Navigating your relationship with movement: questions worth asking

Sophie du Plessis, EDInformed

If you are living with, recovering from, or even long recovered from an eating disorder, movement can be a complicated thing to navigate – particularly if you were an active person before becoming unwell, or if compulsive movement was part of your illness.

Exercise is often advertised as a universal good, with well-evidenced benefits for our physical and mental health. However, when an eating disorder is in the mix – when there’s a sense of needing to do something to manage feelings, bodies, or food – it’s rarely that simple. What’s framed as “healthy” can become the antithesis of health, slowly pulling things apart rather than building them up.

That doesn’t mean movement is wrong or harmful in itself. But it does mean our relationship with it often needs more care, curiosity, and honesty than we’re used to – or encouraged – to offer.

Learning to notice when activity is coming from a place of enjoyment, bodily appreciation, or connection, and when it’s being driven by eating disorder or anxiety-based motivations, can be incredibly difficult. The signs aren’t always obvious. Neither are the thoughts.

Exercise and accompanying compulsion exist on a spectrum. It might look like kilometres of running or lifting weights. It might look like going for walks, taking the longer route, legjigging, or avoiding sitting down. Even very low-level movement can come from a disordered place. As with many aspects of an eating disorder, this can be hard to spot – often showing up as subtle restlessness, niggling guilt, or the sense that truly resting isn’t really “allowed”.

Negotiating this relationship also means thinking about energy and nourishment.

Exercise doesn’t sit separately from food, even though it’s often treated that way. Whether we’re fuelling ourselves enough, whether movement is starting to influence eating behaviours, or whether food feels conditional on exercise – these questions matter, even when they’re uncomfortable to ask.

And of course, it would be naïve to ignore the broader social and cultural landscape that makes this harder. We live in a world that strongly promotes fitness and exercise, often framing them as discipline, productivity, or moral worth. Movement is praised; rest is questioned. Gentler choices, or stepping back, can feel like failure. For someone recovering from an eating disorder, already trying to relearn trust in their body, this constant messaging can blur boundaries and make it even harder to listen to internal cues.

The eating disorder already comes with enough rules. That’s why I’ve found questions can be more helpful – not as tests or checks, but as a way to pause and notice what’s really going on underneath the urge to move. This is something that has been really valuable in my own recovery, and continues to be.

Some questions you might come back to:

Do I want to move right now, or do I feel driven to?
How would I feel – physically and emotionally – if I didn’t, or couldn’t, move today?
Is this something I’m choosing because I enjoy it, or something I’d feel anxious or guilty without?
Is there a meal coming up, or one I’m still thinking about, that might be influencing this urge?
Am I thinking differently about food because I plan to move – or because I already have?
Am I thinking differently about movement because I plan to eat – or because I already have?
How much time and mental space has movement been taking up for me today?
If I knew this movement would do nothing to change my body or energy expenditure, would I still want to do it?
If I had absolute assurance that resting and eating freely wouldn’t impact my weight, would that alter my choice?
How am I really feeling in this moment – physically, emotionally, mentally?
If a friend or loved one were in my shoes, what would I advise them to do right now?
What do I hope movement will give me in this moment – relief, control, permission, escape?

Sometimes simply noticing the answers – even if changing your behaviour doesn’t happen immediately – can be enough to shift something. Planting seeds is powerful. This is something I’ve learned first-hand.

I trained as a competitive swimmer for over 15 years. Training was demanding, structured, and intense – but throughout that time I had a genuinely healthy relationship with movement, food, and my body. Whether I trained or not, I still ate what I wanted, in the quantities I needed. There were no rules. Food wasn’t conditional, and movement wasn’t something I used to manage my body or emotions. It was something I loved, and I looked after myself in order to do it at the level I did.

That changed after I developed an eating disorder.

Since then, my relationship with movement has needed more attention. I’ve had to become far more intentional about why I move, how I move, and when I choose not to. Although I’m years into recovery, I know that sometimes – and with certain forms of exercise – movement simply isn’t right for me, even when everyone else is doing it. Even going for a walk isn’t always the right decision, despite how harmless it might appear on the surface.

Swimming, which I’ve always loved, is something I’ve been able to return to slowly and carefully, once I felt confident in my ability to ask myself these questions and answer them honestly. That came after more than two years of stepping away from all forms of formal movement. I still check in. I still have days where I decide not to move – not because movement is bad, but because intention matters. If I notice guilt, obligation, tracking thoughts, or a sense of “should”, it’s a no. That’s how I protect my recovery.

Uncertainty around movement is common in eating disorder recovery. Questioning your relationship with exercise doesn’t mean you’re failing or going backwards. It means you’re paying attention.