#restriction cw

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

I'm a minor and rlly struggling rn. Any wl tips without ⭐ving? :<

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time right now! I hope you choose to feed your body and soul. You deserve to be well fed and well loved!

I don’t think I can responsibly give you weight loss tips. I understand that you feel this is something that would help you struggle less, but without knowing your circumstances, I don’t think I can provide you with ways to attempt weight loss without potentially triggering coping mechanisms that are worse for you in the long run. I would suggest you identify what it is specifically that you are struggling with and I hope that you can then access what you need to feel better. If you feel your body is not well because of what you have to eat in your home, then working with a certified nutritionist would be best. But if this is more of a body image struggle, personal therapy might be a much more helpful route.

You mention that you are a minor. I am wondering if you are living with guardians that you trust to take you to a professional if you asked for that support?

[iguanagwenscreeches]

Dropping my hospital pics while in the hospital for €d recovery! I’m currently discharged but that was a..ride indeed!

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Hi, anon asking me if your ED is valid/if you should recover! I'm answering like this and leaving your ask unpublished because it has specific calorie counts/weight numbers in it and I try not to post those on my blog, but I did want to make a point to get back to you!

Your experience is valid and you are absolutely not alone. A lot of people with restrictive EDs will make themselves eat normally because people are watching, and then get extremely anxious about it later and punish themselves with even more excessive restriction. I also think the question "am I sick enough for it to count" is extremely common among people who suffer from EDs, as I think it validates our pain when someone can actually see and verify that we are hurting/sick. So I'm going to say something I've said on this blog a few times before, because I think it bears repeating.

The very sickest people suffering from EDs, those who end up needing treatment facilities to recover, those who end up with long-lasting medical complications, those who end up looking like the "stereotype" of an eating disorder - their disorder didn't start out like that. It started somewhere, and then it progressed. So if they ended up getting that sick, then the disorder was real the whole time. And a lot of people who get so severely sick end up wishing they'd been able to stop sooner.

You don't have to wait till it's worse to decide you deserve to get better, is the point I'm trying to make here. At any point on this road, you can say "I can see where this leads and I deserve to go in the opposite direction." You're allowed to decide you deserve that without having to reach some arbitrary amount of suffering in which the goalposts are constantly shifting. You're allowed to validate to yourself that you have suffered and struggled and that you deserve the chance to heal. The road to healing can start anywhere you decide it starts.

Also, gentle reminder that you might not be the best judge of your own appearance right now. A lot of people with restrictive EDs are not able to correctly perceive how drastic their weight loss has been. But you also haven't failed at recovery just because you're struggling right now - we have all struggled. It's okay to falter. Just get yourself up when you're ready and keep working toward healing.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

I gained some weight over the holidays which was already triggering but then I got really sick and I was too sick to eat and I lost a lot of weight. And I am really fighting a relapse, the ED voice is so loud though. And there’s a part of me that is listening and is like yeah maybe relapsing is the right thing to do, maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe I do need to lose weight. I don’t want to relapse but I also don’t want to gain weight again. I know I should tell someone but the ED voice says if I tell someone they’ll make sure I don’t relapse

Whenever the ED is telling you that you can't tell people things, it's not speaking in your best interests. I think part of you already knows that. The ED voice wants to to keep from telling people things because the ED wants to control you. And when you're following its orders, maybe you feel in control too. That makes it scary to tell other people what's going on, because then they might take some of the controls away from you and that's terrifying to think about, isn't it?

But do you trust that your loved ones just want to look out for your best interests? If you do, I think you know it's important that you talk to those you trust about what's going on. These people may be able to help you to work through the intensity of what you're going through, and help you set limits in ways that feel reasonable to you.

Your ED wants you to do this all alone. But I think you know you deserve support and community, and people who see you for more than just your body. You deserve people who can help you see yourself that way too.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Hi :) I’m so happy I found your blog!

