I've spent a lot of time listening to people talk about alcohol and drugs. One thing comes up again and again. For many of them, the way out started with a line: not today. Not one. Not ever again.
That line is hard to hold. But it's clear.
With food, there is no line like that. You can't stop eating.
You have to sit down with the thing that hurt you, several times a day, every day, for the rest of your life.
It's like asking someone to recover from drinking while having a glass in front of them at every meal.
I think that's why "just stop" was never going to work for me. When I tried to make food the enemy, I swung from bingeing into periods of anorexia. Cutting it out completely wasn't recovery. It was the same problem, turned inside out.
What helped was relearning food from the beginning, with people who knew what they were doing. Nutritionists and psychologists who built something around me as an individual. Trusting them, and trusting myself. Learning what hunger actually is. Learning the signals between my brain and my body, and how mine had got crossed.
So for me, recovery with food isn't about a line I never cross. It's about a relationship I keep working on. Some days that's easy. Some days it isn't.
I also stopped weighing myself, and I never went back. I went by how my clothes fit, how I felt, and my own awareness of myself. The number had too much power, and I didn't want to hand it any more.
Today, food is simple. I eat pretty much what I like, I move well, and I use the tools from my own experience and from what I've been taught. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes more structured, sometimes less. Knowing what works matters, but it has to work for you as an individual. Your own learning is important. We're all running psychological patterns from the way we were brought up around food. My parents always did their utmost.