Since my last post, I’ve continued to eat the same, but I’ve hit a bit of a snag. A stressor came up, and my OCD flared as a result. I don’t think I quite realised how closely my ED was tied to my OCD… until now.

Now, continuing recovery feels like a battle again, and my brain is desperately trying to solve its own uncertainty principle. The constant, loud way it’s trying to derive a solution is grating on me – like it’s periodically scratching down the chalkboard.

I felt proud of doing so well eating more for a month. I felt more like myself. But now, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve suddenly gone seven steps back – that all the work I did doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, it still does matter… and that’s the problem.

The Recovery Values

I’ve worked hard in this recovery to build a healthier relationship with food, my body, and movement. Before I relapsed, I didn’t have a healthy relationship with any of it. I ate food that made my body feel like trash, got no joy from it whatsoever, and treated eating as something to get out of the way.

This time, I focused on gaining muscle and protecting my bones. Before I relapsed, I had already lost quite a bit of muscle mass – never eating enough protein, never touching weights, and perimenopause quietly doing its thing in the background. It started slowly when I was around 35, but now at 42, I’m very aware I’m in the tail end of it. My body has made that very clear.

None of this was disordered, and it didn’t start that way either. If anything, it was a positive way of dealing with grief. Losing my best friend at 40 has a way of showing you how fragile life is. Even when she knew her cancer was terminal, she still fought until the end.

I want to do the same.
To honour her.
To remember her.
To carry her with me.

I won’t “wait and see” and if my bones are like Swiss cheese after years of not eating enough. I will do something now. I will fight for myself, the same way she did.

WeeGee also wanted me to find joy in food. She tried, in her gentle way, to guide me there – offering suggestions, buying cookbooks, sharing what had worked for her after her own ED. I didn’t think it was possible for me. The only joy I had around food was our annual Christmas sandwich competition, and even that was more about the tradition and being together than the food itself.

It wasn’t until this recovery that I actually tried. Properly tried.

Now I do feel joy in food. I look forward to what I eat. It makes my body feel stable, nourished, and strong. I’m not swinging between highs and crashes, feeling violently ill, then repeating it all the next day like I used to.

It turns out your relationship with food improves when it isn’t causing distress every time you eat. Obvious, maybe – but it wasn’t to me. I was stuck on the idea that I should be able to eat whatever I wanted, even when it was making me feel awful.

I was proud of how far I’d come. I thought of WeeGee constantly whenever I ate and felt joy – that she’d be so happy if she knew I’d done this. She’d tell me how AWESOME I am. I can almost hear her.

I was also eating in line with my new values, changing my behaviour, building something better. Then my OCD flared. And suddenly, it felt like all of that progress disappeared. My OCD and ED seemed to join forces and turn everything I’d built against me.

More importantly, I didn’t even notice it was happening.

OCD Enters the Chat

Last week, I went through something stressful, and then all the “Numberwang” in my OCD brain became deafening. Suddenly, everything I’d been doing became about earning food. I became irrational about weight changes. Movement turned compulsive, a way to “equalise” the numbers – something I convinced myself was just my NEAT returning, like I said in my last post.

It’s true my NEAT did return, but so did the need to discharge compulsive anxiety through movement. NEAT is unconscious. What I was doing was very conscious.

I only realised when I hurt myself after a full week of doing far more than my body – already dealing with CFS and hypermobility – could handle. I only have a limited number of spoons. I used them all on Monday, then kept going until Friday anyway.

I injured my neck so badly I couldn’t swallow properly for a few days and was choking on food. I still carried on. That’s how I’ve ended up here again, now also with costochondritis.

Other OCD anxieties came back just as loudly. Including but not limited to the fact I catastrophised about the pain in my neck and chest, and felt strong urges to Google both to “check” it was just an injury and not something far more serious. It took a lot of effort – and a lot of crying – not to. It was actually the first time I didn’t compulsively Google and disappear down a rabbit hole where I’m convinced I have something rare, catastrophic, and wildly unlikely. I’m surprised Google hasn’t suggested chest bursting alien instead of costochondritis but I’m very glad it hasn’t.

I’ve had these anxieties since I can remember. However since perimenopause and grief, these OCD symptoms have become so much worse. Since Covid, I’ve also developed anxiety about leaving the house. I still wear a mask when I go outside – it helps – but that fear has flared again, and I’m now petrified of going out, especially on my own, in case something terrible happens.

My ED “helped” with these anxieties. When I relapsed, I started going outside more. I had less health anxiety about the chronic pain and injuries I get. I felt like I was living more. I didn’t realise quite how connected all of this was until it all came back at once.

Eating more restored me – but it also restored the full effects of OCD.

Now the croissant I was enjoying a week ago is a threat to a brain that cannot tolerate ANY uncertainty whatsoever.

The OCD Uncertainty Principle

My brain finding uncertainty completely intolerable has always felt deeply shameful. I’m embarrassed by it. Due to this, I struggle to even explain how bad it gets – how mentally unwell I can become if I can’t do my compulsions. How something as simple as rest, even when I’m ill or injured, can catapult my brain into what feels like a mental health catastrophe.

