The Woman I Never Imagined I Could Become: Julia’s Recovery Q&A

Welcome to this slightly different Q&A, in which the questions are not about a particular recovery struggle, but about me: the woman I was, the life I lived for so long, and the person I became when I finally stepped beyond the eating disorder.

This month, we’re exploring:

• How I moved from forty years of anorexia to complete freedom

• Why weight restoration was essential, but was not the end of my recovery

• How I knew I was recovered and ready to support others

• Why I created the Eating Disorder Recovery Circle

• How I rebuilt a genuinely free relationship with exercise

• How I live alongside diet culture and difficult body-image days

• What everyday life after recovery really looks like

• What has surprised me most about the woman I have become

There is one thread running through every one of these questions: recovery brought me home to myself.

When I began, I believed recovery would be about food, weight and exercise. I thought the task was to eat more, move less, restore my body and somehow learn to tolerate the result. Those things mattered enormously. My brain and body needed consistent nourishment and deep rest before anything else could become possible. Yet I slowly discovered that the eating disorder had woven itself through far more than my meals or the number on a scale. It had become entangled with my identity, my relationships, my beliefs about worth, the way I managed emotions and the way I tried to earn my place in the world.

Recovery gradually asked me to loosen my grip on everything I had mistaken for protection. Beneath the behaviours, I found a frightened part of me who believed love had to be earned and that being herself was not safe. Healing became less about constructing an improved version of Julia and more about discovering that I had never needed to become somebody else. Food freedom followed, but the deeper freedom was the ability to have needs, feel emotions, make mistakes, take up space and remain on my own side.

That is the story connecting everything that follows. Recovery was not a journey towards perfection. It was the end of a lifelong performance and the beginning of a relationship with myself built on curiosity, compassion and trust.

Let’s begin.

1. From forty years of anorexia to complete freedom

For forty years, the eating disorder appeared to be helping me survive. It brought certainty to a world that did not feel safe and gave me a set of rules through which I could measure whether I was doing life correctly. I became the people pleaser, the fixer and the person who held everything together. I did not merely place myself last; much of the time, I was absent from my own consideration altogether.

When I finally committed to recovery, eating more and stopping exercise were essential acts of repair. A starved brain cannot think flexibly, process emotions properly or build new pathways with ease. Nourishment created the conditions in which deeper healing could happen. But every meal and every period of rest also challenged the belief that control was keeping me safe. I was learning, through repeated experience, that I could disobey the eating disorder and survive.

Curiosity then took me beneath the behaviour. Rather than simply asking how to stop restricting, I began asking why weight gain felt so frightening and what I believed it would say about me. I asked what staying small protected me from, and what I feared people might see if I stopped performing perfection. Again and again, the answers led to the same tender place: the belief that I was not good enough and needed to become someone else to deserve love.

Recovery did not turn me into that supposedly acceptable person. It showed me that she had never been required. As compassion replaced criticism, the eating disorder became less necessary. My world expanded each time I released an old rule or belief. Freedom from food anxiety is beautiful, but the greater gift was recovering myself: my voice, my needs, my personality, my capacity for joy and my right to occupy space without apology.

2. Why weight restoration was not the finish line

Weight restoration and full recovery are deeply connected, but they are not interchangeable. The body needs adequate energy to repair, and the brain needs nourishment to regain the flexibility required for psychological healing. Yet a restored body does not automatically create a peaceful mind.

My body changed very quickly when I stopped fighting it. After decades of restriction and over-exercise, it seemed ready to repair the moment it was finally given the opportunity. Alongside weight gain, I experienced significant oedema, so I felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable in my body. From the outside, I may have looked recovered. Inside, I still carried the same beliefs about worth, acceptability and what my body supposedly meant about me. In some ways, the self-loathing became louder because I was now holding those beliefs in a larger body.

I knew I could not return to the eating disorder, but living in a recovered body while continuing to despise myself felt like another kind of prison. The relationship I had with myself needed to change. At first, self-love was far too great a leap. Telling myself I was beautiful would have felt false, and my mind would immediately have rejected it. Neutrality gave me a bridge.

Whenever I noticed a cruel judgement, I began asking, “What is actually true?” My body was bigger. My clothes fitted differently. I had gained weight. Those were facts. The claims that this made me lazy, greedy, weak or unlovable were stories layered onto those facts. Writing the judgement beside the reality helped me separate the two. The facts remained, while the shame began to loosen.

