this something that I've not heard of? I have my theories, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. Obviously, things were talked about in terms of moving forward with my eating disorder, with like outpatient services and let inpatient treatment and all of that. But the only thing that was ever mentioned to me was weight gain. Nothing else was ever mentioned. It was all about weight gain or weight loss. In terms of like them, them talking about my life moving forward, it was about gaining weight. It wasn't about Charlotte, you need to go into recovery. As that seems to be the term is used now, it was about Charlotte, you need to be gaining weight. Charlotte, you need to put on weight. Your weight needs to be this. And I've talked about this so much on my channel and in my blog. And I know that a lot of people agree with me in the focus about with eating disorder services is too much around weight gain. With an eating disorder, your weight, yes, is obviously what's the right word, symptom or side effect of what's going on. Your weight and your body can show what is going on in your brain, but not always. For lots of reasons, eating disorders don't just fall into singular categories such as starvation or binging or beaging and purging. You can have a mixture of it either. An eating disorder isn't just a straight box category thing. It isn't just as clean cut as that. It'll be fucking fantastic as if it was because it might be easier to treat, but it's not as easy as that. And I don't need these professionals understand how fucking difficult it is suffering from eating disorder. If your body is manourished, first of all, your metabolism slows down. All of these things can mean, A, your weight might vary, so your weight loss might slow down or you might start to put on weight. And it means that you might be prone to binging or reactive eating. And this can mean that in the eyes of the eating disorder services, if your weight is either starting to steady out or go up, according to them, then you're doing better. And they're going to view as a less severe case. But nothing in terms of eating disorder has changed if anything. You've kind of got worse because you're going through the distress of the fact that your weight loss is either slowed down or you're putting on weight. But it's just because you're so fucking hungry because you've starved yourself so long, you're so manourished that your body is crying out of food. And it's like they just don't understand this shit and you think they shouldn't know this stuff and they don't. Deep breath Charlotte. I've said this so much before on my channel, your body is in no way a reflection of the severity of your mental illness and people just don't seem to understand that. Your mental illness hasn't changed just because your weight has gone up. Unless you're actually in what apparently this recovery is and you've made an active decision to move on and you're ready to let go then just because your weight has gone up, it doesn't mean that anything is any better. I've been planning to make this video for a while on my misconceptions about eating disorder videos. Somebody left a question for me. I'm sorry I forgot to write your name down but I wrote your question here and they said, is recovery a choice? Do you feel that anybody including yourself can recover if they fully commit to it? I've met so many therapists that told me that I only need to decide to recover and that everything's going to work out. Given that this decision is extremely hard for me, I wasn't able to recover yet. Mainly because I'm not sure if I want to. I feel like I've tried very hard and it never worked so what's the point in trying if the result doesn't weigh out the cost or the effort? First of all obviously as I said the whole what is recovery? Recovery is absolutely is a choice because you're the one that is having to do the work, the other one is having to put the food in your body and deal with it unless you're kind of locked up somewhere for the rest of your life. You're the one that is having to make that choice every single day to not give in. So this is a hard one. Do you feel that anybody including yourself can recover if they fully commit to it? Myself? No. I don't believe I can. I think for me it's more intertwined with my mood and they're not wanting to be alive all of that shit. If you kind of want to know more about the way I feel about that then I don't mind making another video on it. It would be like a whole 20 minute video if I talked about that. If you want me to talk about it then let me know and I will. Do I feel anybody can recover if they fully commit to it? You hear people say I've had me to sort of I'm fully recovered and then they'll start to say things where you're like that's a very eating disordered way of thinking. Like they'll say things about food or their body. I don't know whether it's just because like I'm about hyper aware of things. I like have g'd off eating disorders. I think it depends on how chronic the illness has been. If it's been very short and it's been caught very early I think yes probably somebody can fully recover. To a certain extent you will always have a part of you that will live with it and somebody explained something to me. They were kind of talking about in terms of addiction because an eating disorder is a type of addiction and they said to me that having eating disorder is like having a red button like in your stomach and you have to be aware that there is a red button there and if you don't respect that red button and that it could be triggered at any time and like blow you up then it can be really dangerous. It doesn't mean that it will be pressed. It just means that if it is pressed then you know what will happen. I mean you need to respect that it is there and look out for the warning signs. I wasn't able to recover mainly because I'm not sure if I want to. I feel like I've tried very hard and it never worked so what's the point in trying it if the result doesn't weigh out the cost of effort. If you're not ready to recover then there is absolutely no point in putting yourself in a position where you don't feel ready. However if you're living in a very dangerous situation what are you going to die? One thing that I do that I find easier is not look at things in term of long term. So look at things in term of day by day. So if you can't think oh I'm going to be in recovery just think of it in terms of today I'm going to eat this much. I'm not in recovery because that's too scary and too too much. I don't want to be in recovery. I don't want to get better but today I'm going to eat this much. Even if it is essentially the same as being in recovery you're not kind of putting yourself in the recovery mindset if that makes sense. To me that's far easier than like jumping out and going hey I'm in recovery oh it's all fucking marvelous and great and oh shit I don't want to be in recovery I don't want to get better on a die you know that probably doesn't make any sense. I don't really know what else to say. I hope this video has made a little bit of sense to some people probably not but it's something that I wanted to talk about because it's something that is kind of on my mind all the time. People talk about recovery as some kind of magical walking through the wardrobe and into non-earth thing. I just don't get that. To me I've never been in a place where I've been trying to recover. A because I never knew what that word be because sorry to get a deep and darkened shit but B I've always been working towards death. I've never ever wanted to be alive so I've just been like what this maybe that's why they never talked about recovery with me. Well I've just wasted a whole video because I just discovered the answer. Okay I'll just shut up now because I'm probably I probably talked too much but thank you for watching this please like this video share it around subscribe if you haven't already thank you so much for your support I really really appreciate it thank you bye recovery as I say cubs