I have been having trouble recently in recovery (3 months in) around needing to be more restrictive before an event. If I have plans to go to a club or to see friends, I tend to not eat as much as I should that day or even the day before too. If I know I’ll be drinking, my brain is thinking about the calories in the beer and I’m telling myself that I can eat after the event is done, meaning that I “earned the food” if I wait til then.

Yesterday this happened and I was very upset that I still had this trigger because I thought that my recovery was going well.

Do you have any advice as to how someone could overcome needing to restrict before an event?

So the thing about restricting prior to events where there will be lots of food and drinks - in the short term, it may lead to you consuming less, but in the long term, your body remembers what it feels like to have no food. Your body remembers what it feels like when you tell it that it can't have food. And your body remembers what it feels like when you hype yourself up for the point that you can have food, to the point that you're fixating on it. This is why restrictive eating disorders often lead down a path of binge-purge or binge-restrict cycles. You restrict, restrict, restrict until you finally get access to the food and then your body compels you to want more, not because you're enjoying it but because your body and mind have been hardwired to fixate on it. This leads to patterns of inconsistent eating - too little, too much, too little, too much - that further mess up your relationship with food.

However, it's possible that what you need is not this logical explanation for this. Maybe you already know this. It's possible that instead, you just need to take a breath, sit with yourself, and ask yourself why you feel you need to "earn" your calories.

Caloric intake isn't a luxury, but a basic human necessity. It's not something we should have to "work for." And you are no less deserving than any other human being. So you might need to take some time to unpack why you feel like you need to be deprived of food?

Once you have a better understanding of this underlying trigger, you might have a better understanding of what you need to tell yourself in order to work through this trigger when it comes up, and utilize coping strategies around the fear of eating normally on days when you are anticipating events. (Listing coping strategies that work for you might also help, because even knowing that you should eat, actually doing it may be hard, especially when it gets to event time.)

Here are some basic things you can remind yourself when you are leading up to an event:

"I deserve to enjoy my food properly now so that I can enjoy my food properly later."

"Eating steadily throughout the day will help me support my body, and my body is good."

"I am healing my relationship with food today. When I take care of myself today, it's not just for today."

"My body feels consistently good after consistently getting enough food. I deserve to feel good, even if my disorder is telling me that I don't."

During the event, you may have to remind yourself again.

"I deserve to enjoy myself at this event and I do not have to earn this food."

"I am not starving, so I can enjoy this food properly at a pace that feels good to me. I can be present and not fixated on the food only."

If you struggle with eating at the event, or if you do fixate on the food, you can tell yourself, "I am brave and strong for how hard I tried. It's okay that I wasn't able to do it today, even if I feel frustrated about it. I deserve the opportunity to try again next time."

I hope this helps!

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

I want everyone struggling with restriction/orthorexia to put this in their saved videos so they can watch it the next time some rich, out-of-touch celebrity releases a how-to of their own ridiculous, expensive niche crash diet, you can watch this and have a good laugh rather than staying stuck feeling triggered.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Can being overweight be healthy?

This is a complicated question, anon. My go-to question is: over what weight? We know now that the BMI scale is largely inaccurate and does not take into account height differences, muscle training, breast size and other factors. I also know that many people have different ideals of what's a normal or "ideal" size.

I'm not a doctor. I do know personally know many people whose natural weight - as in no dieting, but no overfeeding - set them as being considered fat. I also know that a lot of those people ended up feeling shame for this, and spent lots of time putting themselves through restriction, various crash diets, and a traumatic level of hatred toward the bodies they lived in. Many of them did lose weight doing this, but at great cost to other aspects of their health, such as their hearts, gallbladders, brains, stomachs, and GI tracts. Would it have been healthier to leave well enough alone and stay fatter? I think so.

