Recovering Uncertainty: Exploring Eating Disorder Recovery in Context

Abstract

Attending to the shades of grey in eating disorder recovery may help to illuminate possibilities for navigating recoveries in their full complexity and diversity. There is a need for more complexity and flexibility in understandings of the timelines, processes, endpoints, and versions of eating disorder recoveries. In this article, we explore eating disorder recovery as a dynamic, intercorporeal, and non-linear process. Drawing on interviews with 20 people doing significantly better than they were during a time of acute distress around food and body, we articulate "recoveries" in relation to four themes: Fuzzy Logics of Time, Not Only Recovered, Recovery is Not All Sunshine and Rainbows, and The Life of Recovery. These themes speak to the ways in which participants struggled to articulate the temporalities of their recoveries, situated recovery as one among many events and processes that shaped their being in the world, resisted "too perfect" articulations of recovery journeys/ endpoints, and described preferredversions of and open-ended guidelines for recovery. We argue that eating disorder recoveries are as complicated and messy as lives themselves and are equally 1 Research carried out while Andrea LaMarre was affiliated with the

An open invitation to productive conversations about feminism and the spectrum of eating disorders (part 2): Potential contributions to the science of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention

“…A critical feminist approach invites us to acknowledge and honour diversity (both within and across the various categories of eating disorder) as we consider how these articulations will always draw in part on the cultural repertoires people use to understand and articulate themselves. Moreover, the research encounters in which these articulations are generated and shared will themselves be laden with power [ 21 , 53 , 54 ]. It is this construction of research that we contend with in the next section.…”

“…Critical feminist work on eating recoveries invites us to consider, for example, the therapeutic and other relational networks that enable recovery to happen [ 53 ]. Given that recovery often involves going “against the grain” of cultural dictates around body size, eating, and self-control [ 31 , 54 , 70 ], we must look at the meanings of and practices around recoveries in context, including investigating the relational and affective ties between people in recovery and the people who support them [ 53 ]. By emphasizing that useful knowledge about eating disorders and recovery requires an understanding of people’s identities, subjectivities, and relationships to the world around them, feminist work emphasizes the value of investigating why some people might not recover, or at least not in “expected ways” [ 70 , 71 ].…”

“…Feminists note that, since people in recovery from eating disorders use clinical and popular ideas about what recovery, eating disorders, and health are, they are likely to position themselves both in and outside of these narratives [ 77 ]. Taking a feminist approach to understanding eating disorder recovery might also involve, then, a rethinking of the very language and terminology we use to describe a state of greater well-being with respect to one’s body and practices [ 54 , 78 ]. For example, the term “reclamation” may resonate better with some than the term recovery [ 78 ].…”

“…For example, the term “reclamation” may resonate better with some than the term recovery [ 78 ]. Still others might prefer to distance themselves entirely from concepts and terms around eating disorders and recoveries that do not align with their current experiences [ 54 ].…”

Material Environments and the Shaping of Anorexic Embodiment: Towards A Materialist Account of Eating Disorders

“…Whilst a fixed definition of recovery is contested by those with lived experiences of eating disorders and scholars (Eli 2016;LaMarre and Rice 2021), according to clinical definitions, fewer than half of patients with either anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa fully recover (Schmidt et al 2016). Individuals with eating disorders have significantly elevated mortality rates.…”