#eating disoder recovery

I started at 215 and now I’m down to 188 it’s feels amazing but I have so much longer to go

Lost 21 pounds this month ☺️

Hoping for more next month

I went to the doctor last week and was prescribed ✨anti anxiety meds✨

BITCH

I started them on Tuesday and I’ve lost 7 pounds bc I feel so violently ill after taking them ☺️

Had no clue but apparently fasting/ restricting is causing my acid reflux to act up,, my throat is in so much pain I wanna die but I can’t eat more or stop fasting

Ate some rice and tofu today and work and I didn’t have time to purge afterwards,, it wasn’t that much but it still sucks :(

Me talking to my mom: Yeah so I just cut out all animal products, processed food, sugar, lowering my carb intake, and drinking more water

My mom: Wow that’s amazing you’re gonna lose so much weight

My brain: Yeah that’s like the whole fucking point dumb ass

2 pounds down 100 to go

✨ fuck today ✨

I had, not even all, of an unwrapped burrito bowl and some Diet Pepsi did some yoga/ small workouts for an hour and a half and this is all I get? Wtf

I never thought my eating disorder was real cause I was never severely emaciated. Yes I was underweight and yes I had a feeding tube at one point, but people would always make comments like “You are extremely skinny, but it doesnt look like you have an ed”. Now my brain is constantly like prove it to yourself and get THAT skinny. Then another part of my brain is like, that’s so stupid and will only make you more miserable. Anyone relate or am I just crazy lol?

Accept no less!!

From everyone that called me out on my weight, my mom was the most painful. The diet pills and the constant remainder that dresses looked bad on me.

I was 14 when I noticed my periods stopped a lot, the doctor blamed my weight, I was 140 lbs… I felt like a heifer, especially when my mom told the neighbor and her daughter if they would like to go shopping with her, that she never took me because the clothes from there wouldn’t look nice on me. 

It hurt… 

Patty McFatty always stuck in my mind… 

I started to drink nothing but teas and those coffees that promise weight loss, nothing but a small meal at night. 

I started to count EVERYTHING I ate… I learned all the calorie content of every food by looking at their labels. 

I started to see how long I would last without food… 

I started to pop more pills, and not just diet anything I could find to make myself purge and make my stomach hurt so I would not want food.

I started to workout more and more, maybe one meal, and if I dared eat more I would punish myself. 

I got laxatives to try and increase purging, since I began to binge eat.. I would eat and eat, until I vomit, until I drowned those laxatives.

The doctor noticed my losing 10lbs in less than a week and was upset, but did not pay attention to it much… 

My friends noticed…. they told the counselor at the school… who told the nurse.. then I was caught purging at school… 

My parents also caught me once at home… 

I met with other girls like me, except they were skinnier, and I was FAT compared to them. I noticed that I never went lower than 120 lbs though.. no matter how much I did not eat. I felt bad and guilty but I did work through it, talking it out, and the fact that I got diagnosed with PCOS helped a lot, because now I knew it wasn’t my fault… and I do tell myself everyday. It took years to learn to love myself more, and honestly I still pick up a bad habit or two, but I noticed and I catch myself before I fall. 

I am not perfect and I am not “cured” of it, although a lot of times it feels like, I go months and even years without falling back again, and the few times I slip I don’t fall. It is about working hard.. 

It is not easy. 

I am sharing my story because I want to tell a teen like the one I was that you are beautiful <3 I want to tell my fellow PCOS sisters that if you have gone through any type of eating disorder you’re not alone… <3 <3 <3 

I hope you know that there is hope! 

“my shadow has been following me around for far too long. maybe that’s why i’m eating less; as if i’m trying to make it smaller.”

—MO

TW: weight talk and eating disorder mention below the cut

I weighed myself this morning, and for the first time since I got sick in college I’ve broken 110lbs. It’s been such a struggle to get back to my pre-illness weight. It’s was only 20lbs that I needed to gain, but when there is positive reinforcement for any weight loss, no matter how extreme or how unhealthy the cause, it gets in your head. When I first dropped to 90lbs I was showered with complements for being so skinny, mostly it was people who didn’t know I got there by being sick, but people who knew my struggles with my pain medication said things too. It seemed like people liked 90lb me much more than 110lb me.

