I haven’t really mentioned my ED recovery much, well, considering just how in it I am and how much I’ve been doing behind the scenes. The fact is, I’ve recovered in a way internet recovery communities would say is “Doing recovery wrong”.

Often I find myself wondering if I’m even allowed to be proud of my wins because of knowing how much crap people in the recovery community give you for eating a protein bar, let alone everything else that I do. They seem to have more rules than my ED gives me.

Despite an ED being a medical and psychological condition there is hardly ANY nuance whatsoever in recovery discourse online. No consideration of the fact that I am 42, recovered from HA straight into worsening perimenopause, and therefore I need to recover differently than when I first recovered at 28. There is not even any thought about people with medical dietary restrictions.

Recovery online is often black or white, and after doing it the way the internet wanted me to last time, I knew that I couldn’t do that again this time. While it might be suitable for some people, it really didn’t work for me or my body at all and caused new problems I didn’t have before.

Anyway, this silence is about to change. I’m a healthy weight now, despite not doing “All in” I haven’t had extreme hunger for MONTHS, and I think I’m in a healthy enough place to talk about everything that I’ve done to get here. I’m going to ease slowly into it with some of the wins I’ve had recently.

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If You Buy That You Will Eat It

I have managed to work out an estimate of my maintenance calories but some days, about three times a week, I am hungry for more than that. Corrupted Clippy – what I call my ED – gets in my head a lot about the fact that if I eat over my maintenance calories it has to be “WORTH IT”. It has to be MAGNIFICENT food that I LOVE. If I don’t have any food here that is “worth it” I just won’t eat anything else.

I decided a small step towards challenging that was to buy food I LOVE for precisely when that happens. I bought Greggs cookies, chocolate pistachios, and vegetable crisps. I REALLY love all of them so much. Vegetable crisps are PEAK and potato crisps are MID and I will NOT be discussing this further.

Unfortunately my ED was NOT HAPPY about me even trying to buy any of these. I get anxious about being outside anyway, and then I’m arguing with an imaginary corrupted paperclip in my head in the chocolate aisle.
“It looks like you’re trying to buy chocolate coated pistachios. DONT BUY THAT, if you buy that you will eat it”
It doesn’t seem to understand the concept of food shopping. That’s what is SUPPOSED to happen when you buy food.
“If you eat that you will BE MORE SAD and ANXIOUS”
Yeah, and I hate that that’s true. But it is slightly better than feeling completely DEAD INSIDE.
“It looks like you’re trying to gain weight by eating extra would you like help spiralling about it?”
Weight gain tends to be what happens when you eat above your maintenance.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as “Clippy lies to me constantly”, it doesn’t. Sometimes I have to sit with the fact that it was correct about what would happen without accepting that it was therefore right about what I should do.

It reminds me of Johnny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077. Sometimes he has a good point, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him using a nuclear weapon on Arasaka tower**. People often say, “Oh EDs lie to you constantly, just do the opposite” and I think they’d be a lot easier to deal with if that was actually the case.

Instead of acquiring fissile material, I enjoyed my Greggs cookie, vegetable crisps and chocolate coated pistachios. Yes, I did gain weight, but that’s also kind of the point of recovery.

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I Wore Clothes I Was Scared to Wear

It was recently very hot and despite my anxiety I wore my shorts outside. Today, despite dealing with TERRIBLE OCD, I decided it was, nevertheless, the day to challenge wearing my leggings without wearing a long top to hide the top part of my legs.

I had never done either of those until this recovery. Throughout the 12 years of my previous recovery I’d just hide all of my body in flowy oversized black clothes ALL OF THE TIME. Even in a heatwave. This recovery I’m wearing form fitting clothes, colours, and actually feeling more in my body than EVER before.

My last recovery left this permanent sensory feeling of wearing a weight suit I couldn’t take off. It actually caused a lot of chronic pain in my hypermobile joints. I dissociated from my body pretty much all of the time to deal with it, and to stay in recovery. I felt like the little alien piloting a human in Men in Black – my body was nothing but a machine my brain was piloting. Recovering differently this time has brought me back into my body in a way I haven’t experienced since I was pregnant 22 years ago.

It has been giving me a much better relationship with my body, even if being in my body has been INCREDIBLY hard to get used to. I also still get very anxious about “being on display”, by which I mean being perceived, particularly in ways I don’t want to be perceived. It’s not even a body image thing and even exists when I’ve lost weight. It’s almost as if I wish to be invisible. It’s also why there aren’t many pictures of me on my blog, I rarely even take selfies.

