Eating Disorder Recovery & Exercise Addiction: Reclaiming Embodiment, Balance, and the Wisdom of the Body
Treatment for Exercise Addiction: An Embodied Path to Recovery
Eating disorders are not merely coping mechanisms — they are profound expressions of the body’s unmet needs for belonging, safety, balance, and worth. Exercise addiction, often entangled with eating disorders, is no exception. When movement becomes compulsive, we must ask: What is the body truly seeking?
Recovery begins when we stop trying to “fix” behaviours and start listening to what they’re pointing toward. From an embodied perspective, eating disorders are messengers — revealing where disconnection or boundary violations have occurred, and where reconnection and resourcing are needed.
What Is Exercise Addiction in ED Recovery?
Exercise addiction is characterized by a compulsive need to move — often excessive, rigid, or punishing — even when the body is exhausted. It can feel like you have to run, walk, or work out, and stopping brings anxiety or dysregulation.
But what if, instead of pathologizing the movement, we approached it with compassion?
“Where are you running to? What are you moving away from?”
In my own recovery journey over 16 years ago, these were the questions I longed for — not punishment for relapsing, but curiosity about what my body was trying to communicate. Exercise felt compulsive (I just had to do it) and excessive (I didn’t know when to stop).
Embodiment: Returning to Center
True embodiment means that your consciousness and your physical form are aligned — organized around a central axis that holds your vitality, creativity, and wholeness. Trauma, especially developmental or relational trauma, can disrupt this center. It creates fragmentation — where safety, trust, and energetic balance are lost.
Eating disorders often emerge from these imbalances. They are not random. They point to unmet needs for safety, connection, and sovereignty. The same applies to exercise addiction — it often arises when we feel off-balance, powerless, overwhelmed, or unseen.
The work, then, is not to eliminate the symptom — but to resource the center. To bring curiosity to movement, to ask:
Where does this movement want to go?
What part of me is asking for release, or regulation?
How can I bring more engagement, breath, and presence into the act of moving?
Movement as Medicine, Not Punishment
In somatic recovery, we don’t throw away the movement. We slow it down. We listen to it. When exercise becomes exploratory rather than defensive, it can reconnect us to our center.
Try this the next time you move your body:
Focus on what helps you breathe.
Orient toward something beautiful as you move your body (in your room, in your surroundings).
Pause — and notice how you feel before, during, and after the movement.
Allow your movement to be relational — to the Earth, to your joy, to yourself.
Rest Is Revolutionary
In a culture that glorifies productivity and the “ideal” body, rest becomes radical. Releasing the identity that’s wrapped up in discipline, control, and body perfectionism takes immense courage in a diet culture world.
Psychedelic healing — especially with intentional microdosing or ceremonial psychedelic work — can support this process by softening the inner critic and reconnecting us to our soul’s rhythm rather than society’s.
Recovery invites us to reimagine nourishment, not just through food, but through how we relate to energy, stillness, pleasure, and presence.
Recovery as Returning to Wholeness
Recovery isn’t just about stopping behaviours. It’s about coming into right relationship with your body. It’s about learning to metabolize safety, rest, movement, and love. The eating disorder — and the compulsive exercise that often comes with it — holds clues to the balance your body is craving.
Rather than seeing these symptoms as the problem, we can see them as the path — invitations to reclaim your center and live in deeper alignment.
Photo by Zaur Giyasov on Unsplash