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Category: Recovery Thoughts

Recovery Thoughts

NEDA Awareness Week 2021


✨Photographs of myself.  Photographs of my mind. Photographs of an affliction that's impossible to capture. It's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. It's one of the weeks I'm most proud to celebrate. And it's also a week I wish I knew nothing about. But turning a blind eye is what prolonged…
Posted on February 22, 2021 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

How I Recovered


⋅ How did I recover? There was never one thing, one person, or one defining moment I can recall that I can credit for my recovery. Rather, there are a myriad of factors that influenced me. ⋅ 1.) THERAPY: I cannot stress enough how important this has been for me.…
Posted on February 8, 2021 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

When Food Rules Your Life


⋅ 🍴It started so innocently for me. I just wanted to eat a-little-bit-healthier. I started asking my mom to pack me fruit instead of cookies in my school lunch box. ⋅ In middle school I went to a tennis camp. We were competitive athletes —carbs were essential to our performance.…
Posted on February 1, 2021 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

Defining An Eating Disorder


⋅ ⚖️Most of my life I didn’t believe I had an eating disorder because I never thought my weight was low enough. Of course, this is what my eating disorder told me, and therefore thin enough didn’t exist. Because ... ⋅ 🚫EATING DISORDERS ARE NOT ABOUT WEIGHT🚫  ⋅ I engaged…
Posted on January 18, 2021 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

#DietCultureSucks


⋅ 🙄Oh ... and don’t forget to take care of your mental health too! What breaks my heart the most about this is the fact that it’s true. I laugh because this post sums up a dark reality that I and many others have lived —sacrificing our wellbeing for the…
Posted on November 3, 2020November 3, 2020 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

Accepting My Reflection


⋅ I’d rather omit the right photo, but the issue is that’s what I look like 95% of the time! That’s normal! We all have rolls when we sit down, and yet, somehow that’s something to hide.  ⋅ It’s taken me a long time to feel comfortable in my skin,…
Posted on May 26, 2020 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

#NEDAwareness Week 2020


  💚#NEDAwareness Week ||"Come As You Are: Hindsight is 2020"💙 “Come As You Are: Hindsight is 2020” Eating disorders look like you and me. They look like your classmates, coworkers and neighbor next door. They look like that person who’s always smiling. They look like that person who’s very quiet.…
Posted on February 25, 2020 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

CHOICES


🌀CHOICES There are many things in life that are not our choice, nor are they in our control. It’s easy when you feel out of control to try to grasp onto something that brings familiarity. What if you grasp onto a false sense of control? What if you’re holding on…
Posted on August 7, 2018 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

Are You “Happy” or Happy?


  🎭 I was H A P P Y ... Because my "happy" in the past persuaded me to believe life was as good as it was going to get. I could not see that my "happy" actually ranked about a 1 on a scale of 100. So I kept…
Posted on June 1, 2018 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder
Recovery Thoughts

Do You See What I See? | #NEDAwareness 2018


­ ⋅ 💚💙What do you “see” when you look at this photo? ­ ⋅ Let me tell you what I see... I see a girl with low self-esteem, a girl who’s lonely and never feels good enough.  I see anxiety -fear, doubt, paralysis, suffocation.  I see depression -isolation, turmoil, defeat,…
Posted on February 28, 2018February 28, 2018 by brittanyburgunder by brittanyburgunder

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brittanyburgunder

✨Photographs of myself.  Photographs of my mind ✨Photographs of myself.  Photographs of my mind. Photographs of an affliction that's impossible to capture. It's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. It's one of the weeks I'm most proud to celebrate. And it's also a week I wish I knew nothing about. But turning a blind eye is what prolonged my struggle, and it only perpetuates the stigmas surrounding eating disorders.  

Opioid addiction aside, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental health disorders. I almost became a part of this statistic, though I never believed it could happen to me. I was diagnosed with anorexia at 13. It had nothing to do with food or weight. But the more weight I lost, and the more I engaged in disordered behaviors —the more my anxious mind quieted. 

