 Just take a moment and make sure my feet are firmly planted on the ground in this moment. I don't know why I developed an eating disorder. The best answer I've been able to find is that genetics loaded the gun and environment pulled the trigger. Never having liked myself or feeling like anyone else in the world like me the way I was. Around age 14 I looked around and noticed that thinness and weight seemed really important. I would notice in movies, television, magazines, thin people were idolized and fat people were jokes. So when I started restricting my food intake, learning how many calories were in everything and developing rigid food rules to live by, it felt good and right and unfortunately my environment confirmed it too. I can't tell you how many girls came up to me and told me they were jealous of my weight loss and asked how I did it. I would go into clothing stores and wear the exact same size that was on the mannequin giving a very literal meaning to fitting in. Even boys started paying more attention to me. I felt like I'd finally taken control of my life. This was my identity. This was who I was. The skinny girl. Thinness, weight, sizes, numbers. These things mattered and they mattered to me and no one could try and tell me that they didn't matter when they so obviously did matter in my world. As the years went by, if the obsession became too much or when my health started to deteriorate, I would attempt entering treatment. But it never worked because truly I didn't want to let go of my eating disorder. My Ed. Ed was the voice of my eating disorder and I didn't know who I would be without him. What anorexia and bulimia gave me was a sense of control when I didn't feel like I had any. It was a distraction and soothing escape from the house I lived in where I didn't understand why an alcoholic got to be the king who treated us however he wanted while we had to tiptoe. It gave me something to feel good about. What it took away from me, though, was everything. Every day for 14 years, 95% of my thoughts were dedicated to a maddening math problem of calories in, calories out, inches around my waist, numbers on a scale. The measures that made me feel safe and okay in the world I didn't understand. Imagine what it felt like for me then when I first got into a float tank last year. Absolutely horrifying. An environment without measurements, without weight. I tried floating after my friend Sandra Com from the float shop suggested it, but when I got in the float tank I was scared and alone. So I did what I would always do when I needed comfort, which was body checking. Obviously, I couldn't weigh myself, so I did this other body checking. I reached my arms around my waist to make sure my ribs were still protruding just as they were that morning in bed, but they weren't. I couldn't feel them. My body felt completely different in the non-gravity environment. So I reached my hands immediately for my hip bones. My hip bones were a big thing for me. As long as I could feel my pointy hip bones everything was okay, but the epsom salt water was so slippery my hands just slid right off. Even my body checking didn't give me comfort in the float tank. I was extremely alone. So I panicked. I started crying and tears rolled down my face, but I didn't want to let Sandra down. I wanted to get through this one float and then just never come back. So I had to find a way to feel good and I noticed that kind of swishing my hair back and forth kind of like a mermaid felt good. So I did that until I don't remember anything else except the music playing. So I didn't see at all how floating could help me in the long run. What I did like about it was how separated I felt entirely from the world. I could close the lid to the float tank and for 90 minutes pretend that the rest of the world just simply didn't exist. I could pretend that I didn't have the problems I was so tired of dealing with. For 90 minutes it really didn't matter if I was skinny or not. Being able to get into a float tank was the same kind of instant relief and escape that I sought from binging and purging food, from restricting calories, or from taking drugs. At the time I had a prescription for Adderall for increased focus at work. Although I was just taking it because it made me feel happy in a beat. And it also basically eliminated any sense of hunger. So Adderall seemingly fixed my eating disorder in the same way that you fix a leaky faucet by shutting off the water. No more leak. But this routine caught up with me. In addition to paranoia and delusion, I just wasn't able to function during the day or fall asleep without a pill. But I was worried that without pills and drugs, my eating disorder would ramp up again. And I was as ashamed as I was of taking drugs, I was more ashamed of the cycle of binging and purging food. So I started floating a lot, like every other day, sometimes every day. Some floats were first thing in the morning and some floats were right after work. Either way, I was replacing floats with taking a pill or binging and purging food. I would be at my job, at the time I was doing medical billing at a doctor's office, feeling the nasty withdrawals of trying to get off the drug as I was taking, and hearing my ed voice coming at me hard telling me how fat I would become if I eat food or if I didn't throw up the food I'd already eaten. And know that at least by 6 p.m., when I got in a float tank, I would be feeling different. No matter what anxiety and discomfort I was feeling in that moment, I would at least know that at 6 p.m., I wouldn't be feeling that way anymore. Instant relief. Ed couldn't get me in the float