So, I'm a 24-year-old, 173 cm/ 5'8'', 67 kg/148 lbs woman who's firmly recovered from an eating disorder. It controlled every waking moment of my life at ages 18-22, then it was slowly getting better for a year (where I technically didn't fulfill the diagnosis criteria anymore but still struggled with disordered thoughts and behavior), and finally, for the last year, I haven't had any ED-related compulsions or thought patterns whatsoever anymore.
My ED started out as anorexia - I was at 63 kg/138lbs for pretty much my entire pre-ED life and I got down to a BMI of 17 within half a year, but then the binging started, getting me back to normal weight, and it evolved into full-blown bulimia pretty quickly, where I tried to compensate my binges with extreme restriction/fasting, overexercising, and eventually purging.
The thing that characterised my whole ED journey though was OBSESSIVE calorie counting. My daily limit wasn't even that low, even at my lowest weight I still ate at least 1200 Calories a day (unless I was compensating for a binge), but the aspect that burdened me the most and turned my whole life into hell was the complete and utter obsessive-compulsiveness of it all. Aside from water (and even that was deeply suspicious to me sometimes because those cals are SNEAKY, right), I weighed every single thing I put into my body, from the three thin slices of cucmber I put on my sandwich to supposedly zero-calorie-drinks like diet coke and black coffee. And the thought that maybe my black coffee had slightly more calories than I accounted for because I let it steep for slightly longer than usual kept me awake at night more than the actual black coffee itself! Not to mention that you can't be 100% sure of any calorie count because food just naturally varies in its nutritional value and, on top of that, food companies are allowed a lot of leeway when it comes to labelling. That shit made me anxious to the point of public nervous breakdowns even if logic told me that 50 calories more or less wouldn't affect anything.
It goes without saying that this ruined my social life. I would never accept any food that I hadn't prepared and weighed myself, I would avoid any social outings where food would be around, I would cancel meetups even if my friends promised there wouldn't be food because I needed the time to exercise.
If I ate anything outside of the food that I had meticulously planned for that day, it would inevitably trigger a binge. And my binges were MASSIVE, not the kind of oh-no-I-overate-on-Christmas-and-now-my-tummy-really-hurts-binge, but >10,000 Calorie binges, which started out with "normal" binge food like sweets and takeout and McD's, and ended with me shoveling weird concoctions like flour-sugar-water-sludge (raw, of course) ar just straight sugar right out of the packet into my greedy gullet. Funny enough, the whole binging behaviour was triggered by a single event in my life - the first "cheat day" I allowed myself. My stupid brain immediately associated eating ANY unplanned food with just going all-out pig mode because "well I might as well turn it into a cheat day and then be good for a week", and it got addicted to the dopamine rush of sugar and fat and excess and gluttony.
I should mention that my eating disorder was never about beauty ideals, I never did it for my looks. It was purely a control thing for me. I was getting through a hard time in my life back then, everything seemed beyond control and unpredictable; my food intake was the only thing I felt in control of, and the fact that it was all so calculable and logical was deeply comforting. Eat 7000 kcal less than you burn, lose a kilo, period, no exceptions, you can count on it, it's science. It made me feel safe. So I kinda overdid it on the calorie counting thing lol.
Okay, enough background context, skip forward to the present day. As I said, before the whole ED thing started, I was always stable at 63kg without thinking about what I ate. My post-recovery body weighs in at 67kg, which is more than I ever weighted in my entire life, and it's also the first time I've ever felt chubby and uncomfortable with my body. I'm also still gaining slowly but steadily and fear that I might become overweight if I don't change my habits. So now I want to lose weight for purely aesthetic and health-related reasons, not because of underlying control issues.
The problem is that my hunger cues are still kinda fucky from all the binging-restricting stuff - regularily eating >10,000 cals and fasting for a few days will do that to you, even if my last proper b/p-cycle was two years ago. I don't know if my feeling for hunger and satiety will ever come back, so I can't rely on standard tips like "eat more protein and veg to feel full" since I never feel hungry or full, same for intermittent fasting, keto, etc. I fear that the only thing that will work for me is good old calorie counting since uncle CiCo never fails you, but I'm terrified that this will turn into an obsession again as soon as anything bad or unpredictable happens in my life.
Asking a professional like my old therapist if this is safe for me would probably be the best bet, but every therapist I've met seems to be in the Body Positivity/Big-is-Beautiful camp, and while I would like to think like that and just not care about my weight, I don't think I ever will. I feel like they will just tell me that trying to lose weight is too risky for any ex-eating disordered person, or even that my urge to lose weight is just the good ol' ED voice in disguise trying to sneak back into my mind, and that I should just try to accept my new body, but I disagree with all of that on an emotional as well as on an "intellectual" level. Hunting an impossible beauty standard was never my motivation, neither in ED-times nor now, I just want to get back to my pre-ED shape that I've had for all of my (healthy) life, being overweight is not beautiful to me, and I don't think I will ever become convinced that it's healthy either.
So I'm asking here instead of seeking a therapist again:
- Is anybody here recovered from an eating disorder for a few years or has family members/friends who are? If so, how do you see weight loss now? Is it just dangerous for any recovered person, do the risks alwais outweight the benefits for our group of people?
- If you are/know a recovered person who managed to lose weight healthily or has been maintaining a healthy weight since recovery , how did you/they do it? Calorie counting? Or did you manage to redevelop your hunger cues again? If so, how?
Sorry for the wall of text and thanks in advance for any tips and opinions!
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