I’ve been eating more for just over a month now, continuing my recovery from an ED relapse, and I’ve learnt more than I expected about my ED – who I call Corrupted Copilot. Named after Microsoft’s unhelpful AI that is installed into Windows computers whether you asked for it or not, because I didn’t consent to having this one installed in my brain either.

I thought a surplus would mean I’d just have to deal with weight gain – tolerate it, cope with it, get on with it. What I didn’t expect was having to come face to face with insecurities, anxieties, fears, the reasons behind them, some unexpected maths problems… and a sudden Rhio personality update.

---

You Can Think You’re Eating Maintenance and Still Be Underfuelling

If you eat X calories a day and your weight is stable, and if you eat X + 200 and gain, or X – 200 and lose, then mathematically that’s your maintenance.

That’s what I believed for the 130 days I maintained my weight during my period of ambivalence.

It was low – but I’m 42, in perimenopause, and I don’t do 10,000 steps a day, so it felt like it made sense. Even though I’d gained a decent amount of muscle this past year, which should have changed that number. Still, I accepted it.

Then I started a surplus. I took what I thought was maintenance and added 150 calories. My weight trended up 0.7kg in two weeks. According to the internet, this is impossible. I must have tracked wrong. I must have eaten more than I thought. Because obviously someone with a restrictive ED who is hyperfocused on the food they eat just forgets to log food (spoiler alert: NO they do not).

Anyway. “Impossible” maths annoyances aside gaining was the point, so I added another 100 calories despite being incredibly fearful still. Old “maintenance” + 250 and then something weird happened. I stopped gaining. My weight stabilised. And I felt like a completely different person.

That’s when it hit me: I might have been underfuelling the entire time I thought I was maintaining. If someone had said that to me a month ago, I would have been annoyed. You can’t create energy or tissue from nothing.

But that initial jump? That probably wasn’t all tissue. It was glycogen and water – and suddenly my muscles had something to work with. They then made themselves known. LOUDLY. I had definition everywhere.

My quads went from “visible under very specific conditions” to just… existing and making jeans a clothing type I just cannot wear anymore. They’re also objectively bigger. I know this because I’ve always had to measure for knee sleeves, and despite weighing less than I did pre-relapse, my thighs are now 2 inches larger.

Muscle changes the equation. Not just because it burns a few extra calories, but because it gives your body somewhere to actually store fuel. Add in daily creatine, and now there are even more places for glycogen and water to go.

So when you increase food, the scale doesn’t just reflect energy – it reflects a body that’s no longer running on empty.

How is this possible?

My body is very good at downregulating. I wasn’t myself. I had no energy, no spontaneous movement (NEAT), no fidgeting. Normally I vibrate – I’m constantly moving, can’t sit still, brain going a hundred miles an hour, legs bouncing, hands tapping, typing, stimming. All of that was just… off.

I blamed being 42 for it. I thought this was just what happens – you get older, you get more fatigued, things hurt more, recovery takes WAY longer, so you have less unconscious movement. That’s why women in their 40s commonly need less energy than they did in their 20s, especially during perimenopause. It made sense.

Then I ate more and everything came back online. The constant vibrating came back. I can’t sit still again. When I move, my muscles feel bouncy and full. My brain is loud – ridiculously loud. My emotions are back at full volume. I’m more reactive, I care more, I feel more. It’s a blessing and a curse. I’ll get into that later.

When women with muscle online said to eat more, I never believed it made sense for me. I didn’t think I needed that much food. Now I’m wondering how many of us are undereating – not because we don’t know better, but because we’re too scared of the scale moving to try eating more.

I was so focused on not moving the number that I ignored how that “maintenance” phase actually felt in my body. When isn’t that what really matters? Not only do I feel more like myself – my body does too.

Now comes the fear of having to eat even more to gain weight, but, it is the path I’m set on walking.

---

Fear Foods Are Sticky and Illogical

I’ve been working on my fear foods again, trying to figure out where they come from – because none of mine make any sense. Why is a Greggs sausage roll completely fine, but anything from the Lidl bakery aisle suddenly becomes too scary?

I’ve never cut out entire food groups. I’ve never believed “fat is bad”, “carbs are bad”, “sugar is bad” – even when those messages are everywhere, from government campaigns to things kids hear in primary school. Corrupted Copilot only cares about numbers.

My fear foods don’t come from diet culture or media messaging as most websites will have you believe if you Google it. They come from something else. The foods I fear are usually the ones that are about joy, not function.

A sausage roll has function. My son and I get one after the weekly shop because I’m exhausted and it solves a problem. It makes sense. Lidl pastries don’t solve a problem. They’re joyful. The croissants remind me of being in France – being told to take more, eating four for breakfast without thinking twice. They’re not about fuel. They’re about experience. That’s what makes them harder.

Fear foods are sticky too. I can eat something every day, feel fine about it – and then suddenly, I can’t.

I made Welsh cakes every week. Ate them daily. Then one day they were scary again. The eggs I bought to make more just sat in the fridge going off because I couldn’t deal with it.

