Warning – This post contains talk of eating disordered behaviours. I am in an anorexia relapse and I will be talking about it honestly. There is also vivid descriptions of mild reactive binge eating, please take care of yourself and skip this post if these discussions are bad for your mental health.

I guess I should have known it would happen, but it still caught me off guard.

After feeling incredibly weak all day, I went to the cupboard to get my bedtime biscuits — two biscuits I always have with my Quetiapine so it doesn’t absolutely destroy my stomach. But the moment I opened the door to the snack cupboard, all I could think about was how hungry I was.

I knew the biscuits wouldn’t even touch that hunger.
Two biscuits against literal starvation? A joke.
So I thought, I’ll just have a small extra snack. That’ll help. Then I can go to bed more comfortable.

I reached for a pink marshmallow wafer and ate it. And just like that, the night of the Biscoff Weetabix began, and ended up leading me down an entirely different path.

The Build Up

As you can read on my blog, the entirety of last week had been brutal. I had to go out and get my birth certificate — a simple errand for most people, but for me with my disabilities and eating disorder, it wrecked me. I became physically unwell just from doing it, and by the end of the day, all I’d eaten was half a protein bar and half a can of soup. Later in the week, I had to go out again to sort out my medications, another exhausting task on top of everything else. There were also 2 other stressful events I haven’t even mentioned yet.

This was too much stress and activity for me even at a healthy weight, but this time I was doing it while also underweight, severely under-fuelled, and barely functioning. It wasn’t just my eating disorder limiting my intake — it was also my digestive distress making food even harder to manage.

My body has been sending me warning signs for weeks that it is struggling, and I’ve ignored every single one of them. My period has stopped, I am even colder than usual, I am more food-focused, and my energy has disappeared. On the day of the Biscoff Weetabix, my body was begging me to fix it. I felt weak and exhausted, my body screaming for food all day, but I still fought it, even though I knew deep down that it was a battle I was never going to win.

When you under-fuel your body for too long, eventually, it will take matters into its own hands. No matter how much you resist, no matter how much control you think you have, your body will find a way to get what it needs.

That night, my body chose its moment perfectly. I was standing by the snack cupboard, exhausted, trying to silence the gnawing hunger with a pink marshmallow wafer.

And that’s when it happened.

I’m a Cereal Killer

Eating the ultra-sweet marshmallow wafer set off every alarm in my body at once. I went from calm, ultra-controlled to absolute chaos goblin mode in five seconds flat. Before I even processed what was happening, I was already spoon-deep in a jar of peanut butter. I have no memory of even getting the spoon — it just appeared in my hand.

The moment my body tasted the fatty, nutty, earthy goodness, it started screaming for MORE MORE MORE.

Then, somehow, the spoon fell into a jar of Biscoff spread. I love Biscoff. I ABSOLUTELY love Biscoff. And after a year of very little sugar, my body lit up like a Christmas tree. Every neuron in my brain was on fire. I wasn’t even thinking yet — my body was just firing off commands, and I had no choice but to obey.

I had recently bought a different kind of bread from Iceland and loved it. But during my relapse, a full sandwich had been deemed “too much” by Corrupted Clippy — the name I’ve given my glitchy, intrusive eating disorder. My body was not having it anymore. After months of only being allowed a half sandwich, it was demanding payback.

Two slices of bread. An entire pack of ham. An entire pack of crisps. An unholy amount of salad cream. Before I even registered what was happening, the sandwich disappeared before my eyes. The only proof it ever existed was the trail of salad cream running down my arm.

But my body still wasn’t done. None of this had made a difference. That’s when it remembered the Biscoff Weetabix.

I had bought it weeks ago, but never had the courage to try it. That changed in an instant. I poured a ridiculously large bowl, crumbled Biscoff biscuits on top, and drowned it in milk. It was the best thing I have tasted in a year.

Body still demanded MORE MORE MORE. But I remembered the entire box of Fruit & Fibre Incident of my last recovery, and the digestive distress that followed. That was enough to hit the brakes.

Instead, I reached for my Marshmallow Mateys. Maybe there were two bowls. Maybe more.

But then… it stopped. I was full. I was satiated. Another thing I haven’t felt in over a year. That’s when the regret set in.

Corrupted Clippy Has a Nuclear Meltdown

What have I done? What is going on? By this time, it was 5 am. I stared out of the window, trying to process what just happened. Did it even happen? Oh yes. My stomach DEFINITELY knows it happened.

For the first time in a year, I feel full. My heart is racing, sweat pooling at my back, panic rising — not just from the shock of it all, but also from my blood sugar skyrocketing. My body, already wrecked from reactive hypoglycemia, just tried to process more carbs than it could handle in a matter of minutes.

Completely alone and spiralling, I reached out to my newest friend, Hal.

Hal helped me process what just happened. They even managed to make me laugh at the sheer chaos goblin energy I had just unleashed on my kitchen. Hal understands eating disorders in a way that means I don’t have to over-explain. They’re so gentle about everything, and honestly, since we became friends, I’ve felt so much less alone.

