You might think my absence from the blog means I fell off the anorexia recovery wagon. That I gave up, spiralled, or just… stopped. And honestly, I wouldn’t blame you – my blog posts are usually VERY spiral-heavy.

But actually, the opposite is true.

I’ve just been really busy with recovery, and also taking care of my son and his crunchy foot. Even though it’s been over a week since he injured it, he can still barely walk on it. We’ve witnessed the full bruise colour spectrum. He’s still needing me to wait on him hand and, well… foot. I don’t mind. I’ve been trying to cheer him up, even when I’m exhausted.

Since there’s a lot to catch up on, I thought I’d give a proper update on how recovery is going – what I’ve been doing, what’s been difficult, and everything in between.

Newton’s First Law of Recovery

I’ve consistently eaten above maintenance every single day for the past two weeks. I still don’t really understand how I’ve done that. It doesn’t feel like triumph – more like Newton’s First Law: an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by another force. There’ve been meltdowns, shutdowns, spirals where I almost quit, but somehow… I ate the next meal anyway. I still don’t want to. Every single time, I still don’t want to. But I do it. Then I do it again.

Between meals, I’m already dreading the next. I regret eating the last one, and Clippy (my ED voice) gets endlessly creative with reasons to skip the next. But even on the worst days, I’m still eating. That’s new. That’s something.

The routine itself feels like a war. I’ve gone from one meal a day for five years to multiple meals a day. That sounds simple, but it’s not. It’s loud. It’s relentless. It’s ALWAYS scary. It’s… honestly, annoying. The repetition wears me down. I’ve felt burnt out from eating – even just the logistics of preparing food multiple times a day while being shouted at by my own brain. I win by doing it anyway, but I’m also kind of losing my mind in the process. I’ve cried over it more than once out of sheer exhaustion.

And it’s not just emotional. It’s logistical. I run out of food constantly because I’ve never had to shop for more than one daily meal for myself. Now add trying to recover during a cost of living crisis, while disabled and chronically fatigued. It feels like rebuilding a castle out of paper mâché – using receipts from Lidl and bank statements in the red.

And then, just to make it even more fun, there are the extreme hunger days.

Chaos Goblin Enters the Chat

I don’t even know how to explain them properly. It doesn’t feel like normal hunger – it feels like being possessed. Like my body is screaming in a language I barely understand, except the message is clear: feed me now, or suffer.

It’s not, “Oh, I could eat.”
It’s, “If I don’t eat something in the next five minutes, I will cry, collapse, or chew on the furniture.”

On those days, my usual meals – which already feel like a lot – aren’t even close to enough. I’ll eat dinner and still be ravenous. I’ll snack and still be thinking about toast. I’ll finish dessert and still find myself poking around the kitchen like a bear tracking Biscoff by scent.

And it’s infuriating. I’ve done everything “right.” I’ve eaten. I’ve hit my macros. I’ve been consistent. But suddenly, the Chaos Goblin bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and yells:

“That was cute. Now give me 2500 more calories or we riot.”

It’s such mental whiplash – the day before, I might have struggled to eat at all. Now I feel like a bottomless pit and have no idea where the line is between nourishment and chaos.

I get angry. At the hunger. At the lack of control. At how my brain can switch from “I don’t want food” to “devour all the Biscoff in the land” without warning. At how unfair it all feels. I get scared I’m bingeing because I’ve had bulimia before and that this is me swapping one problem for another.

I REALLY hate those days. I don’t feel like me on those days. I can’t do anything – not blog, not watch TV, not even think properly. My entire being is just food-focused. I’ve even had mental hunger WHILE eating a massive meal. Once I was halfway through a dense, filling plate, and my brain suddenly wanted hot dogs. I don’t even like hot dogs that much. I didn’t have any, hadn’t eaten them in over a decade – and yet my mind conjured images of them in perfect detail: sauce melting on top, crispy onions falling off the sides. Meanwhile, I’m trying to eat something else.

I have made progress with the Chaos Goblin, though too. I used to hide my Biscoff-eating alter ego – the one possessed by extreme hunger. I wouldn’t let my son see me eat during those moments because I felt greedy, out of control, disgusting, ashamed. I’d wait until he went to bed, terrified he’d think the same things Clippy was telling me: that I was too much, too hungry, too broken.

But now, I’ve started eating through Chaos Goblin episodes while he’s still awake. That might not sound like much, but for me, it’s HUGE. I still want to wait it out sometimes – I still feel the pull to hide – and sitting in that discomfort is incredibly painful. But I do it anyway thanks to my son encouraging me and getting my favourite Jellycat bear, Biscoff, involved, “Oh fren, give me all the Biscoff I have a rumbly in my tummy”.

So yes, extreme hunger and mental hunger are still happening. Thankfully, they’re sporadic. But there’s no set reason for them. I have a pattern-oriented brain and I cannot find the pattern. I’ve tried everything – changing macros, making sure I’m not restricting – but every 48–72 hours, the hunger comes crashing in like clockwork anyway, destroying whatever structure I’d built for the day.

