Quasi Recovery

What is quasi recovery? Am I stuck in quasi recovery? A deep dive into this all-too-common stage in eating disorder recovery and my personal experience with it.

By Vera Li

*Trigger warning: in this blog post I will be touching on some sensitive topics and examples relating to eating disorders. The purpose of this post is to inspire and educate, not to worsen anyone’s mental state. If you are struggling in any way and believe that discussing this topic may trigger you, please do not read this post. Always prioritize your mental health first.*

Eating disorder recovery is an incredibly challenging journey. It takes immense courage and perseverance to make the conscious decision every single day to battle this mental illness, all in hopes to one day live a free, beautiful life on the other side of the prison bars of an ED. For anybody currently in recovery or contemplating ED recovery, you should be proud of yourself. It is extremely difficult to admit to having a problem and asking for help, when the eating disorder voice wants so desperately to keep your illness a secret.

However, recovery is not a linear process. I had naively thought so myself. I just wanted to be free from the constant war raging in my head and finally live my life again. I so desperately wanted recovery to be as simple as a math equation: fix x, y and z behaviors and that will result in freedom and happiness, just like a set of inputs will always give you the same set of outputs.

Unfortunately, just like all other journeys in life, recovery is never linear. Recovery is filled with setbacks, and what often happens in many recovery stories is a situation called quasi recovery.

What is Quasi Recovery?

Quasi recovery refers to a “partial” or “incomplete” recovery. An individual stuck in quasi recovery might be partially or completely weight-restored, for instance, but still struggle with the psychological consequences of an eating disorder like restriction or purging behaviors. Or, perhaps the individual has reduced or eliminated disordered behaviors from their life but has still retained some health consequences It’s a tricky situation because oftentimes, the severity of the eating disorder may have reduced - the person may be at a healthier weight or perhaps stopped engaging in such extreme disordered behaviors - but the ED still lurks in the shadows, waiting to seize control again.

For me, being in quasi-recovery has made it extremely difficult to admit to myself that I am experiencing a relapse in my ED. Because I don’t look sickly like I did at the start of my recovery, I’ve overcome many fear foods, I’ve become less rigid about my exercise habits, and I am eating a lot more than I did in the past, it has become easy for me to justify disordered behaviors as normal. My ED jumped at every opportunity to compare my eating habits and exercise habits to others around me. It told me, “Well, this person on social media spends 3 hours in the gym 6 days a week. You don’t even do intense exercise every day of the week. You should be exercising much more” or “This person only eats half the amount of food you have consumed today. You can’t possibly have an eating disorder when you eat so much food. You’re definitely not undereating, and if anything, you’re probably overeating and should restrict again”. I was constantly comparing myself to others around me, often using other people’s exercise and eating habits as ways to fuel my urge to crawl back into the horrendous, miserable, life-sucking yet safe hole of an ED.

As a result, every single day became a mental battle as my struggling, healthy brain engaged in a tug-of-war with my ED voice. While my ED tried to fool me into believing that I was not sick enough to continue recovery, in reality, I was and still am sick.

My sickness

Physically, I still suffer the health consequences of an ED. At the age of 17, I still have not gotten my first menstrual cycle yet. My hair has started falling out rapidly again, my digestion is compromised, my nails are brittle, and my sleep is unrestful. My heart has also started showing complications, as I have been experiencing bradycardia (abnormally low heart rate) and heart palpitations. Also, although it doesn’t look like it because my body composition has changed, I have reverted back to my weight at the start of my recovery. And yet, with all these red flags that so clearly indicate that I have relapsed, my ED still made excuses and tried to find any way to justify that my disordered behaviors were caused by anything BUT my ED. I would spend hours researching potential causes for these symptoms and conclude that it must be stress from school, IBS, depression, or even indigestion from “too much food” (for some reason, I had convinced myself that my heart palpitations were caused by heartburn after eating “too much”). Because I thought I looked much healthier and that I was eating so much more than I used to, I was treading in the dangerous, deep waters of my ED, just barely staying afloat.

I was unaware - or perhaps I knew and was choosing to ignore it - that when my body wore itself out in time, I would be doomed to drown.

Note: EDs also don’t always manifest themselves in physical consequences, or may do so only when the person is too far down

the ED route (aka on the verge of going under). The belief that one can only suffer from an ED if they are underweight or severely physically-compromised is an incredibly toxic and dangerous mindset, as these excuses are often used by ED patients to refuse to seek help.

EDs are mental illnesses. Because I am in a state of incomplete recovery, my mental health has taken a toll as well. Again, my ED jumped at every opportunity to justify my behaviors.

Take the example of peanut butter, which is a common fear food by many ED sufferers and was one of my biggest fears in the first stages of my recovery. Today, I eat peanut butter regularly without much thought at all and don’t measure it (a common ED behavior). However, this became one of the excuses that my ED used to shut down any suggestion made by the rational side of my brain to seek help for my ED. “You eat peanut butter every day and sometimes even x tablespoons at a time. Anyone with an actual ED would have been terrified and probably wouldn’t have even eaten the peanut butter at all, let alone that much. You’re obviously not sick.” But the thing is, I wasn’t eating peanut butter without any guilt or fear. I still had mental rules about portion sizes and when I could eat it. What often resulted was a “milder” form of an ED compensatory behavior - I would eat a lot of peanut butter but resolve to eat less at the next meal or conveniently schedule a workout soon after, for example. This is NOT healthy, and it is an example of the ED still retaining control over my life. Just because I eat a lot of peanut butter now, it doesn’t mean that I am recovered and does not equate to me being undeserving of recovery.

This mindset applied to my workouts as well, as I constantly obsessed over having a “perfect” workout and felt guilty when I had a sedentary day. “It’s not like you’re doing an intense regimen every day like you did in the past” my ED voice would scold. “If anything, you should be exercising more because you’re just being lazy sitting down all day. Other people spend x amount of time in the gym while also counting calories and macros, so you have no excuse for not doing a workout.” Again, this mindset is clearly disordered, and the guilt and shame around exercise is still evidence of an unresolved ED.

Why to Pursue Full Recovery

Quasi recovery is exhausting. If anything, one could even say that it feels worse than the beginning stages of recovery because at least at the beginning, you might have hit rock bottom and had more motivation to pursue recovery from such a miserable life. With quasi recovery, there’s self-doubt and often frustration because it feels like after all the time and effort that went into recovery, you still have not freed yourself from this mental illness. It is this self-doubt and anger that often leads to relapse.

No matter what stage of ED recovery you are in, what’s important is that we learn to trust ourselves. And no, I don’t mean the ED voice, because the ED is not who we truly are. The ED voice is a loud, powerful and manipulative abuser. It can be hard to find our true self again after an ED has taken over our minds.

But I will tell you now that quasi-recovery is exactly what it is: it is INCOMPLETE recovery. It is NOT the finish line. It is infuriating, exhausting and difficult, but it is not where you have to remain for the rest of your life.

Trust that the actions you are taking - whether it be eating enough (like actually eating enough for your body), eliminating intense or all exercise, seeking advice from licensed professionals, cooperating with a treatment team, etc. - are going to be good for you in the long-run, no matter how wrong and uncomfortable it feels at the moment. Trust that you are on the right path, no matter how different your journey looks from others.

To take our lives back and relinquish ourselves from the tight grips of an eating disorder, we must learn to trust our intuition and strength.

Good luck to all those recovering out there. You are truly strong <3