Medication has never really solved it. At best, it’s felt like taking paracetamol for a severe wound. At worst, it’s made things harder, because my brain doesn’t like the uncertainty of new medication either.

It feels embarrassing too, because it’s so opposite to who I am as a person. Because I love uncertainty… At least, intellectually.

I love physics. I know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I know Schrödinger’s Cat. I know that relativity itself starts to break down in extreme conditions, like inside a black hole. That excites me. The idea that the universe isn’t fully knowable – that certainty itself has limits – is fascinating. Even things like Loop Quantum Gravity, whether it’s right or not, are exciting to think about.

I enjoy uncertainty. I’ve even wondered if part of my drive to learn physics was my way of teaching my brain that uncertainty is a natural part of life – the universe and everything – and that it can be interesting, even exciting.

But my brain didn’t learn that lesson with me. If anything, it pushed back harder.

That’s the thing with OCD. Therapy is often about learning to live with the anxiety of uncertainty and not diving into compulsions. Not make it go away completely. But even that is incredibly hard when the compulsions feel so automatic that I don’t even realise I’m doing them – until it hurts to take a deep breath because my breastbone is on fire.

I didn’t even realise my ED was tethered to this OCD anxiety. It doesn’t make sense on the surface. How can something that risks my body failing actually reduce my anxiety about my body failing?

Because it’s certain.

I know what happens. I know how to “fix” it. I’ve done it before – relapse, recovery, repeat. That path is familiar. But this? This weight gain, this version of me, this life without WeeGee – I don’t know what it looks like.

My brain is also afraid of returning to the weight I was when everything fell apart. As if that weight is a destination. A place where all the bad things happened. Like going back to a physical location tied to trauma.

It was never really about how I looked. I didn’t feel much about my body at my pre-relapse weight. If anything, I was ashamed of my relapse, of how underweight I was and tried to hide it. It was always about the numbers. The further I am from that place, the safer my brain feels.

Now that I’m slowly edging back towards that weight, I can feel my brain scrambling for control:

Go backwards – it’s safer.
Move more so the surplus doesn’t take you there.
Do you really want to eat that croissant?
MOVE MORE
Danger.

And because of the way I’ve recovered this time, it’s an even bigger battle. I’ve given myself something to lose. And my brain doesn’t like that at all.

Anxiety, It’s Taking Over Me

I’ve never felt like I had anything to lose before. Now the thought of losing joy in food, losing muscle and therefore mobility, or undoing all the progress I’ve made with my bones makes going back feel impossible. Almost silly. Why would I give this up? These things are tied to values I’ve built in this recovery.

The problem is, to keep all of that, I have to live with this anxiety.

Anxiety that flares up over triggers I can’t avoid. Anxiety triggered by hormones, or something as random as a night of bad sleep with terrible night sweats. Anxiety that makes life feel like surviving one disaster before being launched into the next – even when I can logically see that isn’t true. I still end up believing it, especially when I’m exhausted from constantly fighting it, or worse, not even realising I’ve started listening to it.

Anxiety that turns food into a battle again.

Not the same battle as before – but a different one. Now I cry not because I’m eating, but because even something as simple as eating has become hard again. Last week there was joy in it. Now it feels like grief. And then my brain adds another layer – maybe I don’t deserve that joy anyway, because I can’t handle uncertainty, which is ridiculous when the entire universe operates on it.

I’ve worked hard to distract myself, to not give in to compulsions. But there’s been a lot of crying. I wish I could just make it all stop. I wish I didn’t have to distract myself constantly just to get through the day. I wish all of this work meant solving it, not accepting that I’ll always have it.

This weekend I tried audiobooks. Sometimes it works – I relax into the story. Then suddenly my anxiety cuts in, sharp and loud, like I’ve forgotten something important, pulling me straight out of it. One moment I’m there, the next I’m gone.

I made Welsh cakes again and ate them anyway. I tried to find the joy in them. But now they sit in the container feeling like, “not today – not a battle I want today, over something so small.”

I’ve still eaten my croissants every day, even though they’ve become a battle too. I spent the whole weekend not moving, trying to heal my ribs. I can do these things – but not without mental anguish. I’ve been an absolute mess.

I get so tired of everything being a fight. It doesn’t take long before I’m burnt out, exhausted, and then something else comes along and it all feels like too much on top of everything I’m already carrying.

I wish there was something as effective as my ED was at quieting this anxiety. Not because I want that life back – it brought its own problems and now I have too much to lose – but because I’ve tried everything else. There isn’t a suggestion I haven’t followed. Exposure, workbooks, mindfulness, resilience therapy, to name but a few. I’ve been trying to fight this for most of my life.

That’s the hardest part.

I’m exhausted by the fact that nothing makes it go away completely. That I can do all the right things, and the reward still feels like more anxiety.

Somehow, right now at least, I’m still doing it anyway. Why? I know life doesn’t – and never will – come with a crystal ball offering the certainty my brain wants. And even if it did, I’d probably be too anxious to look at it anyway.

The song for the post is this beautiful song, that really feels like trying to live with all of this anxiety without WeeGee.