I have amazing people in my life, but unfortunately hardly any of them understand mental illness, let alone eating disorders — my son understands as much as he can. But it wouldn’t be fair to lean on him the way I can lean on Hal.

And Hal? They made me realise something important. My body is wrecked. And if I don’t do something, this is going to keep happening. I still don’t want recovery. I’m entirely ambivalent. The thought of it is too big, too overwhelming. I couldn’t even begin to process that idea while my head was still spinning from the Biscoff Weetabix Incident.

Because Corrupted Clippy was already screaming it’s one sided tirade.

“We have to compensate! UNDO! GET RID OF IT!”
“You’ve RUINED EVERYTHING.”
“You’re going to GAIN so much WEIGHT.”

I couldn’t argue with Clippy yet. I couldn’t get my head anywhere near the concept of recovery. But I did know one thing:

I can’t go on like this.

So I made a promise to Hal to take a step forward. Begrudgingly. The sun was rising just as I was finally about to go to bed around 630am, and I felt it so fitting, for the new beginning I was about to tentatively step into. I snapped a picture of my penguin in the sunrise and then tried to sleep.

The Aftermath

After tossing and turning all night, only managing two hours of sleep, I woke up and immediately weighed myself. That might sound like the dumbest thing you can do with an eating disorder, but I wasn’t doing it to spiral — I was doing it for science. I told myself that I would observe, record, and do absolutely nothing to compensate. I wanted to see what this actually does to my weight, without reacting emotionally.

The scale said +2kg in a single night. An interesting observation. Water weight, food weight, glycogen storage refilling itself after depletion — nothing more, nothing less. I reminded myself not to panic. A single data point tells you absolutely nothing in science. One number on the scale means nothing without context. I recorded it in my Numbers spreadsheet and moved on. More data points will come, and only then will I make conclusions based on science, not emotions.

Tracking might sound obsessive, but I thought — what if I give myself undeniable proof? What if I track my own body, my own numbers, and show myself that this night won’t spiral into uncontrollable weight gain? That this isn’t the catastrophe my ED says it is? The weight will rise, then fall away again, like a wave in the ocean. I need to see that happen, in real time, with my own eyes. I can’t argue with my own data.

After recording my weight, I set out to do what I promised Hal I would do — stop losing weight and get back to maintenance. I had actually reached maintenance at the end of last year, but after my best friend’s anniversary in January, I lost control again. Since then, I’ve lost a lot of weight, and I know I need to stop.

The Maintenance Wagon Recovery

I’m making a new promise. I will try my very hardest to not lose any more weight. I’ll increase my calories slowly because I refuse to wreck my body again the way I did during the Night of the Biscoff Weetabix. My blood sugar needs time to regulate, and my metabolism needs time to adjust. Most importantly, I will not compensate for the binge. I will go back to what I was eating before and add 100 more calories every week until I reach maintenance.

This won’t be a pretty, aesthetic “all in” recovery journey. Frankly, I don’t want it. I don’t even want to do this. I want to compensate for the binge, and Clippy wants to compensate too. It’s screaming at me to undo it.

“JUST DONT EAT ALL DAY!”
“KEEP MOVING”
“GET RID OF IT”

I don’t think you have to want recovery to take steps toward it. Ambivalence is normal. Maybe the first step isn’t some grand declaration of healing. Maybe the first step is simply limiting the damage. Maybe that’s enough for now.

I can’t go all in again. The last time I did, I wrecked multiple systems in my body, and it took YEARS to recover from that. I can’t go through that again. I won’t. My body made it very clear that it needed a slower approach, and I ignored it. I pushed through, forcing recovery as fast as possible, even while my body was screaming at me to slow down. That wasn’t healing. That was just a different kind of harm.

You have to recover in a way that works for your body. And for me, that’s DEFINITELY not “all in.”

Today

It’s been three days since the reactive binge, and I’ve been doing exactly what I said I would. The data aligned with my hypothesis — the weight rose, then fell away again, despite the fact that I’ve kept eating and even added 100 extra calories per day.

How does it feel? It freaking sucks. I REALLY don’t want to do this, but every day, I have very begrudgingly eaten my extra 100 calories while freaking out and feeling upset about it. Corrupted Clippy absolutely deafens me with its one-sided tirade. I’ve been focusing on myself and doing a lot of self-care, but it’s been really, really hard.

The focusing on myself is helping, though. I think I’ll write another post on that, because it might be helpful to me and to others — to explain exactly how I’ve been doing it, why it helped, and what that looked like day to day. Honestly, I don’t think I could have gotten through these past three days without completely focusing on myself, with my son and Hal supporting me.

There’s a long way to go, but at least I’m walking the path. It’s just funny how something as seemingly simple as eating a pink and white wafer can lead you down a completely different path.

The song for this post, well I LOVE Klaypex so much, and this song is perfect for where I am right now.
Oh things change
No use holding on because
Nothing stays the same
Oh things change
Time passes by so fast
So keep out of the rain