u/TheMilkSpeaks

Idek what to do atp. A month ago I had to miss two IOP appointments for a few mandatory meetings I COULD NOT get out of, not matter what. I had been consistent ever since and was communicating as best I could. I had been told that if I had another late cancellation or missed session for an IOP session, they would discharge me. I have not missed a session since even if that meant having to move life around.

I had accidentally double booked myself during an individual appointment with therapist supplied by the program with a medical appt, and obviously chose to go to the medical appt. I had sent an email earlier in the day explaining the situation and my apologies. I figured because I wasn’t missing an actual IOP session, it would be fine.

I didn’t see her email at 11 saying that if I missed the individual session that I could not come back, and after my med appointment she called me and told me I am being discharged. I tried to explain the miscommunication and conflict once again. I apologies and she has said “well, it’s not MY life” in the snarky way she always seemed to respond to me for things.

So now I don’t have IOP, when I freaking need it. I am seriously struggling with eating tonight and I needed the meal support. Asking for help for eating a meal makes me feel like I’m giving up on myself and that I need to just hide and lie. I’m starting to spiral and my ED is taking this as a sign to come back in.

I’m fucking angry at myself, angry at the program, angry at the damn therapist tho thinks she can talk to me like that. Am I seriously just a number?

I’m really struggling with my body image. I put on a swimsuit because I had to and I saw my legs and stomach in the mirror and it’s been kinda not too great for a minute. Frankly, to say it’s been hard is an understatement, and I’ve been crying multiple times a day. I know there’s nothing wrong with my body objectively, but to me, there’s so much wrong.

I really am trying and my brain is telling me to stop. It tells me that I am bad and undisciplined for recovery and that I’m just letting go of everything I have been trying to hard to maintain, and that I will no longer be anywhere near beautiful. It tells me average is failure. It’s just screaming so loud and I don’t know how to get it to stop

So in order to try to regulate myself, I’m gonna write here why I know I should stay the course.

1. Society is sick; staying in my ED is sick. I know I want to be seen as special and to be envied in society, but this society is struggling too. I shouldn’t be killing myself to be envied by a sad, disordered society.

2. Losing life, joy, experience is not worth the control and exhaustion I put myself through. I wasn’t happy with my life when I was happy with my body. The only thing I had was my body. But recovery can give me the chance to be happy with my life and my body.

3. Forcing myself into a body that isn’t mine won’t make me happy. I have to learn to accept the genetics and body type that I have. There’s no right or wrong body type. My body can be just as beautiful as someone else’s body who looks different than mine.

4. I’m so tired of being so damn hungry all the time.

I suppose that’s all I can think of right now. I know that recovery is possible. I reached out to my parents and therapist. I’m trying to keep myself busy. I guess I just needed to write this here to keep myself going.

This community has been so supportive of my all in journey and I am thankful for the heads up that all in gets ROUGH. And I know this tough spot is part of the process, but man, this is buns.

I’m terrified. Today I didn’t control what I ate at all and it was… a lot. I ate what I was hungry for plus my meal plan. Which is good! But my ED is NAWT happy.

I feel a lot of loss and fear and anxiety and self loathing, but for once my brain is a little quieter with thinking about food all the time. But my ED is yelling and I’m trying to yell back and it’s this huge tug of war and I want to hold on, but it’s so damn hard.
I’m able to catch the thoughts that say I’m supposedly binging and being undisciplined and losing control and that my body is gonna look awful and I won’t be special to society anymore , and I’m trying to reframe them but they keep popping up over and over. It’s exhausting

I’m not sure if there’s a way to make this tug of war easier. My ED brain is screaming at me and my body to stop, but my own brain is screaming back to let me eat and finally just heal and not feel ravenous all the time (even if that means eating my pantry lol). I want to live and be present again. I want to be strong and happy. I want life.

So I went all in today. And I cried. And it was hard. I’m terrified to do it again tomorrow. But I know it’s time.

If there is anyone here who’s gone through all in, could you offer some advice on how to get through this first big part?