But I also think that health can be really complicated and a lot of people end up having to make choices as to what aspect of health they must prioritize. So, for example: say you need a medication that has a side effect of weight gain. Do you accept the weight gain, or do you deny yourself medication that you might need? Say that you used to be a runner, but then you got a permanent knee injury and gained weight from being less active than usual. Do you prioritize treating your knee, or do you keep running on your injury to maintain the same weight? Or do you give up something else, like restricting a favorite food, for no other reason than because you feel you must retain that body shape at any cost? Say you have recently given birth to a baby, and the pregnancy caused you to gain weight. You want to breastfeed, but you're struggling to produce enough milk when you diet. Do you focus on the diet? Or do you focus on your journey with your new baby? Now say you are diagnosed with an invisible disability. Your doctor advises you against heavy exercise because it would be dangerous, but your natural weight is bigger. Do you choose to exercise anyway and risk the consequences of further disabling your body? Or do you think that you should have to restrict your food intake simply because you have a disability? Now what if you also have a comorbid diagnosis that impacts your GI tract, limiting what you can eat already? (Yes, some people are in the situation of having multiple disabilities.)

Do you think that people with these conditions should have to disclose all of their personal health history in order to be accepted for being fat?

(How many people disclose these personal things, do you think, and are not believed anyway?)

If you live with these conditions, and are making the best decisions you can for your own health in every given moment, do you think that it's a healthy choice to accept a co-occurring hatred for your own body at that given time? Do you think it's always the healthiest thing to pursue thinness?

Life is not simple. Managing one's body needs will not always come down to a series of simple choices. It's always going to be a balancing act where each individual needs the liberty to choose what THEY are going to prioritize to live well. And it won't be easy for everyone else to tell, at a glance, what those carefully-selected choices looked like for that individual.

I'm someone who is not fat, but who does have a chronic health disorder. Am I more healthy than a fat person who does not have the same disorder?

All you can do, anon, is focus on the choices that are right for you. That might mean giving up restricting if your body feels better when you don't, even if that comes with significant weight gain, just as an example. It might mean you've spent so much time hating your body that preserving your mental health means avoiding dieting or diet culture. I can't tell you what the right choices are for you as an individual; I can only tell you to listen to your body's cues and use the information you have available to you in order to set your balance of choices as close to "correct" as you possibly can. Nobody else could understand your process for this, nor could you understand theirs if you don't live their life. And that means nobody else gets to judge you, or your body, at a glance. Loving it properly means taking care of it to the very best of your ability, and yes, sometimes that might mean letting it be naturally fat. And I think there'd be a lot fewer EDs in the world if we weren't always so afraid of that.

I hope this helps!

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

You popped up on my feed today when I signed in, I had followed a few days prior when I made my blog, I wasn't sure I was actually willing to recover, and always felt invalidated because I was never underweight or even close to it. Yesterday I deleted absolutely ever PRO piece of media I owned, my PRO tumblr account within the ED community. I just walked away. It's scary, because everyone sees "fat" as such a bad thing, such a "dirty" thing. I sat thinking the other night as I recovered from a blood sugar of 60 after ⭐️ving all day, that I didn't want to live like that, I would rather be fat, a little "unhealthy" and happy, than constantly treating chronic low sugar, always being cold, always being irritated, y'know how we get when we're hangry lol but I just realized how much of my life I had missed even in the last year, and I didn't want to do that anymore, I want to LIVE my life. Focus on getting "healthy" that's all that matters to me. Anyway, I just wanted to vocalize how I was feeling. It's nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you! It’s good to hear that you are taking steps to prioritize a healing mentality. It’s a good idea to try and remember to stay patient with yourself as there may be times that you feel tempted to go back. Something you can do for yourself is to make a list of reminders about what positive things you want from your life that you can only get from taking good care of your body and mind. Treat yourself like you are deserving of feeling good, even when it is hard to believe it. And yes - your body is deserving of everything that any other body is.

Also - I don’t know if you just came over here from TikTok (if so, welcome!) but you don’t have to write “⭐️ving” or other abbreviations. We don’t have to use “clean” language for marketing, so you don’t have to find clever ways to get around saying what you want to say. If you’re more comfortable saying it that way, you can, but you don’t have to. However, you can put your specific ED in the tags if you ever post about it, and that way people can avoid that tag if they don’t want to see content for it.