Welcome To The Let's Recover Substack!
What this is, how it works and why I'm doing it.
10 years ago, I started recovery from my eating disorder. My treatment team was very good at telling me what to do, but left out the why’s. Here’s the thing: I’ve always been all about the why’s. I spent my childhood researching whatever niche special interest I had at the moment, and that never really ended - especially not when half-heartedly showing up to my first appointment at the eating disorder clinic sometime in mid-late 2013. ‘Curious’ does not really cover it, although that sounds lovely doesn’t it? ‘She was just curious of her own recovery! What an engaged patient!’. To be honest, I’d more so describe myself as feeling suspicious; suspicious of my team, my body, and this whole recovery-thing all together, which to eating disorder-me sounded like nothing but a scam set up to sabotage me and force me to eat more and put on weight.
Investigating the why’s gave me a sense of reassurance, and an understanding of what on earth was going on with my body and brain. Eventually things started to click; perhaps this eating disorder thing wasn’t some amazingly deep or exciting thing, or a metaphor for something ‘bigger’. Perhaps crying over yoghurt wasn’t my purpose. Perhaps a lot of the bizarre personality- and interest changes I had experienced was not really me, but instead my brain being cognitively impaired by severe, consistent restriction. Who would have thought? Not me!
Anyhow, I found a lot of helpful information online - articles, studies, you name it - and being in a recovery community online, I wanted to share what I’d found. I also found that some of the content online was written in quite an inaccessible and dry language, so I merged my love for writing with my love for knowledge, and boom, Let’s Recover was born. It started as a Tumblr, stopped for a while (I needed a few years far away from anything recovery-related), re-emerged as a website and in 2021 I started my podcast Recovery Talk, which surprisingly took off, considering how niche of a topic it is (or maybe not, considering how many people have eating disorders and/or disordered eating, or know someone who does).
Recently I’ve started to fall back in love with writing (and out of love with social media, to be honest), so I thought, why not start a Substack? This will be a place for me to share longer form articles (kind of like a blog combined with a newsletter), plus bonus podcast episodes. By subscribing you will get the latest posts sent straight into your email inbox as a newsletter, totally free. If you enjoy my writing and podcast and want more + want to support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription at any time (no worries, it’s only a few quid per month and you can cancel anytime). As a token of appreciation for supporting me financially as a creator (and contributing to me not having to do TikTok dances to pay my rent) you’ll get access to bonus podcast episodes and be able to submit reader questions for me to answer here or in the pod. You can also gift someone a subscription - great way to semi-guilt someone eating disordered into consuming my recovery propaganda ‘because it was a gift’, and suddenly they’re all converted, we hope.
If you’re not as invested (I won’t take it personally), you can always just pop by this space now and then by going to letsrecover.substack.com (or access it under ‘articles’ from my main website letsrecover.co.uk).
The theme of this Substack will be eating disorder recovery as 1) that is my job, niche, core audience and specialty, and 2) I kind of enjoy gatekeeping other areas of my life, but who knows, maybe I will delve into other topics, too. I have not set an exact time line on how often to post, simply because this might force me to quickly churn out some generic, low-quality ramblings, but my ambitious goal is posting weekly, which may realistically be more like every 2-3 weeks during busy periods. Bear with me.
I hope you enjoy this space, and that I will end up in some of your email inboxes very soon, whether you’re a free or paying subscriber - all is appreciated!