All aboard! Join me on my recovery struggle bus. In this post, you can be the passenger who disembarks whenever you’ve had enough of the woman staring out the window, loudly proclaiming her recovery struggles to the whole bus.
Go on, make an excuse – “I’ll just walk from here, it’s fine.”
It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s edged away from me on the bus.

You have the window seat on the bus however, so please enjoy my Jellycat Panda scenery, they’re photos from a recent walk to get even more food.

What triggered the struggle bus to arrive now? Nothing dramatic – it was just… timetabled. I’ve reached that familiar part of anorexia recovery where the struggle bus pulls in right on cue, ready to take people to the next destination. We all hope the grass is greener there.

Unfortunately, this particular bus must be German in origin – because no matter how much you hope it’s late, it’s always reliably on time.

The next stop will be Clippy Common

Welcome to Clippy Common

I’ve realised something really hard, and I’m struggling to sit with it:

Extreme hunger – and the way I’ve been responding to it – has become its own eating disordered system. I didn’t even see it happening. But it’s made me more afraid of food than I’ve ever been.

Right now, I’m eating in a way that’s mostly aligned with slow weight gain – giving myself a small calorie surplus so that my body has a chance to build lean mass, not just fat. Because fat? It comes back fast. But muscle? Takes months. And I need that muscle. My joints are unstable. They can’t carry weight alone.
Starvation atrophied any muscle I did have. So here we are.

But here’s the problem:
I’ve been trying to “account” for extreme hunger in a rigid way. Like it’s a switch I can plan around.
– “Today isn’t an extreme hunger day, so I can’t have that.”
– “That food is only for Chaos Goblin, not for me.”
– “I’m still hungry, but it’s not allowed today, so I’ll just go to bed hungry”

I thought I was being reasonable. But now I see it: I’ve just rebranded restriction in a more palatable way.

Eventually, going to bed hungry for 2–3 days inevitably triggers extreme hunger. So when I finally let myself eat, it’s no longer calm – it’s chaotic.
It looks like bingeing. It feels like bingeing. This makes all the red flags go up, because I’ve been here before. Binge-purge past-me knows this terrain.

And here’s where it gets even more ingrained – my brain has started associating certain “Chaos Goblin” foods with losing control. So even if I try to eat them in a reasonable way on a normal day, my body kicks into physiological extreme hunger anyway – because it now expects chaos when that food arrives.
And when that happens, Clippy (my ED) shows up to say:

“See? You can’t handle that food. You always lose control. Better go back to the plan.”
So I do
Back to the rigid, precise plan. Too scared to break it. Too scared to eat outside of it. Too scared to nudge the edges.

And it’s bad. I’m calculating every calorie on MyFitnessPal like I’m some gym bro trying to fine-tune macros for hypertrophy – except they’re not mentally ill. I am. And I’m obsessed and it is compulsive.

My weight gain’s been fast. I look better than I did. So if you judged my recovery by that metric alone, you’d probably think I’m doing great. But here I am, entering Biscoff products into MyFitnessPal, hoping they fit the plan exactly.

Clippy’s just wearing a different-coloured cape. I think I even fooled myself for a while.
“I’m doing better because I’m gaining weight… so this isn’t a problem.”
Until I realised it was because I wanted to eat something else for dinner, and couldn’t because I’d “Already eaten too much today”, in recovery, from anorexia. I shouldn’t be restricting anything my body needs all the calories it can get, yet, I am too afraid to let that happen.

The next stop is NEAT Alley.

Welcome to NEAT Alley

Everyone getting off at this stop is required to move constantly. NEAT stands for the calories you burn through everyday movements: cleaning your kitchen, fidgeting, taking the stairs instead of the lift, your step count.

Since I increased my calories, I feel like I have to be constantly moving or productive. Clippy won’t let me sit still without barraging me with insults about being lazy or undeserving of food. And the worst part? It’s compulsive. I do it before I even realise I’m doing it. I’ll keep doing it even if I’m exhausted or in REALLY BAD physical pain.

Sometimes I also do it just to distract myself from “hunger past what I’ve eaten on my meal plan.” If dinner did absolutely nothing? I’ll try to take my mind off it by being productive.

The next stop is Joy Restriction Point.

