Today is Monday 28th April – the first full day of my true anorexia recovery.

I wish I could say that was the first thought that met me upon waking up, but I take Quetiapine and dealt with cluster headaches all night so mostly my waking thoughts are:
“Wait, I exist? How do I do that again? I forgot,” and also,
“OMG I FORGOT I HAVE JELLYCATS THEY’RE SO CUTE. I MISSED YOU,”
when I feel something under my arm and see Biscoff’s cute face staring back at me.

However, I was expecting to wake up and feel different to what I wrote in my last recovery post. My recovery so far has been very this or that – either I’m determined to recover, or I desperately don’t want to recover and get mad at the former myself for expecting the current me to be okay with all this. Sometimes it flips back and forth so fast I can’t even keep track.

It was a surprise to me that this morning I still felt pretty determined like I did last night. I was quietly happy about it. Well, once I remembered that’s what we’re doing now, thanks to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind effects of Quetiapine.

Today was going to need a lot of caffeine, so I stumbled – still medicated – haphazardly into the living room bringing Biscoff with me, because if we are really going to do this, I need A LOT of coffee, and I also need to go and get A LOT of food.

Every Lidl Bit Helps

We live near a Lidl, but we’ve never shopped there since I moved in around six years ago. My son has ARFID and, well, I am me, so we’re both particular about food. However, recovery is going to cost so much financially, and I desperately needed to find a cheaper way to eat entire containers of food in one night.

I was still feeling incredibly brave when we arrived and loaded lots of fun food items into the basket. While Clippy protested, I was trying to really listen – through all its high-pitched screeching – for myself.

I came across a salad bowl, one of those fancy ones in the brown tubs. I have ALWAYS wanted one of those, but never bought one. EVER. Not even during the 12 years I was weight restored. Clippy does not trust them, and I’ve always had a very large fear of “wasting calories” on not liking something and it’s quite often I don’t like something because I have sensory issues.

I told Clippy to fuck all the way off and put it in my basket. I felt so brave for this little act of rebellion in the fridge section – “Down with this sort of thing!” The tub said chicken shawarma on it, and I love chicken shawarma so much. We’re going to use all the yoghurt and mint dressing it comes with, AND eat it, and if I don’t like it, it’s okay. But let’s be real: I LOVE chicken shawarma. I’m going to like it.

Heading into the cereal aisle, I found Lidl’s version of Krave – only instead of chocolate and hazelnut in the middle of the carby pillows, it has Biscoff inside. This made me quite excited; Biscoff products have literally been getting me through recovery so far, hence why I named my Jellycat bear after it. Last time in recovery it was Nutella and peanut butter. This time, it’s Biscoff and peanut butter.

Talking of which – I got Lidl’s peanut butter too. It looked the same as the Marks and Spencer one, which is now my favourite peanut butter in the whole world. I hope it’s the same because the peanut butter container I have written about in my last two posts is now empty. Peanut butter only lasts for the time it takes to write two blog posts these days.

I got a lot of fruit and vegetables too – my mental hunger demands bowls of fruit and vegetables as well as the Biscoffy peanut butter madness. I keep thinking about fruit platters, roasted vegetables, and edible arrangements constantly. I think it’s because Clippy decided vegetables were too much during the relapse. That’s how bad my eating became – where fruit and vegetables were “too many unnecessary calories.” I absolutely love fruit and vegetables. I have really missed them.

My son was really brave too and bought quite a few things to try, and I was really proud of him. After adding more food to our basket, and feeling triumphant – especially after facing the gauntlet that is being thrown your food too fast at the checkout and trying to pack it faster than is humanly possible – we then headed to Asda to get the rest of our combined safe foods.

Storming Asda Tower

Asda was a much harder rebellion than Lidl. If I could explain it in Cyberpunk 2077 terms, Lidl was like storming Militech, and Asda was like storming Arasaka Tower on the hardest difficulty.

Halfway around the store, I started to lose my bravery – the same way V gradually loses health in the mission “Don’t Fear the Reaper” – and began morphing into the other Rhio. The one who is scared of eating food, scared of weight gain, scared of losing Clippy and what that loss will mean. I was getting severely overwhelmed, looking at my trolley, seeing all the food in it, knowing that somehow… I’d have to eat it.

Thankfully, the bravery didn’t start to leave until after the bakery section, where I found Biscoff croissants. That was an absolute yes from me – and from Biscoff the bear. He will love that. Maybe a part of me is still standing there in the bakery aisle, daydreaming about Biscoff croissants, because that’s where the excitement stopped.

I’m always braver in the supermarket than I am at home, and I worried about that too. I worried about how I’d have to go home – not as excited, defiant Rhio – but as scared Rhio. The one who hesitates, who doubts herself, who negotiates with Clippy until exhaustion sets in.

