I’m finally feeling physically better after being really poorly with some kind of sickness bug for a week. Having a sickness bug in recovery was absolutely dreadful – but the worst part wasn’t the illness itself.
The worst part was getting better, and having to return to normal eating again.

I had a lot of time to think while ill. Which also meant: I had a lot of time to feel. I was too poorly to do anything for days. No distractions. No “self-care.” Just stuck there in my body, with my thoughts, unable to move or numb anything.

It led to some pretty rocky mental health. I’ve been working really hard to get back on track with recovery – but my mental health being so shaky has made it very difficult.

Bodily Awareness

Getting better from the illness made me very aware of my body – suddenly and constantly. I can feel how different my body is. How big it’s gotten. How unfamiliar it feels to exist in.
And all that runs through my head is:

What have I done to myself?
Why did I do this?
Go back. Restrict. Get it off.

I’m sure it was the illness itself that made me more bodily aware. I mean – how could I not be aware of my body and my intake or lack thereof 24/7, when it was making horrible noises, with terrible abdominal cramps of doom, and forcing me to dash to the bathroom at all hours?

But getting better didn’t help either, in many ways.

The first of which… was creatine.

The Creatine Panic

I started taking creatine a few weeks ago, mostly because I’ve read so many studies on the benefits for women over 40 (which I am). Creatine, however, causes weight gain. I knew that when I started taking it – and despite being utterly terrified of that, the studies were too amazing to pass up.

For three weeks, I had no weight gain. So I thought, maybe it isn’t going to happen to me. Which, when I look back on it, is a bit silly – because that’s not how creatine works.

Creatine floods your muscles with intracellular water. You can gain anywhere from 1–3lbs. I gained just shy of 3lbs in a week, while ill. Clippy (my ED) was loving the fact I was sick, because I couldn’t keep anything down or in for days. It thought we were on our way to a nice little weight drop. So imagine both of us being shocked to see 3lbs of gain, while barely eating.

I knew it was water this time. I couldn’t see exactly where it went, but my muscles now look fuller when relaxed, and my knees were sore again – classic sign for me. I always get knee pain from increased water. I guess I must have been so creatine deficient, it took over three weeks of taking it daily to fully saturate my muscles and do anything noticeable.

The creatine panic causes this internal war in my head. Throughout recovery I’ve focused on protein, creatine, and making sure my body gains lean mass, not just fat. I’m 41, with joint issues, and a body that’s now losing more muscle and needing more protein as I age due to anabolic resistance. Having low lean mass when you’re 41 and have joint issues is a terrible idea.

This has caused more weight gain, and faster than last time. Which is good – seeing as I’m actually building the scaffolding to carry the fat I’ve also gained. Creatine itself causes weight gain. But I do it because it’s what’s best for me.

But I still cry about it because I HATE it. Even though I have caused this to happen. Even though this was the best time to take it before I reached my set point because gaining over that would have freaked me out EVEN MORE.

I will cry about creatine causing this weight gain and spiral into a meltdown over it – while walking into the kitchen to make my daily creatine drink and downing a protein shake like my life depends on it.

Because it does.

It still really hurts though. I get mad about it. I want to restrict to “account” for this gain. But I don’t. Because I know what’s happening. I know this is recovery. I know I’m doing the right thing. It just doesn’t feel good right now.

And then – because the universe has jokes – the oedema came back too. On top of it all.

Ready Or Not Here I Come, Cells Can’t Hide, Gonna Find Them and Make Them Leaky

Returning to normal eating after the unintended restriction of illness triggered a whole new wave of oedema. I didn’t want to carefully add more food slowly – I thought the best thing to do was just return to maintenance as quickly as possible, but with plainer foods.

My initial refeeding oedema had mostly settled before I got sick. But now it’s back – like after the Biscoff Extreme Hunger Nights of Yore. Except I haven’t gone fist-deep into a jar of Biscoff. I’ve just been eating what my body needs to survive every day. But here comes the tsunami of leaky cells anyway.

I’m back with puffy ankles, sock marks, and super shiny, tight-skinned thighs that won’t quit swelling. I even get pitting if I lean my elbows on them.
This happened after and on top of the creatine water weight, and it kicked in the day after I returned to my full intake – so I really don’t think it’s related to creatine.

Which means: despite being ill and not eating much at all, all of my clothes are now tight again. The ones I just bought two weeks ago.
Cue the financial panic of needing to buy yet another new wardrobe.
But it’s not just water. My metabolism tanked – hard – from being ill.
UGH.

This Makes No Mathematical SENSE!

My entire recovery I’ve been so mad about my metabolism. In recovery, you can gain weight on shockingly low amounts of food. It’s normal. I’ve seen medical papers confirming that the body can gain actual mass eating as little as 1400 calories a day when recovering. And thats for young people, not for 40 year olds whose maintenance at a safe weight is near that amount.

That “calories in, calories out” thing? Yeah… not so much when it comes to starvation, malnutrition and being underweight.

I have never eaten 7000 calories over my maintenance in a week (theoretically enough to gain 1kg of fat). Not once. And yet – I’ve now gained 12kg, all of it overnight after eating extra for one day and some of that is most definitely fat.