I usually say numbers don’t matter to me, it’s the only way to stop me from obsessing, but this number sort of does matter. And it feels good.

if you get the patience  read this, if you go through the same things, feel free to hit me up, i’m interested in starting a convo on this.

A detail i have come along to realize about myself, is that i cycle in between anxiety and depression. i have no idea if there is a specific diagnosis for this, if it is simply just, i have both and they sometimes overlap and other times appear separate. I was wondering if anybody else is like this. This is not just, one day i am anxious and the other day i am terribly depressed. I have always lived with these two very different emotional states, and they come in waves that sometimes i can’t even predict or control. my therapist has always treated me as being someone who suffers from generalized anxiety, but for some reason i have always known there as a bit more to it. Thing is i hid my depression out of shame, and surely i wanted to do the same about my anxiety, but it is such a more violent and unpredictable state, that sometimes it would just burst out and i could not control it.

So it usually starts with an outburst of anxiety, if i was to put it in the perspective of my worst i would wake up every morning with an impending sense of doom and i would go along my day hyper aware of every single thing around me. My brain can’t stop at those times, it thinks about every single thing that most people do not think about, and then worry about specific thoughts and details of said thoughts, and even in the peace and quiet of my own bedroom i would freak out, burst into tears, have a panic attack, you name it. And usually this general state would go on for a significant amount of time, especially if i was expecting something to happen.

And then that nervous state would either be disrupted by an outer influence, or it would shift on it’s own into, not what i would call the polar opposite, often i would still feel anxious, but it would mostly just shift into depression. and in those times i would just not care, i would wake up not with a sense of doom, but i would simply remember who i am and i would hate it and want to disappear. So there i would go into a period of time where i was mainly depressed. 

i will get anxiety about getting depression and then i will get depressed about having anxiety. First i thought that i either had one or the other, and then i would have a smaller percentage of the other illness. Then i thought, well i must have both, but they’re completely separate, and you are just weird like that. But it never felt quite right, and the more i get to know about myself, the older i get, i just believe that they are sort of interchangeable, or even connected in some way. hell, it might even be the same thing. I know one person can be diagnosed with several metal illnesses, but i mean, i only have this one brain, would it not make more sense, since these problems seem to have the same origin, it is not something that i have developed from any particular trauma that i remember, i do have traumas and i have mental consequences and tel tales of said traumas, but analyzing my behavior, even that is separate from my anxiety and my depression.

i mean what am i supposed to say, “oh just let me list all of the things my brain has decided to fuck up on, lets see, anxiety, depression,anorexia AND bulimia at at least one point, technically also orthorexia for around a year and a half, very very likely ptsd from serious abuse, but that’s separate from the other things, have i told you i also get body dysmorphia? oh yeah chronic panic attacks and i get easily addicted to things”…. to me it just seems like i am some sort of grocery list. At one point i started to worry if i was thinking about all these things i had, if i was not just a hypochondriac or an illness collector. Which is completely idiotic, i’ve been diagnosed and treated for all of the mental illnesses above, it was never something that i made up in my mind.

But with a certain amount of psychological knowledge (i mean 8 years of intense therapy gets you some skills in at least understanding what the heck is going on) I ended up to the conclusion, i am neither going to restrict myself into one single problem, neither am i going to list every single problem in the book.

so let’s synthesize. 

I have a restrictive eating disorder, it shifts and adapts as the circumstances of my life appear, like a parasite trying to resist medication; reasons: biology with a gymnastics background and a perfectionist head

i have at least a mild to moderate form of ptsd, it is fairly recent and it is yet to be completely understood by my treatment teams at it’s fullest extent;reasons: I am a rape victim but previous to that i endured abuse from several “sources”, which built up and eventually burst when a more major event happened.

And then i have anxiety and depression. It show up as mutated sort of mental illness. almost like a bipolar individual (which i am absolutely not); i cycle between these two states as if one caused he other, or just, i have both and my brain gets too tired from one thing and goes to the other thing, or depending on the situation it will react accordingly, but it always has a tendency to find a way to get depressed or anxious and then i am more likely that in  a span of a few weeks of that constant feeling,  or even months, i will change into the other state, or into normality.

any thoughts?