My struggle peaked when I was a freshman in college. My weight fell to that of an 8-year-old. I was dying. But my eating disorder convinced me I still wasn't sick. After a long hospitalization, I defied the odds and miraculously survived. But my journey was far from over.

My battle with anorexia morphed into binge eating disorder. Only 18 months after I almost lost my life to anorexia, I was clinically obese. Although my eating disorder "looked" different, nothing else had changed. It was still the same underlying issues driving my maladaptive ways to cope. A vicious fight with bulimia unfolded next. My quest to recover always seemed to fall short. But I never gave up. 

My rock bottom was not physical, but rather mental. I reached a point where I wanted a better life for myself. I worked diligently with a therapist and dietician, and I learned healthy ways to cope with problems. My eating disorder was a symptom of deeper issues —not the other way around. And as my mind healed, so did everything else in my life. 

Eating disorders are complex, multifaceted illnesses. My biggest regret is that I didn’t reach out or accept support sooner. Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. There were many times I was told I was a hopeless case and would never recover. I questioned if this were true —"maybe they're right and I can't recover." But I did ... and so can you. ~Britt💜 
#EatingDisorderAwareness
💫I am extremely well-versed in upwards social c 💫I am extremely well-versed in upwards social comparison. I tend to compare myself to other individuals who I believe are better than me. Maybe they're smarter, have a more successful job, are a better athlete, seem happier, look prettier, and have what appears to be ideal relationships. I have an innate ability to magnify other’s strengths and overlook their flaws, while I magnify my flaws and overlook my strengths. Rationally I understand this is distorted thinking, but subconsciously I beat myself up for not being more accomplished —whatever that means. 

The deeper issue is I will never measure up or feel confident if I base my success against those who don't share my same path. I struggled with severe eating disorders for over a decade. That is a hard pill to swallow. It's incredibly difficult to battle a private war against yourself while simultaneously trying to appear unscathed to the public. Nonetheless, I still held myself to the same standards as my peers who did not share my same challenges. I could never meet those standards. Not when I also had to meet the standards my eating disorder demanded. 

It may seem as if I'm just too competitive, or jealous, or driven. To be honest it's the opposite. I want nothing more than to be liked, to be accepted, and to feel good enough. But I've learned external achievements can't give me these things. 

And when I look back on my life, I see a girl who has qualities that cannot be measured or ranked. I see the invisible victories she's won, and I hear the silent screams she learned to soothe. She has a PhD in healing, a gold medal in perseverance, a happiness that radiates from within, and a relationship with herself that was worth every misstep to find. I have come farther than anyone ever believed possible, but deep down I must have known I could overcome anything. ~Britt💜
🎉I’m so excited to share that Equip, a new co 🎉I’m so excited to share that Equip, a new company dedicated to transforming eating disorder treatment, has announced its launch. THIS is the treatment program I needed years ago, and it could have made all the difference with helping me reach recovery during my early struggles. 

A big challenge in my recovery was finding a collaborative support team that I trusted and that my parents could rely on to help keep me accountable. I often doubted if recovery was possible because I lacked support from individuals who had been in my shoes. One of the great things about Equip is that it provides every patient with a dedicated five-person care team including a therapist, dietician and medical doctor, along with a peer mentor and family mentor who've gone through treatment themselves. 

Part of what makes Equip's treatment approach so effective is it provides a virtual program  delivering Family-Based Treatment at home that promises lasting recovery. This allows families to arrange treatment to fit their schedules and needs, and makes gold-standard care accessible to all. Personally, this is a component that would have helped me greatly. My attempts to recover in treatment programs often failed because they didn't resemble real life nor offered the ongoing support and tools I needed to continue making progress at home. 

I often think about my own family and how difficult it was for them to navigate the best ways to help me. My parent's desperately wanted guidance from medical experts, but they also needed feedback from other parents who had been through similar situations. They wanted hope for their daughter. Equip listens, and was founded upon what patients and parents need most for a successful recovery.💚

👉Check out @equiphealth or visit equip.health to learn more!
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