Sick, Sick, and More Sick

I thought my biggest obstacles in recovery would be things like: trauma work, depression, anxiety, unemployment, etc. Nope. The worst of all is being physically sick. I’ve been battling a really wicked stomach flu bug since late Thursday night/early Friday morning. Tonight is the first time I am starting to feel real improvement. It’s been completely and totally ridiculous.
So, I’ve thought of some steps to take when battling a temporary physical illness that may throw off your recovery.

1) Tell Your Team!
This has been one of the most important things for me. I use the Recovery Record app on my phone, which is connected to my dietician. This way, she can track all of my logs and make sure I’m following my meal plan without avoiding fear foods, lacking variety, and consuming appropriate amounts. She checks this at least 2x a week, if not more. So, she was the first person I needed to talk to about being sick. We set a game plan for when I started feeling better to help me get back on track and make up some of the missed components of my meal plan. This leads to my next step:

2) Have a plan for when you feel better!
This has been really helpful for me. I know it would be difficult to transition back into my fairly high calorie meal plan afterwards. Also, after being sick, many of the foods on my meal plan sounded really unappetizing. So, I worked with my dietician to plan out options for meals and snacks that I could try once I started feeling better. This has helped me better transition into what will, hopefully, be a full day back on my meal plan tomorrow.

3) Self care- Do it!
I am pretty notorious for avoiding self care. I’ve been working with my current therapist for the last 6 months, and she always calls me out on this being one of the pieces I continue to struggle with. In being sick, there wasn’t a lot I could do. I basically had 2 choices: distract or self care. So, while I did do my fair share of distracting, especially when anxious, I did take the time for self care. This included: journaling, listening to music, sitting with my dog, and doing my body image work book. All of these things helped keep me occupied but also helped reduce the ED thoughts I was experiencing. Self care is a great thing that most of us, me included, fail to make time for.

4) Challenge those Eating Disorder thoughts.
One of the worst things has been the rapid increase and strong presence of ED based thoughts this weekend. Being sick caused my body to be restricted of food, even though not by choice. This made my ED incredibly happy. When I started to feel better, that nagging voice has been there saying “You can just keep doing this. It’s not doing you any harm. You’ll be fine. Keep this up.” This is all kinds of bad and incredibly easy to follow. The best thing I have been reminding myself is that I am not using ED behaviors intentionally and that those thoughts are trying to take advantage of things beyond my control. That’s way easier to say than to actually follow through on, but it has given me some piece of mind as I begin meals and snacks again.

5) Be proud of yourself for making the choice to stay in recovery.
 Recovery is an incredibly hard journey, especially when we get those unexpected and unavoidable roadblocks. It’s good to remember that things will happen beyond our control, but that doesn’t mean recovery has to be one of them. Getting derailed is difficult, but by choosing to take care of ourselves and get back on track, recovery continues to be possible and make us even stronger.

So, stomach bugs suck, but it’s just a part of life. Now, I just keep rolling along (and sleeping).