Welcome to Joy Restriction Point

I’m currently tangled in some unhinged calorie maths. I’ll suddenly want to eat a small thing that brings me joy, and it happens to be 300 calories. My brain goes: “Well, that’s enough calories for a meal, so I should have the meal instead.” Even though I wanted the smaller joyful thing. Even though if my body is asking for the smaller joyful thing, it’s probably craving fat – and a 300-calorie “meal” won’t have as much of it.

Even though I know that if I skip the joy food, I’ll inevitably end up eating a metric tonne of fat later just to compensate for restricting it.

It’s not even about the fat – it’s about the maths. It’s about trying to get as much food volume as possible for as few calories as possible. And then I get irrationally mad that a stupid ice cream stick is 300 calories and does nothing to touch the hunger hole I’m in.

What I’m doing is trying to control hunger by restricting joy.

Talking of joy, the next station is Emotion Road.

Welcome to Emotion Road

All my emotions have come screaming back – sometimes quite literally – in waves of frustration and anger. I’ve been so angry since my best friend WeeGee died, and I think a lot of it is grief.

But I’ve also come to realise that some of it is just… me. I’ve always had this fire inside me. I rant about the world. I try to make it funny. It’s how I’ve always coped. I think it’s part of my Welshness – we do have a fire-breathing dragon on our flag, after all.

When WeeGee died, I think I lost that part of myself. I felt so alone. And so many people told me I was “too much,” so I muted myself, tried to be smaller, quieter – hoping I wouldn’t be alone anymore.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. Most of the people I’ve met since have absolutely deserved my fire… and yet I say nothing. I let them trample over my boundaries. Then I cry about it privately, stew in righteous anger privately, then internalise it – and end up hating myself for not burning them to the ground when they crossed the line the first time.

So yeah. The anger is mine – but it’s grief-soaked. Sometimes I think WeeGee was the only person who will ever fully get me. So now I hide the parts of myself that people have criticised the most:

“You’re too loud.”
“You talk too much.”
“You’re too ranty.”
“You’re too creative.”
“You have too much fire.”
“You do too many things.”

I used to not care what people thought. I used to say I’d rather be alone than with people who didn’t get me. And I meant it. I also know that if I don’t let this righteous fury out somehow, I implode.

It really doesn’t help when this sudden emotional range is mixed with the depression I’ve been dealing with lately – “No one will ever understand me”, “I’ll be alone forever”. It makes it difficult to work on yourself when your brain comes back with, “What’s the point?”

This is the end of the line for now.
Another struggle bus will be along in five minutes to take you the rest of the way.

But I need to deal with these stops first.

How I’m Getting Off the Bus

Just so you know – I’m not sharing all this as a performance of despair. I have plans. Messy ones, but plans nonetheless. So here’s what I’m doing to help myself get off the struggle bus, or at least make the ride less hellish:

Clippy Common – I’m going to eat extreme hunger foods most days – to break the association between “chaos foods” and losing control. It’s going to SUCK at first. Probably involve mess, chaos, severe anxiety, a LOT of crying, regret, shame, emergency Lidl trips, a swollen belly, and a side order of oedema. But it’s the only way.

NEAT Alley – I’m planning deliberate low movement days. Like a “movement meal plan” – where I know ahead of time I won’t be burning a tonne of calories, and I try to sit with it. I might blog. I might macrame. I’ll have to do something because I will have a meltdown if I do entirely nothing. But I won’t use exhaustion as a reason to punish myself.

Joy Restriction Point – I’m using novelty to fight the joy maths. Lidl bakery helps – their stuff is fresh, short-dated, and forces me to eat it when it’s best. That helps break the calorie-per-volume trap. I’m also trying every Biscoff product on earth. And if I’m craving a higher-calorie snack, I’m learning to trust that there’s probably a reason. I’m also going to try to shift toward smaller-volume, richer meals.

Emotion Road – I’m going to write more rant posts. My old blog was full of them, and I loved writing them. They helped me feel seen and helped other people laugh at the same things that drove me mad. I need to start letting the fire out again – even if it’s messy, even if people don’t like it.

I will not try to do all this at once. Because if I do, I’ll burn out. And then I’ll set fire to myself instead.

Thanks for riding the anorexia struggle bus. We hope you enjoyed your journey – despite the joyless food, ridiculous rules, righteous fury, and one extremely cursed paperclip conductor.

Until the next bus.

Cheers, drive.

There is it is again, that funny feeling.