Before I got sick, I’d started a slow reverse diet: I began at my calculated maintenance, waited for the oedema to calm down, and then increased by 100 calories per week (sometimes more if I was still hungry or dealing with extreme hunger).

At that point, I was eating 200 – 300 calories per day over maintenance and maintaining my weight. But getting ill set me back. My metabolism shut down again. So when I tried to return to my post-reverse-diet maintenance intake… it triggered daily weight gain. So I’ve had to drop back down to my original calculated maintenance, and I’ll try to climb up again from there.

I’ve been trying to find the top end of my maintenance so I can gain weight slowly back to my set point. Because here’s the thing no one tells you:

Lean mass takes way longer to build than fat does.

It’s probably one of the reasons I gained so much weight during my last recovery but still had visibly atrophied muscles. You will gain fat, no matter how hard you try to prioritise muscle. But if you don’t gain any lean mass to scaffold the fat? That can – and does – happen in recovery.

It happened to me.

My last recovery really affected my health – increased chronic fatigue syndrome, joint pain, mobility issues. That’s what I’m trying to avoid this time. That’s why I’m focused on lean mass, creatine, and protein, even when my ED is screaming at me. I have no problem with gaining fat, it is absolutely unavoidable, but I can’t be in the same position as last time. It never got better even after 12 years, it actually got worse due to ageing as you lose lean mass with age.

I tried to use coping mechanisms to manage the stress of this recovery chaos.
And they seemed to be working. But being ill made me realise just how much of it was distraction.

I Realised Coping Mechanisms Work Too Well

Coping mechanisms do work, but only as distractions – a prescribed avoidance tool with a halo on it.
Funny, because they do the exact same thing for my mental health as playing Halo.
But that’s not prescribed – that’s a problem, apparently. But what exactly is the difference between me escaping my emotions on planet Reach, and escaping them by knotting a macramé bow for one of my Jellycats?

I used to think coping mechanisms were about sitting with the emotion. It only took getting physically ill to realise: they’re actually just keeping me away from the emotion. When I can’t physically do “self-care” – aka prescribed avoidance – all day, what’s left is a mountain of backed-up feelings. And then I get horribly mentally unwell from being overburdened by ALL of them at once.

Everything has been trying to barrel through – grief, recovery, my changing body. Being ill made me realise just how much I’ve been distracting myself from everything.
I distract myself after meals.
I distract myself after getting changed.
I distract myself in the bath and the shower with YouTube videos.
All of my hobbies are distractions.
Even now I’ve been distracting myself hard with a new Jellycat (more about this new arrival soon).
I can’t even sit by the window all sad for long, because something outside will distract me – usually my wood pigeon friend, who sees me by the window and assumes it’s time for walnuts.

It’s all good self-care activities – stuff they tell you to do to help you “sit with” complicated emotions. But it just feels like another way to mask how I really feel. As if any emotion at all isn’t allowed – and the second one rises, I have to smother it in distraction.

Whenever I tell my mental health team this, they accuse me of “doing self-care wrong.” Or worse – not working hard enough.
But the point is: it works too well. And then I become a pressure cooker of unfelt emotion, ready to erupt into a meltdown the moment I’m forced to stop – like when I get hit with a stomach bug and my only focus is running to the bathroom several times a day.

The only thing that actually works for me is blogging.

It forces me to sit in the emotion, because I have to name it. But even blogging can betray me – sometimes I catch myself writing in that matter-of-fact, emotionally absent tone, as if the action of writing itself has become another distraction. I delete those posts. They feel hollow. Like I’ve missed the point. When that happens, I have to give up and try again the next day.

So no – I can’t just blog in the middle of a meltdown. Not every thought that barrels through my head deserves to be published. Also I’m aware of how the internet is now. The toxic positivity. Most people don’t want to read about every meltdown I have.

Journalling doesn’t work. Don’t ask me why blogging does and journalling doesn’t. My guess? It’s about being perceived. Just like talking to someone helps more than writing in a notebook – blogging feels like I’m talking to someone. Even if no one reads it.

Actually, it feels like I’m talking to her. WeeGee. I met her on WordPress. We used to read each other’s posts. In a way, I feel like I’m still communicating with her here – someone who finally understood me.
Someone who still does.

All of this to say:
My mental health ended up in the toilet while I was running to it.
And all I could think was: without distractions, what’s left of me?

When All Is Dense and Done

I hate creatine.
I hate weight gain.
I hate that none of my clothes fit again and I can’t afford to keep replacing them.
I hate that I’m doing everything right – everything I didn’t do last time – and it still hurts this much.

I feel like I’ve lost the plot. Not just in recovery, but in who I am.
Like I’m watching myself from the outside, ticking the boxes – protein, creatine, maintenance calories, movement – and still somehow falling apart.

I’m tired of trying to “cope.” Tired of being told to sit with things I don’t know how to survive. Tired of distracting myself only to fall apart the moment I stop.

This is where I am right now.

No clean ending. No recovery montage. Just this.

A body I don’t recognise.
A mind that’s coming undone.
A blog post I’m not sure I should publish.

But here it is anyway.
Because even when I’m unravelled – I still want to be understood.
Even if I’m not sure how to understand myself right now.

For the song, this is just too perfect.