Same with the pastries. I ate them every day in an earlier phase of recovery, stopped for a week, and suddenly they were off-limits again. Months go by. Then I bring them back, eat one every day for a while and it still feels fragile. Like it could flip again at any point.

I don’t think the stickiness is about the food, numbers or even my weight. I think it’s about how I feel about myself on any given day. I grew up in a house where food was used as a weapon. You only deserved nice food if you did something exceptionally good. You could lose dinner entirely for small things – just for being a kid. This was a common occurrence.

So somewhere along the way, food stopped being about hunger. It became about worth. I was often taught that minor infractions meant I didn’t deserve to eat food.

The most damaging messages about food didn’t come from thin celebrities, or the 90s, or whatever macro is being blamed this year. They came from inside my house – from people who were supposed to love me.

So now, if I feel like I’ve done something wrong – even something as ridiculous as having too much anxiety and struggling with something small and being mean to myself about it – I will feel like I don’t deserve food, especially not the foods that give me joy.

I would never think that about my son. No matter if he actually did something wrong, I’d still want him to have the food he loves most. I’ve brought him up that way. I’m trying to see myself the same way.

It’s just… harder than it sounds.

---

The Rhio Personality Update – With No Patch Notes

Since eating what I thought was a surplus – but what now feels like just enough – I’ve been very… me. Almost too me. It’s VERY intense. I’m more emotional, more reactive, more passionate, more loving, more opinionated. I’m squirmy again. Hyperactive. My brain does not shut up. It makes connections everywhere.

Some of those connections aren’t pleasant. Like realising my food fears don’t come from nowhere – they come from trauma.

I have no focus. No linear attention. My brain is everywhere at once, which makes writing suddenly really difficult. I spend half my time deleting tangents that only make sense to me. It’s hard to even sit still long enough to finish a thought. My brain screams that it’s too slow, too understimulating.

My blog posts from here on out may become slightly unhinged. Or is it, slightly more unhinged? You can decide.

I’m more forgetful too. Not because I’m not thinking – but because I’m thinking too much. My brain latches onto a connection and runs with it, and everything else just… disappears. It’s chaotic. Overwhelming.

It feels like I’ve been dropped into a canoe in the rapids with no lessons, no paddle, just trying to stay upright – and somehow also trying to avoid Kevin Bacon.

And then there’s everything else. All the reasons I relapsed. All the things I didn’t fully feel at the time. I think about my best friend, WeeGee, constantly. I think about losing her. I feel it.

I know this is good, if you’re not feeling these things fully you cannot accept it, but how do you accept that someone you loved died at 40? How do you accept that you’re now older than them, when they were always supposed to be older than you? How do you accept that you’ll never see them again?

And underneath that – How do I accept myself?

Being loud, chaotic, opinionated, passionate. That’s the version of me people have always said is “too much”. People preferred me when I wasn’t eating enough. I was quieter then. More focused. Easier to deal with. Less… me.

Apart from my son, WeeGee was the one person who saw all of me and made me feel safe to be even more myself. Without her, I don’t know how to be that person again. I think part of me tried to make myself small after she died. More agreeable. More likeable. Safer.

Because the one person who accepted all of me was gone, and I didn’t believe anyone else could. I think it’s what lead to convincing myself I was eating enough during my ambivalent phase because I was still quiet, still focused, less me. Everything was still turned down. Muted. Controlled. Now it’s all back.

I know, logically, that the connections I want – the real deep meaningful connections – require me to be authentic. That’s how I met WeeGee. You don’t build something real while pretending to be someone else.

It’s like being friends with Bob Odenkirk but only knowing Saul Goodman. That’s not a real connection. That’s a parasocial connection of the character someone plays, not them. I know all of this. I just don’t know how to not be terrified of it.

Because being small didn’t just make me easier to tolerate – It made me physically small, weak and well medically unwell too. And I can’t do that anymore if I want to stay in recovery.

I wish this Rhio DLC came with detailed patch notes. Instead, I find them out at 3am, when my brain suddenly decides sleep is optional.

---

Maximum Entropy?

This has been a surprisingly overwhelming and intense couple of weeks. I really thought all I’d have to deal with was weight gain – and jeans becoming even more impossible because of my full quads.

Instead, it’s been everything, everywhere, all at once. I used to describe this feeling as maximum entropy. Complete disorder. Everything scattered, nothing settled.

But it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels more like the beginning of something. Like the birth of the universe. Gas clouds, chaos, nothing in any kind of order. Intense, violent, overwhelming – and yet, at the same time, the start of something entirely new.

At the beginning of this, I thought eating more would just change my body. What it’s actually done is remove whatever was muting everything else – my mind, my soul even. This isn’t just weight gain. It’s energy. It’s emotion. It’s me.

And I think that’s why it’s so overwhelming. Because I’m not just dealing with food anymore – I’m dealing with all of it.

If I can only figure out how to stop being quite so scared of it all.

My blue jeans image reminded me of this song, called Blue Jeans. Funnily enough.