Wearing the leggings with a short t-shirt today was really difficult, but I did it, and I know it’s one of those things I’m going to have to repeat continually. I wore shorts last year and made a post about it, but when the many “Wales pretending to be SOUTHERN SPAIN” heatwaves came around this year, I fell back into the OH NO SHORTS ARE TERRIFYING AGAIN.

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I’m Getting A Bit Better At Handling My Weight

Weighing yourself when you’re in perimenopause is a ride. Weighing yourself when you’re in ED recovery while going through perimenopause, taking creatine and lifting is EVEN WILDER. My weight is absolutely insane. I have struggled with it this whole recovery.

It has been very difficult to estimate my maintenance because I am dealing with so much CHAOTIC NOISE. MacroFactor gave up and just started giving me maintenance calorie amounts whereby it must have assumed I was in a COMA. The problem is, I can eat the same amount of calories every single day and my weight bounces between two numbers so I think I’m eating maintenance, but then all of a sudden I’ll gain weight continually and quite rapidly every single day for a week and a half.

I’ll freak out and think I’m eating too much and drop my calories thinking that if I continually gain weight every day for a week and a half I must be in a surplus. It’s the ONLY explanation. However, lately I’ve instead been waiting it out, again I gained weight every single day for a week and a half, it was 1.5kg, then, while on purpose NOT dropping calories (it was ROUGH) I woke up having apparently lost almost 2kg in a single day.

Whatever was happening, I obviously hadn’t gained 1.5kg and then lost almost 2kg overnight. A huge amount of what I was looking at was noise. There are clearly some water-weight shenanigans going on. It also makes sense because I am constantly dealing with night sweats and hot flushes, while also dealing with recovery from lifting which when you have hypermobility comes with increased inflammation.

One of the things that helped me deal with the weight displayed on the scale was that I had to weigh my adjustable dumbbells. I was sure they were wrong, that the plates were heavier than they stated on them. I was right they were wrong, I held two 18kg dumbbells and apparently they made 37.5kg.

To measure them I held one in each hand and stood on my scale, which meant I saw my weight plus 37.5kg. My ED immediately flipped out like it was really my weight. I have really bad OCD type numberwang problems with my weight. I had to sit down because I’d started to panic so much. But then, something weird happened: I started recognising that the scale was weighing what it had no idea were dumbbells. In a way, it’s the same with me.

It’s just weighing a number that doesn’t mean anything really. It doesnt say what that weight is made of, whether it’s human or whatever stinky material Argos uses for its dumbbells. It just spits out mass according to the gravity on this planet. I think I will just do that exposure whenever I do strength now, also so I don’t try and lift too much because my plates are wrong.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the chaos of my weight during perimenopause. I do not even weigh if my body has obvious hormones like ovulation and shark week. The graph I’ve posted is WITHOUT that data. I also didn’t want to ban the scale. I’d rather learn to deal with it and not have the situation where I freak out because I’m going to the doctors and they might weigh me.

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I WIsh They Felt Like the Achievements They Are

It’s been harder this recovery to see these as wins, not just because of recovery community dogma, but because I’m so much older now than the last time I recovered. In fact, in the case of the Greggs cookie, instead of celebrating, I beat myself up for being proud of myself, “You ate a cookie, what do you want, a medal? You’re 42 for crying out loud”.

There’s also the problem that when I eat more food, it can destabilise me mentally My OCD gets worse, my mood drops and I feel like TOTAL CRAP. There is no, “I am in my aesthetic healing era”. It’s more, “recovery is HORRIBLE and I’d do anything to escape it”, while knowing that escape leads to even more problems.

It is a destructive coping mechanism I have been trying to give up, while still eating food. Yes, I have to “sit with discomfort” but that looks less like sitting by a rainy window with a blanket and a cup of tea, and more like having increased anxiety attacks, and desperately missing my best friend. Her death was one of the reasons I relapsed.

And yet, despite going through all of this pain, and dealing with all of this anxiety, and not feeling like I achieved anything, I still did.

** I’d have named it Johnny Silverhand, but I actually like Johnny Silverhand a great deal and have no feelings for my ED. It’s not my saviour, it’s not my friend, it’s not the main antagonist of my story, it’s just an annoying corrupted Microsoft Word pop-up I can’t go into Mikoshi to get rid of.

“Remember everything will be alright
We can meet again somewhere
Somewhere far away from here” :-