One of the hardest things for me to adjust to in recovery was all of the spare time and energy I had.  When I was in the depths of ED, I spent all my awake time perseverating about how much I ate, how much I exercised, what I weighed, and how much I hated life.  I could distract myself for brief periods--maybe for a few pages of an unusually good book or during a movie scene--but the ED always intruded.  This dragged me back to going over and over these things in my head.  Literally, these thoughts were my life.

As they receded, I often felt my brainpan was going to collapse without the constant pressure of those thoughts zinging around.  The obsessive thoughts lessened somewhat as I reached a healthy weight, but they still occupied freaky amounts of my time.  I didn't enjoy obsessing about every little thing, but I didn't know what else to do.  One of the things that left me so vulnerable to relapse was the fact that I didn't have anything to take the place of the ED that had occupied my thoughts for so long.

I found writing to be so helpful not just because it helped me sort through my thoughts, but because it provided me with something to do.  For the first time, I had something much more interesting, enticing and absorbing than the ED crap to think about.

I slowly began to find things that were not only more interesting to think about but could also be totally absorbing when I actually did them.  That's what I loved about mountain biking- I literally could not think of anything besides not crashing.  I hated the constant threat of danger, but I loved the challenge and the total mind-absorbing nature of it.  It's one of the main reasons I fell in love with cycling- I could daydream but the task at hand still demanded almost all of my attention.

I still struggle to clear my head while writing at times.  I'm aware that this is pretty normal, but I get a little more peeved when it's ED stuff creeping in rather than more normal, I-need-to-run-the-dishwasher kind of stuff.  And if writing doesn't do the trick (and I have some free time, which is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon!), I can get involved in a good book as reading is another major passion of mine.

Finding my passion for writing didn't enable me to recover--there was a lot of hard work and therapy and facing my fears about food one at a time and meal after meal after meal.  But it's one of the best motivations to stay recovered.  Then I can actually get absorbed into books and projects and bike rides.  When I'm malnourished, all I can think about is food.  Now that my brain and body are (mostly) healthy again, I can focus on bigger and better things.