I’ve never written about the details of my recovery before – I will, one day but it requires so much explanation – but right now I need to talk about the stage I’m in. I’ve been sitting at BMI 20 for over a month now. My body feels fine and safe here. There’s no chaos goblin inside me raiding the cupboards at midnight, no extreme hunger Biscoff demands and my son hasn’t woken up to a kitchen that resembles the aftermath of a spoon and peanut butter explosion in quite a while.

My body has finally stopped shouting. It’s calm. I can plan what I eat and mostly everything is fine. I can even deviate without spiralling. My clothes haven’t staged a mutiny in a while, and every time I weigh myself the number sits in the same one-kilogram margin. That stability is comforting – which is also exactly the problem.

I am stuck.

BMI 20 Is Not the Finish Line

Incase you missed the post where I went off on a rant about BMI, my thoughts on BMI are as follows – It is absolutely rubbish. We can better assess the mass of distant planets than we can humans on this planet. My body however, likes to play games with me and it wasn’t me that stopped at this coveted BMI, it was my body. As soon as I got here, extreme hunger turned off and I stopped being so obsessed with Biscoff – although I do still eat them every single day. Biscoff means a lot to me now.

I have two set points an upper one and a lower one – I didn’t just make that up either, there’s science backing a Dual Point Intervention Model that most people have two, not one. BMI 20 just so happens to be my lower set point. I know where my upper set point is, and I know where my body is happiest, right in the middle of those two points.

BMI 20 therefore is not the finish line, for me, or for many other people – another reason BMI is a terrible model. The finish line of weight gain is where your own body is happiest. At 41, holding on desperately to BMI 20 like a life raft knowing full well my body is happier at a higher BMI is not healthy, or recovery. It proves I’m still struggling with Clippy (my ED) in my brain whispering about how staying here is fine. If I stayed here, it would be quasi recovery, and staying still is not moving forward.

And still – even knowing all that – I can’t quite untie the life raft and wade into the tide. I’m too scared I won’t actually be able to swim.

I Try To Say Goodbye and I Choke, Try to Walk Away and I Stumble

For weeks I’ve been trying to swim away from BMI 20. I nudged my calories up by 100 a week, and this week I finally found my upper maintenance. That told me exactly where real weight-gain calories begin.

Sometimes I get brave and push more food in despite not being hungry – ride a little wave of courage – and for a day or two I think, I can do this. I picture the benefits: more weight that actually helps me, more muscle despite the mirror’s dysmorphic lies, better mobility and bone health as I age with hypermobility. I’ve done this recovery mostly by myself, so I tell myself I can do this.

Then dread rises up from the ocean I’m bobbing on like a Leviathan*: what are you doing? You can’t cope with the consequences – new clothes, new body, new problems. Better to stay small and steady. So I retreat to BMI 20 and my body quietly eats the extra trying to swim me back to the life raft. Metaphorical Leviathan swimming apparently counts as cardio.

I wish brave-me lived here permanently. Instead I can become that tiny, terrified kid who hid in the wardrobe, hoping disappearance will fix things. Little-me still lurks, and when she appears I choke.

Some days both versions show up: I’m proud I tried, then ashamed I couldn’t keep going. I know the right thing to do – and I can’t do it. That’s the stuck place I’m writing from.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend

Clippy – that corrupted paperclip that’s been my dark companion – is in the life raft too. It’s stupidly loyal; it soothed me when no one else did, so in the middle of the dark sea it still feels like company even while it’s trying to ruin me. Parting with it feels impossible sometimes, like I’m being asked to give up the only thing that kept me from facing all the Leviathans in my life alone. We joined forces to battle a shared enemy: the grief of losing my best friend, WeeGee.

Clippy has been my abuser and my crutch in equal measure. It is my enemy and, at the same time, my saviour. I grieve the company it offers in the cold hours when I have no one else and am wishing for WeeGee to come back. I grieve the weird safety of a voice that told me what made sense when the rest of the world didn’t. I grieve the safety it offered me.

So the question that sits heavy in my chest is simple and terrifying: what will I have when I swim away from it? I have already lost so many things to recovery – friends who couldn’t stay, routines that broke, all of the coping mechanisms I gave up to survive. I can’t bear to lose one more thing.

Letting Clippy go feels like swimming away and not even knowing if there’s land in front of me, and even if I do somehow touch grass, what is waiting for me there? Or who? Part of me thinks: if I keep Clippy and stay right here in this life raft, at least I keep some company. If I let it go, I might be utterly alone with the real feelings – the emptiness and loneliness of grief.

I Don’t Know Where To Go From Here

Everyone acts like BMI 20 is a magic number – like once you hit it, everything is fixed. The truth is messier: BMI is rubbish, and what I actually did was stop dying. That is huge. Getting here, especially on my own, is an achievement. But “not dying” is not the same as living. It can mean surviving, barely holding on. Right now I’m surviving in a life raft, caught between knowing I must swim away and being unable to.

This battle is invisible. People tell me I look better – which is true – and then assume I’m fine. They don’t see the fight running on repeat inside my head. I walk down streets passing people that think I’m healthy while my supermarket trolley is the site of a weekly internal war: will this be the week I add the extra calories, or do I put it back?

I get these waves of bravery that push me forward during the day. For a few hours I think, I can do this. I picture a stronger, heavier me with better mobility and more muscle. Then night comes and the dread pulls me back to the raft, and I use all that day’s energy retreating. I grieve the brave version of me. Sometimes I don’t even know which of us I am – the timid or the brave.

What I hope for is simple: that the brave me learns to trust herself enough to swim for a shore she can’t yet see. One day maybe she’ll be strong enough to become a life raft for the timid and little me.

So this is where I am currently, and this post is everything I’m battling when I’ve tried to swim. Despite retreating I still try to push forward, every single day. I keep jumping in the water, hoping this time will be the time, I finally reach the shore.

*This is a Mass Effect reference. If you pictured a different Leviathan, that’s fine too – but it wouldn’t be my post without at least one gaming nod. (WeeGee used to tuck little asterisks like this into her blog; this one’s for her.)

For the song, I was aiming for something deep and meaningful to fit the tone – all rivers, rafts, boats. Instead, my brain queued up Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me A River. The damage is done, so I guess I’ll be leaving… it in the playlist.