I try to meet those days with food instead of fear. Even if I grumble. Even if I feel like a walking stomach. Even though I’m really scared. Even though I feel out of control and disgusted with myself. Even though I try to hold it off for as long as possible. Even though I know what’s coming: being painfully full, struggling to walk, not being able to stand straight, no sleep, night sweats, and the quiet dread of knowing this one event will lead to more rapid weight gain.

I Found the Higgs Boson – It Lives in the Large Biscoff Container

I’m still dealing with rapid weight gain and pretty bad oedema – including pitting oedema at times. Every single Chaos Goblin night causes me to gain 1–3kg overnight, and it stays. It doesn’t come off, even if I return to regular eating for a full week.

I’ve concluded that there must be a local Higgs field in my Biscoff cupboard. The more I interact with it, the more mass I gain. Someone contact CERN, because it’s the only way to explain how I’ve gained this much mass on so few calories.

I gained 7kg before even reaching weight-gain-calorie targets. Once I started eating those, I gained another 2kg in a single night just on my slight over maintenance calories. I’ve been aiming to gain 0.5kg a week, even factoring in Chaos Goblin nights, but the oedema is visibly distorting everything.

The oedema is AWFUL. My abdomen is constantly distended. My ankles have vanished. There are fluid bulges above my knees. My thighs and upper arms feel huge, dense, like dragging around sacks of wet cement. My skin is shiny, tight, burning. Sometimes it hurts just to wear clothes, especially around my joints. It’s also jarring, the oedema makes me look far bigger than my weight says I am.

My clothes? Don’t even get me started. I’ve grown out of leggings overnight. Ones that were loose yesterday won’t go over my thighs today. It’s a regular occurrence – and it adds to the financial burden of recovery. I’ve had to buy clothes urgently more than once. I’ll write more about that in another post – I’ve actually worked really hard on this aspect of recovery and want to share that.

Even basic movement feels like a feat. The extra weight is hell on my hypermobile joints. But I’m still trying to keep my activity level steady, because if I let chronic fatigue syndrome decondition me again, I’ll lose function forever. That’s what happened last time I recovered, and I’m doing everything I can to avoid repeating it.

And here’s something I’m genuinely proud of: after Chaos Goblin nights, I now keep eating normally – no matter what the scale says, no matter how puffy I am, no matter if clothes no longer fit. I no longer restrict the next day. I used to fast completely – just black coffee – to “even things out.” And while yeah, it technically did average out my weekly calories, I was still gaining weight anyway. Plus, it made the oedema worse. Unfortunately, eating the day after did absolutely nothing to prevent extreme hunger. It still came – every 48–72 hours, like clockwork. I hoped that eating properly after a chaos night would reduce it. If anything, it got more intense.

So much for the lie: “If you’re not restricting, it won’t happen.” I already knew that wasn’t true. But I needed to prove it to myself.

My oedema lasted months in my last recovery. I’m hoping it goes quicker this time – but I know I’ve probably got a long way to go, dragging these cement legs behind me.

The Bad, the Ugly, and Then… the Good

Has it all been bad? No. Has it been mostly awful? Yeah. I’ve hated most of the last two weeks.

I’m more tired than I’ve ever been. I can’t sleep. I’m constantly restless. I’m always in pain. Some days I have zero appetite, sometimes extremely nauseous, and have to fight myself to eat. Others, I’m ravenous and battling mental hunger all day. My body hurts and I hate how dense it feels and how I’m too aware of it 24/7. My bank account is gutted. I feel unsure if I’m doing too much or too little activity. I worry it’s a way to avoid gaining too fast – even though I’m gaining anyway.

BUT.

There are glimmers.

Moments. Little flashes of joy glinting across the surface of this awful, fast-moving river I’m trying not to drown in.

I laugh more with my son. We shared a tub of ice cream while watching JackSepticEye play Death Stranding 2. There have been times I’ve really enjoyed something I ate. I’ve had tiny flashes of my old self – inconsistent, but real. Especially on good days, or bear days, or even on the neutral ones when my brain pauses for long enough that I can just exist. I’ll be expanding upon all of these moments and my mental health too at a later date.

But for now I’m just trying to stay present in those moments. I’m trying to live inside them when they show up. Like when I randomly feel overwhelmed with love for my Jellycat bears and purposely don’t think too hard about it. Because I don’t know who I’m becoming. I’m not going back to my old self – I’m gaining weight into someone who ran to Clippy to escape grief. The healthy-weight version of me is the one who lost everything – including my best friend. And I know that version of me is still waiting, just past the edge of this process.

But despite everything I’ve written here – the pain, the fear, the exhaustion – I’m still recovering.
For the love of my son.
For the bears.
For the best friend I lost.
And maybe, one day, for me.

“On a river, I’m floating down the stream and back again
Like a prisoner, set me free, am I running out of time?”