Ugh I need help

So I was forced to go out to a restaurant, and ofc I brought my one pea that should hold me over for the next year. Naturally, I would NEVER order such sweaty foods that the others order. A pea is just soooo filling and satisfying to me, so why would I ever deviate and eat such fattening foods?

HOWEVER, I think just by watching others eat food I may have absorbed some of the calories??? Big Back Bethany ordered a chicken pecan salad and I could just feel the grams packing onto my petite, atom-like frame.

What do I do??? If I close my eyes, I’ll be burning less calories because I won’t be using energy to see.

Not even headphones with music blasting block out the noise of people talking. I’m losing my mind as they talk for hour. I wish they would shut up and I can’t do this lol

I guess I’m still going through heightened hunger (I’m not really sure atp) and when I was talking to my IOP therapist about it, she had stated that she had never heard of extreme hunger. Mind you, this is an ED IOP center. So I’m already confused now because atp I feel like she’s telling me that I don’t feel hunger and it’s all in my head.

Second, my dietician said some of my eating episodes clinically are counting as binges atp. Some aren’t, she said, but she said a lot of them are because of the amount of food I’m eating and how fast I’m eating it and the way I feel when I’m eating it. These episodes always start out with me being so hungry but I guess always end up differently, because my brain snaps and I just wanted it all to stop.

So now I’m honestly so triggered and lost. I’ve been told to eat only the meal plan and to add specific portions and don’t eat outside meals and snack time. (Because in their words “I should tolerate being slightly hungry in between meals as there should be a period of fasting between meals and snacks”) Often this leads me to being ravenous after lunch and getting dizzy at times, but I’ve already eaten my meal plan plus more.

So between meals and snacks I’m always thinking about food or am really hungry or both; yet they tell me I just have to wait. To me, they are telling me to not listen to my hunger because im binging so much when I crash out when I’m still hungry no matter what I eat in a given time frame. My hunger just builds and builds until another “binge” (by their standards), and they tell me another reason why is because I’m only mentally hungry and not physical, and I’m so close to being weight restored so it’s not as “normal” to be so hungry.

So honestly I’m so lost and so triggered. I feel awful. This morning I had another episode and I feel like I’m getting worse in this program instead of better.

Is my team right? Am I just starting to binge and swing the other way? I’m so confused and lost and it’s making recovery so hard.

I’ve been weight restored for a while and instead of my extreme hunger being constant and every day, it’s moved on it hitting me like a truck every 5-7 days.

Has anyone else experienced this during the recovery process? I’m sure it’s normal but I just want to feel a bit less alone because I feel like I’m going insane.

Idk if this is against the sub rules or not, so if it is, then please remove :3

The exposures don’t have to be food related, and can be more experiential (so like wearing a crop top, going grocery shopping, etc).

I guess I’m more asking this because I’m kinda lacking on ideas. They want us to have both a big food exposure and an experience exposure each week. I know my fear food and fear food situation ones so I don’t think that those have to be discussed much, but I was wondering if there was any ideas on the experiental ones other than crop tops and mirror exposures

Especially on early morning or late night flights. Sound seems to carry across the plane and people generally don’t want to hear someone talking about politics and that stuff for 2+ hours straight.

Maybe it’s just the American population that seems to be louder and very chatty on flights (I’m American and I fly often, so I feel like I’m rather seasoned in the flight culture).

I feel like I might be more frustrated here because I woke up at 2:30am and had to fly to Orlando with a bunch of louder older people yapping it away at 5:00 am until the flight was over so I’m crabby. But I do generally still think that conversation should be kept brief and hushed.

There’s this girl I don’t know but have seen for years. She went from perfectly normal to super sick looking over this past year. I wish so badly I could say something

And I feel like I’m going to just throw recovery out the window

I started recovery for him. I’ve failed him. He was the only person who treated me like a human and I love him so much and I failed him too

He’s been struggling with depression and adhd and he said if he doesn’t get better with the meds he’s going to have to leave. That’s almost 2 years wasted. I have no reason to recover. I know it sounds dumb but he was the one who really secretly inspired me to recover.

