“I’m not sick enough to recover” is something I hear people say when I talk about recovery and what it takes. Maybe they feel that a person needs to be diagnosed with an eating disorder or to be suffering for years. But that’s not the case.
You don’t need to have a diagnosed eating disorder to need recovery. If you can say that your eating and relationship with food and your body is not normal then you ARE “sick enough to need recovery”.
Who draws the line between abnormal eating or disordered eating and eating disorders anyway? The lines are extremely blurry. Do you need to be bingeing and purging 10 times a day? Do you need to be looking emaciated to get help? Of course not!
In fact, I believe many “moderate dieters” would need to go through recovery because dieting by itself is a form of disordered eating and a hell of a RED FLAG. Dieting is the first step towards an eating disorder.
Again, if you can say that there is something wrong with your eating, it’s not normal, you need recovery.
Whenever you think “I’m not sick enough” then know that just by thinking this way you already prove you need recovery. Just the fact that you are thinking about recovery shows that there is something wrong and needs to be dealt with.