Recovery didn’t start with “eating more”... it started with eating regularly

I wanted to share a bit about how my recovery from anorexia has been unfolding because it hasn’t been what I expected at all. For me, the eating disorder has always been centered on restriction. Not eating enough, controlling intake, and gradually shrinking what felt “safe” to eat. I only started seeing a dietitian a little over two months ago, after I made the decision to actually try recovery for real. At the beginning, the focus wasn’t on suddenly increasing how much I was eating. That felt overwhelming and honestly unrealistic at that stage. Instead, my dietitian started with something much simpler: eating regularly. Just establishing consistency again. What surprised me was that she wasn’t focused on what I was eating at first. The priority was the pattern, not perfection. So initially, a lot of what I managed to eat were fruits and vegetables. It wasn’t about building a “perfect” diet overnight, it was just about breaking the cycle of restriction in a manageable way. That shift was hard for me to understand at first because I thought recovery meant doing everything at once. But I’m learning it’s more gradual than that. It’s about rebuilding trust with food step by step, even if those steps feel small or repetitive at the beginning. I’m still early in this process, but I’m starting to see that recovery isn’t just about eating more, it’s about eating consistently, without fear controlling every decision.