From neutrality, compassion became possible. My body was bigger, and she was healing. My body had changed, and I was still Julia. My body did not determine my character, and I remained deserving of care. I was not forcing myself to adore every part of my appearance; I was learning to stop abusing myself for being human.

3. How I knew I was recovered

I knew I was recovered when I understood, deeply and without negotiation, that restriction and compulsive exercise were no longer options, whatever life brought. I knew where that path led and what it had cost. I had experienced enough of life beyond the eating disorder to know I would not surrender myself to it again.

That certainty did not mean I had become a perfectly healed human being. I still experienced difficult emotions, insecurity and painful events. I had not unravelled every belief I had ever held, and I did not wake each morning feeling endlessly confident about my body. Expecting that would turn recovery into another impossible standard of perfection.

The change was that I could remain with myself. I could feel sadness without restricting, fear without exercising and discomfort in my body without trying to alter it. I could make a mistake without punishment and survive somebody else’s disapproval without reshaping myself to regain their approval. Recovery meant that I no longer required the eating disorder to manage the experience of being alive.

My own freedom gave me an overwhelming desire to tell others that the eating disorder’s promises were false. Letting go had not caused me to lose everything; it had allowed me to find a life far larger than anything I could see while I was ill. Coaching grew from that knowledge and from the privilege of witnessing another person recognise that they were never broken either.

4. Creating the Eating Disorder Recovery Circle

During my recovery, I was constantly searching for what I needed. I found fragments in different places: nourishment in one, trauma in another, self-compassion somewhere else, and separate information about emotions, exercise or physical healing. I longed for one place that could hold the many layers of recovery together.

I also sought connection in online communities. Some were helpful, while others left me feeling more hopeless. People understandably needed space to express how painful and frightening recovery felt, but sometimes it seemed as though everyone was sitting together in the darkness without anyone switching on a light. I wanted to create a community where honesty and hope could exist together: somewhere nobody had to pretend recovery was easy, but where they could leave a conversation remembering that change was still possible.

From there, the Circle grew into coaching calls, workshops, courses, recovery guides, Q&As and daily conversations. Yet the resources are not its heart; the people are. Its real power appears when somebody admits they are frightened to eat lunch and others gather around to say, “We’ve got you,” or when a person who arrived feeling hopeless becomes the one offering hope to a newcomer months later.

Recovery happens through connection. Being truly seen by someone who understands can soften shame and make an impossible step feel survivable. My hope is that the Circle continues to grow while remaining warm, honest, compassionate and quietly empowering: a place where people can arrive believing they are broken and gradually discover that they never were.

5. Rebuilding my relationship with exercise

Exercise was so bound up with fear, control and identity that moderation was not possible for me at the beginning. I needed to stop completely. After roughly a year, I returned to CrossFit, but I came home crying because my body and abilities had changed. I compared myself relentlessly with the person I had been and imagined everybody else was judging me too.

I eventually realised that I did not want CrossFit itself; I wanted the identity and validation I had once received there. I was trying to recover an old version of myself instead of listening to the woman I had become. Even after taking more time away and attempting another return, something remained wrong. I was exercising because I wanted to be somebody who enjoyed exercise, rather than because I enjoyed it.

Only after I no longer needed exercise could I discover whether I wanted it. Much later, a quiet desire to do some strength work appeared. There was no urgency, body-change goal or demand to compensate. I chose a women-only strength gym with a body-positive approach, explained my history and set clear boundaries around nutrition advice, weight-loss language and pressure to push harder.

The freedom lies as much in not going as it does in going. I can miss a session without guilt, move slowly when I am tired and leave halfway through if my body has had enough. From the outside, exercise might look much as it once did, but internally it is entirely different. It used to be something I had to do; now it is something I may choose to do. I am not “Julia the exerciser”. I am Julia, and sometimes I enjoy exercise.

6. Living in a world obsessed with bodies

Recovery does not remove me from the culture in which I live. I still encounter messages celebrating thinness, weight loss, rigid eating and relentless exercise. Sometimes those messages land. There are days when I feel uncomfortable in my body or wish I were thinner. Having that thought does not mean recovery has failed; it means I am human and have absorbed a lifetime of cultural conditioning.

When this happens, I remind myself that I have choices. I could respond by controlling food, pursuing weight loss or using exercise to change my body, but I know exactly where that road leads. I have worked too hard to rebuild trust and safety with my body to abandon her because I am having a difficult day.