I also worried about having all this food at home because it feels dangerous. The reactive eating – the peanut butter – it may sound unhinged, funny, even meaningful in hindsight… and it is. But it’s also painful. It feels like spiralling out of control, like free-falling with no parachute.

It’s so painful, in fact, that I was walking around Asda with the worst bloating I’ve ever had in my life. The weather was too hot to hide it in an oversized hoodie, so my belly that looked the same as when I was about 5 months pregnant was fully on display. I was in visible peanut butter distress from the chaos goblin event of the night before – the skin on my stomach stretched too tight, my digestion doing VERY AUDIBLE awful things in the middle of Asda.

Reactive eating is terrifying. It’s shameful. And it makes the next day physically punishing, thanks to slowed digestion from a year of malnourishment. I focused on just getting the job done and getting through the self checkout.

There’s no real way to know which Rhio I’ll come home as, until I do in fact, get home. It changes hour to hour, moment to moment. But even in the middle of that fear, I held onto the morning I had. Because in Lidl – standing in front of Biscoff cereal and peanut butter jars – I felt the most like me than I had in years and even if the rest of the day at home is complete rubbish, that’s not nothing.

Home Sweet Home? Or No?

After putting the shopping away, I had a meltdown. I was overstimulated, overwhelmed, and upset. Why can’t I be that other Rhio all the time? I was supposed to eat as soon as I got home, and I skipped it. But then…

I sat there on the sofa thinking, “Oh, I’ll just wait until dinner,” while watching the clock again, and I asked myself, “What the actual fuck are you doing? Aren’t we recovering for this exact reason? Clock watching SUCKS. We can’t DO anything now until dinner, because we are so hungry, and clock watching.”

Fed up of my own shit, I went to the kitchen. I had bought macchiato pods for my Tassimo machine to try. Me and milk in drinks have a long history. I have not had a coffee with milk in it since 2005. That was the last time – it was a cappuccino when my son was a baby – and I haven’t had milk in my coffee since that day (aside from the white mocha I posted about the other day which didn’t count because it was a powdered sachet).

I made myself the L’Or macchiato, despite Clippy’s rules about calories in drinks and despite my weird and boring history with milk in coffee. The macchiato was beautifully layered – I loved the look of the aurora milk layer at the bottom – and I drank it. All of it. And it was the best coffee I have EVER had. Better than my usual Americano (the only coffee I’ve drunk for the last 20 years), absolutely.

Then, well, coffee actually makes me hungry. It’s not an appetite suppressant for me. It relaxes me so much I want to fall asleep after drinking one, and then through that relaxation, it makes me hungry. So I went to the kitchen and got out the chicken shawarma salad I bought in Lidl and sat and ate it.

It had olives in it. I’m 41, and I’ve never in my life even tried them – or olive oil – I was too scared. Turns out? I like olives.

The chicken shawarma salad, complete with olives, was absolutely delicious. I used all of the dressing, but honestly, I would have totally used even more. The yoghurt and mint dressing was almost a religious experience.

I was pretty proud of myself, being scared Rhio but commanding the energy of excited defiant Rhio to eat it – and because of that, I found my true love, the one for me: the macchiato.

I even laughed thinking about how the Starbucks barista, who knows me as the “Americano woman,” is going to flip out. He knows I only ever order Americano. He might pass out when I turn up asking for a macchiato. (Current mental hunger brain while writing that last sentence: “OH I BET THE STARBUCKS ONE IS GOOD.”)

After the macchiato and salad, I was better able to write my journal, my blog, and I didn’t have to burn an hour waiting for an arbitrary time to eat food.

This is exactly what I’m fighting for – Freedom. And apparently, macchiatos.

The Macchiato Obsessed Queen Has Spoken

Day 1 wasn’t exactly a magical beginning. It wasn’t an aesthetic “perfect first day of recovery” story. It was full of panic but also excitement, meltdowns but also defiance, shame, overwhelm, weird digestive sounds, fear, and even the seemingly mundane – grocery shopping.

It was full of Clippy shouting that I couldn’t do this – me believing it – and simultaneously telling it to fuck all the way off in the fridge section in Lidl.

It was full of coming home and staging further rebellions against it, despite doubting myself – Defying specific food times. Eating a salad bowl I’ve always wanted to buy. Finding out I actually like olives after 41 years. Drinking a macchiato after 20 years.

It looked like any other day of grocery shopping –
but really, it felt like the first day of the rest of my life. Because it was.

Or maybe I’ve just had far too many macchiatos today.

(By the way there was a lot more food than this later on. But this post was long enough. I’m planning to do a separate food wins/reviews post <3)

The song for this post :-
With every biscuit she sank with a drink,
Knives full of biscoff in the kitchen sink.