Having an eating disorder is never easy. Life can be hellish while your mind and body go through a topsy-turvy ride, hiding what you're doing, feeling shame over yourself and your actions. It's not something that anyone should have to go through. Unfortunately, too many people have gone through it, are going through it, and will go through it. Some end up getting the help they need. Others aren't so lucky, and don't come out the other side intact. If they come out at all.

There are many places to get help with an eating disorder, if you have one. There are even articles on HubPages with tons of information and advice relating to eating disorders, coping with them, helping people you know who have one. But one thing that tends to get overlooked is the aftermath. There are plenty of people who had eating disorders who no longer suffer from them actively, but who still have to deal with not only the fact that they once had such a problem, but the tiny insidious voice in the back of their head that tells them that it's okay to start again, that things will go better this time. It's hard, it needs fighting against, and most people don't get help from other people when it happens because the shame associated with eating disorders still kicks in.

That insidious voice whispers, "You're not actually doing anything wrong. You just want to. Why bother telling anyone? They won't understand, they won't be able to do anything for you anyway."

Anyone ever have to listen to that voice? Yeah, me too.

My trouble with eatingdisorders started when I was in my very early teens. I'd always been a bit large. Chalk it up to genetics and the fact that my parents had no clue what to feed a child to keep them healthy. I wasn't allowed to bring cartons of juice to school to bring with my lunch because my parents claimed it had too much sugar, but bringing a can of Pepsi was just fine. I developed plenty of bad dietary habits in my younger years, and I'm still fighting to override them.

I can theorize about what caused it, either social pressure, depression, a confused body filled with raging hormones. But at a certain point, I started to lose my appetite. I started eating half my lunch and throwing the rest away. Then I stopped eating any of my lunch at all, and throwing it all away. I just wasn't hungry. I told my mother to stop making lunch for me, since I would just waste it, and, like any "good" parent, she did just that. So I stopped eating lunch.

I didn't eat breakfast, either. I've never liked it, and eating too early in the morning often makes me feel ill. So I skipped that meal too, all the time.

Somewhere along the way, the bright little idea came into my head that if I ate less, I would lose weight. I'd no longer be fat. This was a good thing, right? So eating less was a good thing. No two ways about it.

The problem was, I also ate for comfort. And going through clinical depression meant that I grasped at comfort whereever I could find it. It came in the form of candy, chips, packets of Mr. Noodles. My mother gave me $3 a day to buy my supper from a nearby convenience store, and that was what I spent it on. I was getting the rough nutritional equivalent of sugar sprinkled on cardboard.

Unsurprisingly, I was nearly always hungry. But by this point, the "eating less = weight loss" idea had been so firmly planted in my mind that I began to associate hunger pangs with satisfaction. I could only be happy if I was hungry, because being hungry meant I was eating less, which meant I would lose weight.

It didn't go as far or as badly as it could have. I started having mood swings, and I was lucky enough to have friends that managed to talk me out of what I was doing and started making sure I ate each day at lunch time, whether I wanted to or not. This, I'd like to add, was more than my parents did, since I had, to be blunt, a rather crappy home life at the time. But that's another story entirely.

For years I ate for comfort, which was due in part to the depression, but at least I had stopped trying to starve myself. And now I find pleasure in eating, but don't eat to feel better when I'm feeling bad. This is an improvement.

However... More than once, in the years since then, I've felt my stomach growl with hunger and had to fight back the thought that feeling hungry will make me happier. When I've had a bad day, sometimes it's all I can do to stop taking $5 and going to the convenience store to buy some candy to make myself feel better. I technically don't have an active eating disorder. My eating is not disordered.

But my urges are. It's there in potential, but not active, and while that's not as hard as actually going through an active disorder, it's not exactly what I'd call easy. Having that voice in the back of my mind telling me that all I have to do to feel better about myself is to starve myself again. It's like the aftershocks on an earthquake. The main problem has subsided, but sometimes things still move about, shaking things up a little.

I'm strong enough to resist those thoughts, but that doesn't take them away. And I'm certain that plenty of people who have recovered from eating disorders feel the same way. The battle keeps going on even once the war is over.

It can be hard to talk about. It's rarely easy to talk about active problems, and sometimes even harder to talk about things that may become problems. "Why discuss what isn't even really happening. It sounds stupid to say that sometimes I almost feel sort of like I did when I had an eating disorder, but nothing's come of it. So just disregard what I just said."

It gets better. And talking about it does help. Even if you don't feel the need to go to a therapist or counselor to get help with the thoughts, sometimes even just telling a friend how you feel sometimes can take a tremendous load off your mind, and your friend can keep an eye out for you in case you start to slip.

I say slip because in some ways eating disorders are like addictions. Just because you're no longer addicted to something doesn't mean that going through life is easy again. The temptation to start again can be there for years, sometimes never going away. People keep an eye on recovering and recovered addicts all the time to help them, and the same ought to be done for those who have recovered from eating disorders. Those same nasty little poisonous thoughts might be lurking at the back of your mind, your friend's mind, and it can cause a great amount of insecurity and fear.

If you've felt this way, you're not alone. If you know someone who's felt this way, tell them they're not alone either. Encourage them to talk, to share their feelings, and let them know that you're there to help them if things start to get hard, if they ever have any more of those old urges.

And if you're having them yourself, don't be afraid to talk about it. Don't worry about people thinking you're overly paranoid or a worrywort because you're concerned about a potential problem recurring. It's a valid concern, and you are not weak for worrying about it.