I'm watching a documentary about eating disorder treatment called THIN. I think I understand better why so much in-patient treatment doesn't work.

I don't see staff showing compassion. They refer to the patients as antidepressant junkies, even the suicidal ones. The parents seem clueless. I'm angry, watching this.

I get 3-4 emails a week from people who have read my ED posts. I can't believe there is so little out there that is real. I want to wrap my arms around these women and girls (and sometimes boys). They are so scared of their own bodies. They should be more scared of their minds, and their minds are being sadly neglected.

ED is about the mind. It's about looking into your future and asking yourself if you can stand the thought of suffering at this level in five, ten, fifteen years. If you have ED, you have three choices: you can suffer indefinitely, you can recover, or you can die.

Those are your choices.

Some of us contract terminal diseases. The difference between those people and the general population is that those people know how they will die.

We will all die someday. The human mortality rate is currently 100%.

The question is: Do you want to speed it up?

I didn't care when I was sick. When I looked at recovery, I started to care. I reached for happiness, for peace. I didn't want to go on like that. That daily struggle between life and death is awful. How can anyone keep it up indefinitely? At what cost?

It is my hope that anyone reading this while hating his or herself can see the three choices clearly and want, seriously want, to eliminate the more dismal two.

There are evolutionary reasons our brains can drive us for perfectionism that don't seem necessary in 2014. It's okay to tell that part of your brain to stand down. In a First World country, you can get water from the tap. Stop listening to the part of your brain that says you need to run five miles to deserve it. That's not true. Your brain is stuck on evolutionary default, but you have a frontal lobe. Let your frontal lobe win.

Life is short. Life is beautiful. Seize the desire to be fierce, to live free, to tell your asshole inner voice to go back to the cave and wait for a saber-toothed tiger. In 2014, what matters is staying sane despite the photoshopping and the Pinterest and the perfect family Facebooks. Stay with us. Value yourself in your soul enough to keep that shell that carries your soul around alive.