Once changing my body is removed from the table, I can decide how to accompany myself in the body I have. Criticism will not alter her; it will only make the experience of being me more painful. Instead, I return to what is true. I am loved for who I am. My life contains relationships, laughter, work, adventure and connection, and none of its meaning depends upon being thinner. A body cannot tell anybody whether I am kind, interesting, compassionate or worthy.

I also choose my surroundings carefully. Recovery does not require me to tolerate spaces filled with diet talk, body judgement and pressure to earn food. Protecting myself from environments that repeatedly diminish me is not weakness; it is self-knowledge. I cannot remove every harmful message from the world, but I can notice where it came from, decline to obey it and stay on my own side. Sometimes recovery looks like wishing my body were different and choosing myself anyway.

7. What life after recovery really looks like

Life after recovery is not perfect. People still become ill, relationships remain human and grief still arrives. This year we lost our beautiful Evie, our gentle, wise little dog of fourteen years, and only days later Dave had a stroke during the busiest point of the blueberry harvest. Recovery did not protect me from heartbreak or fear. It gave me the capacity to feel them without turning against myself.

I can miss Evie deeply while feeling enormous gratitude that she spent her life with us. Sadness and gratitude can sit beside one another; one does not have to cancel the other. When Dave became ill, I could stay with the facts, attend to what needed doing and trust myself to meet the next moment when it arrived, rather than imagining twenty terrible futures and emotionally living through them all.

Recovery has changed my marriage and my relationship with our sons because I am present now. In the past, I could be physically in the room while my mind was calculating food, planning exercise or criticising my body. Today I can laugh, play, listen and be fully there. I can tell Dave when I am struggling, ask for help, be emotional, be wrong and remain myself. As I have stopped demanding perfection from me, I have become more accepting of him too.

Our everyday life contains Daisy, who is affectionate, hilarious, gloriously bonkers and convinced that everything she has to say is extremely important. It contains nature, the sea, family conversations and ordinary moments I once lacked the mental space to notice. Soon it will contain months of travelling through Europe and the Balkans in our motorhome, with uncertain plans, unfamiliar food and no knowledge of exactly where each day will take us. The old Julia would have found that unbearable. I feel ridiculously excited.

When the eating disorder quietened, it was as though somebody put the colour back into the world. The beauty had always been there; I had simply been too consumed by control to experience it. My life is simpler now, but it is immeasurably fuller because I am available for it.

8. The woman I never imagined I could become

The greatest surprise has been the freedom to be authentic. I once viewed myself continually through other people’s eyes, wondering how I should look, what I should say and who I needed to be. Now I dress for comfort and pleasure. I have stopped dyeing my hair. I may have my nails done because I enjoy it, or leave them undone because that suits my life. None of these things needs to prove anything about me.

The old Julia would perhaps be most astonished by my confidence. I used to remain quiet because I assumed other people mattered more. I listened, agreed and fitted myself around them. Now I know my worth well enough to speak, hold an opinion and survive disagreement. I can challenge a client with love because compassion does not require me to withhold honesty. I can also admit when I am wrong because a mistake no longer threatens my entire sense of self.

Confidence has grown through keeping promises to myself. When I need food, I eat. When I need rest, I rest. When something feels wrong for me, I listen. When a boundary is needed, I honour it. I no longer abandon myself to keep everybody else comfortable and then wonder why I cannot trust myself.

I began recovery expecting to learn how to eat and tolerate a larger body. I could not imagine that I would find a woman who no longer had to perform, prove, shrink or improve herself to feel worthy of space. I did not know that life could feel this simple, that I could move this slowly or that being myself could feel safe.

Coming home to yourself

At the beginning and throughout the messy middle of recovery, it is impossible to see everything that may be waiting beyond the next frightening step. I certainly could not see this life. I thought I was fighting for freedom from food rules, compulsive exercise and body obsession. In reality, I was finding my way home to myself.

Full recovery has not made life permanently comfortable. It has made life fully available. I can grieve and remain present, feel afraid and still move forwards, dislike my body and continue treating her with care. I can let plans change, allow other people to help, say what I think and choose a life that fits me rather than performing one designed to earn approval.

If freedom feels unimaginable from where you are standing, that does not make it unavailable. The person you are today cannot yet know everything the version of you who keeps going will discover. Recovery may begin with food, rest and the courageous interruption of familiar behaviours, but it can become something much larger: a return to trust, connection, possibility and the self who has been there all along.

Keep going and meet that person. A bigger life may be waiting than you can currently imagine, and you do not have to become anybody else to deserve it.