It is my one-month anniversary of being at a healthy weight in my recovery from an anorexia relapse. I’ve been maintaining the same weight all month – within 1 kg. My extreme-hunger Biscoff-eating chaos goblin is gone, and for once I’ve got weight stability instead of the thermodynamics-breaking chaos that’s been my life for the last five months.
By the way, I sat down intending to write a nice update with humour about where I am and what’s next in recovery. Instead, this post veered off into the messier stuff – grief, Clippy, depression, and the positives I can still see through it. It’s not linear, but neither is recovery. So here it is, exactly as it came out with some random photographs I’ve taken recently.
The Paradox of BMI 20
I have two set points, an upper one and a lower one. My lower one is exactly BMI 20. I hate BMI, by the way. It’s an outdated, ridiculous method of weighing the mass of a human. Astrophysicists can measure the mass of planets more accurately than doctors can measure the mass of people. Although, to be fair, if you measured the gravitational constant of me and a jar of Biscoff, you’d probably get a pretty accurate reading. The closer I orbit around Biscoff, the less mass I seem to weigh.
My body, however – just to spite my feelings about BMI – pays very close attention to the chart. My weight always stops spiralling as soon as it hits the coveted BMI 20. It happened the last time I recovered too, twelve years ago, so I wasn’t expecting it to be the same. Yet here we are: maintaining BMI 20 for a whole month.
I couldn’t have forced this if I tried. Before I reached BMI 20, even thinking about skipping meals would summon the chaos goblin. If I so much as cut the cheese in half on my burrito, it would get mad – and I’d end up eating way more than those lost calories later in Biscoff products. To be fair though, cutting a 30g portion of cheese in half does deserve punishment. Cheese is so gouda.
The chaos goblin has now gone into his long sleep, and I haven’t seen him in over a month. I still eat Biscoff, but I’m not obsessed with it anymore. I can skip meals and make up for them later to stay in recovery, without late-night binges or my son waking up to an absolute disaster in the kitchen.
That’s the paradox of BMI 20: I hate it but my body seems to love it enough to put the chaos goblin to sleep. I never thought I’d get here – in more ways than one.
We Have Normality, I Repeat We Have Normality
Having weight stability is surreal. I’ve written before about how utterly out-of-control the weight gain was up until this point. I gained so much on so few calories – a lot of it just eating maintenance. My extreme-hunger episodes only pushed me to ~2,500 kcal on a few separate days, and each time I’d get an overnight jump of 1-3 kg that stuck. Horrendous. Knee pain from sudden weight rises? Still dealing with that. So waking up the same weight for a month is the stability I’ve needed – it let me pause and breathe for the first time in ages.
My brain hasn’t caught up with the body changes. I still gasp when I look down and realise my thighs have thighs (I didn’t even know my body could produce quads). I see a different person in the mirror. I walk into doors and get bruises because I don’t fit in the same space I used to. It’s disorienting.
This isn’t a return to my old self before the relapse. My body is unrecognisable from the last time I was this weight because my high-protein recovery has put actual muscle on me. I’m a completely different shape. My body dysmorphia is at an all-time high as a reward for my efforts – my brain thinks I’m about to shout GET TO THE CHOPPER because I have biceps and quads, but reality is less Arnie and more like “I have solid muscle and it’s fine”. I am not about to enter any bodybuilding contests based on the opinions of my body dysmorphia that’s for sure.
Last time I recovered I was stringy: muscle atrophy in arms and legs, lots of fat gain, weak and disabled in ways that made life harder. I preferred that look because it felt familiar and less threatening – even though it made me unwell. It’s why I posted my last post. I don’t want anyone to end up like that, it wasn’t a life. That’s why this is a battle I’ve never faced before – no one tells you to eat enough protein.
Is this what normality looks like for me? Will it get easier? Am I just not used to it? I’ve never stared down my muscle dysmorphia like this – intentionally calling in protein and watching my body change. I used to be too weak to build muscle, and I secretly liked that stringy look despite its cost. Now the muscles are back and my brain is full of noise.
We have normality, I repeat, we have normality therefore anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
The False Glimmer of BMI 20
You might think reaching BMI 20 would magically fix my mental health. It hasn’t. I’m still dealing with depression, mood swings, and a lot of grief – for my best friend, and for myself. Weight and food stability gives your brain more energy to feel, and the feelings don’t trickle in gently. No. WHAM – an unexpected item in the baggage area of everything you’ve been holding for the last five years. You used your ED to cope, and now that crutch is quieter, the full weight of what you’ve buried comes thudding down on top of you.