Every picture means nothing to me now. I feel like he’s given up. I’ve given up. I really see no point

And fourth dinner too plus like 4 snacks and probably another meal later

(Extreme hunger has me in a chokehold and my eating disorder is pissed)

I don’t know if they are trying to be helpful, have no idea what they are saying, or are downright malicious but I’ve literally been told (after disclosing I have been recovering from an ED and I have gained weight and would appreciate not talking about certain topics) that my “old” body (aka sick body) looked “shredded and amazing”.

This was AFTER I told them I used to be sick.

AND THEN. AND THENNNNN.
They have the GUTS to say “well I’m sure you still look okay now.”

LIKE HELLO??? WHAT.
I feel more angry than triggered because WHAT???

I don’t know how to respond if respond at all. I don’t know if they are just uneducated or what. But I don’t want to hear how “shredded and fit” I looked when I could barely stand up without passing out.
The best I could muster was that I was dying then and I’m not dying now, and that should be more important.

This hasn’t just been by one person too, which makes me so mad. How messed up has society made us??

I’ve had most of my meals unmeasured, and I even ate out at a restaurant not knowing any nutritional info!

I’m still working on eating things outside of what is safe to me, but I think that comes with time and practice. My parents have been so supportive and they are slowly challenging me more and more (that’s the goal anyway) under the guidance of my team.

I even had a food that I would normally only eat measured, completely unmeasured, which is a huge deal to me. Honestly it felt nice to not have to do math and just build a pretty plate.

I’m still trying to work through internalized fatphobia and body image struggles. Some days I am proud and accepting of my body and I realize most people don’t care about body composition and stuff (and most of the time the people who do, don’t have complete food freedom), but most days are still a struggle. I’ve been challenging myself by wearing shorts more.

I do want to say I am thankful for the mods for laying down the truth hard. It the moment I feel like some of us can be confused or taken aback on why maybe a post was taken down, but I think as I’ve been more nourished I’m able to see things a little better.

I start in person IOP 7 days a week soon, and I’m very nervous about having no control over my dinners, but I know it is helpful in the long run.

Fat shaming doesn’t just shame the body itself, it also shames some assumed character traits. Fat people are assumed to be lazy, undisciplined, gluttonous, gross, etc. Fatness has not been near any sort of beauty standard (at least in western countries) for a very long time.

Meanwhile, skinny shaming only assumes that they don’t eat, look less feminine, or are not as strong. There is significantly less assumption on someone’s character if they are skinny. Supermodels are stick thin with very little curves, and the current beauty standard right now glorifies signs of actual malnutrition. If you are skinny, you are not assumed to be lazy, undisciplined, etc. If you are skinny, you won’t be shamed for eating a triple cheeseburger.

I’m sick and tired of skinny people victimizing themselves. People throw around the term skinny shaming too, when in reality a lot of it is genuine concern over someone who lost a lot of weight and does not look normal. Theres natural skinniness and forced, and the physical differences are obvious.

I am not fat, but I was treated significantly better when I had abs and was drastically underweight compared to now. Skinny will always be more respected. It’s awful and shouldn’t be this way, but it is.

If you lose weight, you are more likely to be complimented than if you gained weight, even if the circumstances revolving weight loss were bad and weight gain were good. Additionally, more people are directly bullied into self starvation than directly bullied into weight gain.

So yeah. I’m sick and tired of skinny people acting as if comments or stereotypes on their body and character are anywhere near as toxic as comments and stereotypes of fat people.

I have an old back injury and got chronic back pain. Squats, deadlifts, etc. Hurt my back.

I love doing barbell squats but I don’t think my back likes them anymore. What are some good alternatives? I know leg presses and hack squats are pretty good. Anything else?

I’ve officially lost any form of abs. The one thing it seems like society worships, and if you have it, you’re seen as amazing and perfect and whatever. I know it’s not objectively true on a universal level, but what society is saying now… it’s hard to not feel like shit

And it’s gone. I don’t feel special anymore, or beautiful. I feel average. It feels like I have nothing now