Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison · Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS

The Elusiveness of “Full Recovery” from Disordered Eating with Mallary Tenore Tarpley

·34 min·2 clips

Mallary says she became "perfect at recovery" and still relapsed at college.

Christy Harrison opens the episode with a note about the show’s anti-diet stance and the kinds of details it avoids, including weight and calorie numbers. She also introduces the conversation as a cross-post from Rethinking Wellness. The episode stays centered on disordered eating and recovery from diet and wellness culture. The guest talks about how much of her recovery was tied up with grief. She describes the work of letting go of the pedestal she had placed her mother on. That mattered because it helped her accept her mother’s flaws and, in turn, her own. She connects that process to the perfectionism that often sits inside an eating disorder. The episode stays close to the emotional logic of that shift. The guest explains that residential treatment helped her begin to eat differently. She also started returning to foods she used to make and love with her mother. Those foods became part of recovery, not just part of memory. She says the eating disorder stopped looking like a solution and started looking like the problem. That change required her to hold both the purpose it once served and the damage it caused. Christy follows that thread into the question of identity. The guest recalls the difference between saying she had anorexia and saying she was anorexic. The change captures how deeply the disorder had come to define her. Residential treatment helped her see that she was more than the illness. Even so, she makes clear that this recognition did not happen overnight. Christy then turns to the book’s central idea about the in-between place. The conversation asks whether full recovery is always the right goal, or even a workable one. They consider what factors might protect someone on the path and what can make the road longer or harder. The episode also asks whether the language of full recovery helps at all. By the end, the focus is less on a perfect endpoint than on what it means to define recovery on your own terms.

As heard by us

A reflective look at recovery as an uneven process, not a finish line.

This episode treats recovery as uneven and unfinished, not something that snaps neatly into place, and it keeps diet and wellness culture in view throughout.

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Why you'd press play

Want a careful conversation about recovery that leaves room for uncertainty?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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