There’s an unspoken expectation that arrives with Thanksgiving: you should feel grateful. The holiday practically demands it. Gratitude is the price of admission to the table, the thing you’re supposed to feel before you’re allowed to participate. For someone struggling with an eating disorder, this expectation can feel like one more thing you’re failing at.
Eating disorders don’t just take your relationship with food or your ability to inhabit your body comfortably. They take your capacity to feel much of anything beyond fear and exhaustion. Gratitude requires a kind of spaciousness that the eating disorder has collapsed. When you’re constantly calculating, restricting, compensating, or managing anxiety about what’s on your plate, there’s no room left for thankfulness. And if you’re in recovery—especially early recovery—there’s often an additional layer of pressure: you’re supposed to be grateful for recovery itself, even when recovery feels like the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
The emptiness of performative thankfulness brings its own kind of pain. You know what you’re supposed to say. You know how to smile and nod when someone asks what you’re grateful for this year. But the words feel hollow because they don’t match what’s actually happening inside you, which is often closer to desperation or numbness than gratitude.
An Alternative to Thankfulness
What if, instead of focusing on what you’re supposed to feel, you focused on what you can give?
Giving doesn’t require gratitude as a prerequisite. You don’t have to feel abundant to offer something, and you don’t have to be healed to show up. Giving is an action, not an emotion, which makes it more accessible when feelings are either overwhelming or completely shut down. When gratitude feels impossible, giving might not be.
This reframe matters because it shifts you from passive receiver to active participant. Even when you feel depleted, even when you’re struggling, you still have things you can give.
What We Can Give Ourselves
Recovery requires you to give yourself things the eating disorder has withheld, often for years. This is about small permissions that create tiny openings, not grand gestures or complete transformation.
- Permission. Maybe you can’t give yourself permission to eat freely at every meal, every day. Maybe you’re not there yet, and that’s okay. But can you give yourself permission for this one meal? For Thanksgiving dinner specifically? Not as a binding contract for how you’ll eat tomorrow or next week, but just for today, permission to participate, to eat what’s served, to sit at the table without calculating or compensating. A moment of peace with your plate.
- Honesty. You can give yourself the truth about where you actually are, instead of where you think you should be. You’re allowed to find this hard. You’re allowed to be in recovery and still not feel grateful about it. The eating disorder thrives on the gap between reality and performance, the exhausting work of pretending you’re fine when you’re not. Shut it down by dropping the mask and see how it goes.
- Compassion. When you can’t access gratitude, can you access gentleness with yourself about that? Can you give yourself compassion for how hard this is, rather than judgment for not feeling what you’re “supposed” to feel? The revolutionary act here isn’t forcing gratitude, but rather being kind to yourself in its absence.
What We Can Give Others
Eating disorders are isolating by design. They convince you that you’re better off alone and that being around others brings judgment and shame. But isolation keeps you sick, recovery requires connection, and connection requires reciprocity.
- Presence. You don’t have to be recovered to be present, the same way you don’t have to feel good to show up. Presence doesn’t mean you’re healed or that you’ve got it all figured out; it just means you’re there, in the room, with the people who matter to you. Even if you’re anxious about the food or you can’t participate fully in the way you wish you could. Imperfect presence still counts.
- Truth. Sometimes, the most generous thing you can give someone is honesty instead of performance. “I’m having a hard time right now” is a gift, even though it might not feel like one. It lets the people who care about you actually see you, which gives them the chance to support you. The eating disorder wants you to hide. Letting yourself be seen—letting people know you’re struggling—is an act of trust and courage that creates the possibility of real connection.
- Letting them matter to you. This is harder than it sounds. Letting people help you, letting them see you, and allowing them to be important to you—all of this requires vulnerability, and vulnerability feels dangerous. But it’s also how relationships work. You give others the chance to show up for you. You give them the opportunity to matter. And in doing that, you give yourself access to the support that makes recovery possible.
Giving Through Service
When the eating disorder has stolen your sense of purpose, service can create meaning. Small contributions can connect you to something larger than the constant internal focus the eating disorder demands.
This might mean helping with dishes. Setting the table. It could be asking someone about their day and actually listening to the answer, and even holding space for someone else’s struggle. Thanksgiving is also a holiday with many opportunities to engage in charitable acts and volunteer work. Big or small, these are acts of service, and they matter. They pull you out of the eating disorder’s self-focused spiral, maybe not completely, but in bits and pieces that add up to something more robust, over time.
Service is meaning-making. It reminds you that you can be of use and that you can contribute something, even when you feel otherwise. It connects you to other people and to purposes beyond symptom management. The eating disorder wants you to believe that your only value is in how well you execute its rules. Service says: No, you matter because you can give something, however small, to the people and world around you.
Small Acts of Connection
The eating disorder constructs a particular story about your value. This story keeps you isolated, which keeps you sick. It says that you have nothing to offer, that you’re too consumed by your own struggle to matter to anyone else, and that until you’re recovered, you should stay hidden. Giving doesn’t need to wait for wholeness. You can offer something real while still struggling. Maybe it’s your presence at the table or your honesty about how difficult it is to be there. Maybe it is your willingness to let people help you.
One meal where you give yourself permission doesn’t solve everything, but it creates an opening. One moment of honest presence doesn’t heal all your relationships, but it reminds you that connection is still available. One small act of service doesn’t give you back your sense of purpose entirely, but it proves the eating disorder wrong when it says you have nothing to contribute. This is how recovery actually works: through small acts of connection and meaning-making that the eating disorder insists aren’t possible.
You don’t have to be full—of gratitude, of recovery, of certainty—to give. You just have to be willing to try.