My depression drags me. I’m battling anhedonia: the things that used to give me joy (games, crafts, small pleasures) feel muted. You’d think stability would give me the capacity to enjoy them again, but often it just hands my brain the bandwidth to grieve properly. Joy is hard to find right now; my brain wants me to sit with the grief first, and it feels like until I do, I can’t access the light stuff.
I flit around trying to distract myself and make silly jokes – it works some days. Other days I run out of spoons and collapse on the sofa, completely exhausted mentally and physically, and all I can do is cry. Recovery is still absolutely exhausting. The armour of anhedonia feels like it’s trying to break and all I want is for it to be okay. But it’s not. I miss WeeGee so much. I miss the me I was when she was here, and recovery didn’t get me back to her – I’m someone new now, and I have to grieve the losses of myself: the me that existed with WeeGee, and the me who relapsed when all she wanted was her friend to come back.
Clippy Wears A Different Hat
My weight may be stable and healthy, but Clippy is still in my ear pretty much all the time. It now wears a different hat – a lecture about whether I “deserve” food depending on how active I’ve been. Yesterday I spent the day on the sofa, exhausted and out of spoons, and it put on a deranged TED Talk in my head about whether I deserved the same amount of food or not.
When I don’t comply, Clippy yells that I’m lazy and that I’m going to gain another 3kg in a day. It convinces me so thoroughly that I check the scales expecting catastrophe, and then I’m surprised when nothing has happened.
Due to my blood sugar issues I fast on days I do activity so I don’t crash – black coffee until around 6 pm. I’d hoped that a high-protein, macro-friendly diet and weight stability would steady my blood sugar, but it’s actually been so much worse. A few days ago, after trying to eat earlier just to fuel my going to Lidl, I had a nasty hypo (3.2 mmol) and correcting it took ages to get back to 4.0. Dextrose tablets are a lifesaver, but if I don’t follow them with a balanced meal the rollercoaster goes on all night. Clippy was very mad that I was eating extra food to correct hypoglycaemia that would have been dangerous to leave untreated.
New hat Clippy also wants me to stay at this weight forever. Less? Maybe. More? ABSOLUTELY NOT. That’s another reason I’ve held steady with the help of my body for a month – to give my brain time to catch up and to avoid a fresh battle with Clippy.
But getting to a healthy weight doesn’t magically make it go away. Anorexia isn’t a weight problem – it’s a mental health disorder. The weight can change, but the voice often stays. I’m working on that voice. I’m not done yet.
It Hasn’t All Been Bad I Swear
This is not the direction I intended for this post, but sometimes writing for my blog drags out the true feelings. You might think reading up until this far that I have regrets. No, it hasn’t been all bad. It’s so great not having extreme hunger anymore. Recovery belly is gone – I’m flat most of the time. Oedema is a thing of the past. My heart rate is now a respectable 70 pretty much all the time instead of the scary low numbers I was stuck with. And I don’t get bone-cold anymore.
The fat I gained has redistributed instead of just clinging to my abdomen, hips, and back. It’s back to where it usually hangs out. That happened fast – I’m sure the muscle helps, because last time it took ages. This time, over the course of two weeks when I reached this weight, the necessary “all in one place” fat stopped being a tyre around my middle. I even looked like I lost weight, though I hadn’t. My new bigger-size clothes loosened in spots they hadn’t before.
That’s been a relief too, not having to buy new clothes every few days. Gaining weight is ridiculously expensive. I did still need a new coat recently – it poured with rain again, and none of mine fit. My son helped pick one. He’s so stylish, and out of two choices he definitely picked the best one for me.
I don’t think about food all the time anymore, which is both a relief and a curse. The relief is obvious – I’m no longer glued to food YouTube or TikTok, and I can actually watch other content again. But it’s also strange when the noise in your head quiets and you’re left with everything else underneath. Still, I appreciate the freedom, and I’ll happily try every new supermarket launch (yes, including the pink digestives). Food novelty keeps me going when I’m struggling.
And then there are the physical wins: my new glutes mean it doesn’t hurt as much to lie in bed, sit on the sofa, or take a bath. I used to get such bad tailbone pain from just existing in a chair – now it’s better.
So even through the depression, I can still see and feel the positives. That’s worth holding onto.
Sorry This Post Turned Out Like This.
My original plan was to write a quick outline of where I am and where I’m going next in recovery. But my emotions saw their chance to storm the keyboard, and here we are. I think that matters though – because people often assume anorexia is just a weight illness, that once you reach a “healthy” weight you’re cured. I’m not. There’s still work to do. Recovery is as messy and non linear as this post turned out.
So I’ll save the “what’s next” for another post. For now I’ll end with Douglas Adams, because of course I will: I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Here’s what I was listening to writing this post. It kind of sounds like this post too. It’s from the Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Soundtrack.
Absurd Universe 