Food, Sex, and the Fire of Aliveness: Reclaiming Life Force in Eating Disorder Recovery
What happens in your body when you read the words food and sex?
Do you notice tightening? Heat? Curiosity? Fear? Longing?
For many people in eating disorder recovery, these two words carry an unexpected charge.
Food might feel scary, overwhelming, forbidden, comforting.
Sex might feel shameful, dangerous, healing, addictive, life-giving.
These associations don’t arise by accident. They are shaped by early experiences, cultural messaging, attachment patterns, and the ways our nervous systems learned to survive, connect, and belong.
Food and sex are portals into life force.
The Stories We Learn to Survive
Our minds organize the world through stories—stories about safety and danger, worthiness and shame, desire and restraint. These stories influence what we notice, what we ignore, and what we expect to happen in moments of hunger, intimacy, and pleasure.
This is why patterns repeat.
The mind gathers evidence to confirm old beliefs. The nervous system anticipates what it already knows. The body follows familiar motor plans.
If food once felt unsafe, the body may brace against hunger. If pleasure once came with consequences, the body may shut down desire.
And when those beliefs were formed in fear or pain, they can block the nourishment, connection, and aliveness we long for in the present.
Food, Sex, and Sympathetic Energy
Food, sex, and power all live in the same energetic channel: our life force.
Desire is not only sexual. It is hunger, creativity, intuition, appetite, longing, wanting.
In my own recovery, my sexuality was one of the most challenging places to inhabit—sometimes even more confronting than my relationship with food. Learning to feel safe with desire and pleasure meant learning to stay with sympathetic activation: heat, intensity, arousal, momentum.
This is often where eating disorders intervene.
They are not simply about control. They are often attempts to dampen life force—to quiet hunger, mute desire, and contain energy that once felt overwhelming or unsafe. To be the good girl.
This is why recovery asks us to build something very specific: capacity.
The capacity to feel.
The capacity to receive.
The capacity to stay present with our authenticity and aliveness without needing to shut it down.
New Experiences Change Old Predictions
Our relationships with food, sex, and desire don’t change through positive thinking alone. They change through new embodied experiences.
Somatic experiences that show the nervous system something different:
that hunger can be met without punishment
that pleasure can be felt without shame
that intensity doesn’t have to mean danger
This kind of work requires careful repetition, co-regulation and witnessing, neuroplastic sequencing, and resilient environments to support corrective experiences that involve the re-inhabitation of one’s life force energy.
May we continue to build our capacity to feel our soul hunger without panic.
Capacity to feel pleasure without collapse.
Capacity to stay present with the fire of being alive.
Eating disorder recovery is about learning how to hold more life.
And that life force—messy, beautiful, intense—is not the enemy.
It is the way back.
Photo by Paul Bulai on Unsplash