tank. His screams of becoming fat and demands to count calories for the day had no power. Sure, he was waiting for me right outside the float tank. But for 90 minutes, what he said didn't matter. Actually, I started hearing a different voice. A voice I hadn't heard since I met Ed. And this voice and I took adventures. This voice challenged me to ask for less hours at work so I could be less stressed, which I did. This voice asked me what it might feel like if I were happy, something I've never actually thought to ask myself before until then. This voice challenged me to start meeting friends for coffee because she knew how lonely I was, which I did. And I found that I was calm enough to actually follow through. Being a calmer, more reliable friend to other people was a quality that I noticed I started to like about myself, liking myself. That felt very different. In one float, this voice held my hand and flew me back to childhood to confront a previous trauma, but this time with the perspective of my adult self. As I adult me, watch this scene as an onlooker, I whispered to younger me that everything would be okay and that she didn't do anything wrong to cause it. I assured her that someday she would be confident and surrounded by friends who love her. And finally, the trauma suddenly seemed to have less power. I know what you're thinking. That's your inner voice, Emily. Why didn't you listen to that all along? It makes so much sense. I couldn't hear that voice over Ed. Or I remember hearing it for a moment and then Ed would swoop in and play on a reel all the mistakes I'd ever made in my life and how it was nothing before he found me. After floating one to four times per week for about six months, though, I stopped hearing Ed's voice altogether. He just went away. I noticed that I would start my daily math problem of counting calories and suddenly it seemed painfully boring. I noticed that I would eat food expecting to throw it up right after and suddenly purging seemed like a hassle because then I would just be hungry again. Where did Ed go? What happened was this. The more I got to know my inner voice, the more I got to know my identity outside of being just a skinny girl. The less I needed to be the skinny girl, the less I needed Ed. The more I liked myself, the less I needed Ed to tell me I was okay. The really incredible part about this is that until it happened to me, I didn't think that full recovery from the eating disorder was possible. All I had seen around me in treatment in support groups and among my Ed blogging recovery community was people cycling in and out of treatment until eventually resolving to live with their disorders as best they can by maintaining their symptoms. And that seemed really sad to me. When I turned 28 and realized that I'd had my eating disorder for half my life and when I looked back and couldn't even remember a time that I didn't have it, I truly thought I was just permanently damaged. And I wasn't alone in that thought. A 2011 New York Times article by Abby Ellen called, In fighting anorexia, recovery is elusive quotes Dr. Suzanne Dooley-Hash, a former emergency room physician regarding her own anorexia saying, I think I would be naive to think you would ever not be a part of my life. Ellen explains that most medical experts agree that a third of people with an eating disorder will remain chronically ill, a third will die of their disorder, and a third will recover with one significant caveat. There is little agreement as to what recovery means for people with anorexia. Most doctors believe that recovery from anorexia is rarely absolute and more often occurs by degrees. While patients may get better, aspects of their disease will continue to nag them. Ask my friends if they think any of my eating disorder still nags me. And they will tell you that the only part of my eating disorder that still nags me is the archaic but permeating belief that eating disorders are chronic diseases. Dr. Justin Feinstein at the Laureate Institute knows that sufferers deserve better than what they're getting. He believes in the plasticity of our brains to reach a point of full recovery and that the float tank is our most valuable tool for guiding patients to their inner voices and empowering them to heal themselves. I have no doubt that the work he's doing is going to change how people with eating disorders view their own potential for recovery and have hope. Imagine my joy to wake up now and not even hear my head voice to forget that that was a thing I once had to deal with. Ask me what I ate yesterday. I don't remember. Ask me what I'm eating for dinner tonight. I don't know yet. The quality of life I feel now is too good to just be a remission. The quality I feel now must mean full recovery. Talk about reprogramming. The book I wrote about this process of recovering for me is called Unsinkable. And you can actually read it for free. I just put it up on a website I made. It's emilykatenoran.com. And you can also buy a hard copy and buy a couple of copies for your float center just in case someone picks it up and connects with it. My bio on the float conference website also has those links. I'm extremely grateful that I have access to float tanks in my city. I interact a lot in the blogging community for eating disorder recovery. And some who've read of what's happened to me really want to try it but don't have access to a float tank nearby to open your float centers. And to those of you who run float centers or are opening float centers or are doing float research, I say on behalf of everyone who deserves better treatment than what they've had available, thank you.