u/econroy

.I just need to put this somewhere. Please forgive any typos I'm wearing these new fuckass nails and it's impossible to type on my phone with them. Thank God for autospell.

Context isn't really needed I guess. Couple decades of disordered bs. Handful of inpatient stays, little bit of therapy outside of that here and there, nothing effective. Spent my 20s and early 30s maintaining a very low bmi, because i feel deformed and monstrous at a healthy bmi. Crippled physcally and financially due to strict ocd based binge purge cycles. Very deep hole to pull myself out of.

It's been difficult holding down a job through all of it, so I've bounced around a lot and my insurance coverage has been spotty. I've finally settled at a very good place of employment with good people, good pay, and a safe environment. In 2 weeks I'll qualify for insurance again.

I'm in an interesting spot existentially. From autumn 2025 to maybe March 2026 I had one of the more substantial recovery attempts I've ever had. It was on my own, just using anad and edanon meetings on zoom, recovery podcasts, and support from my partner. He is as well versed in my issues as anyone can be without experiencing them first hand, and os 4 years clean of a 15 year drug addiction. While his issues don't entirely align with mine, he is capable of offering support and empathy unparalleled by anyone else in my life and i am truly blessed to have him to lean on sometimes. Which isn't to say I put everything on him - I do understand there needs to be a boundary.

I started this new job and immediately relapsed. Fell back into the restriction/ bp cycle, lost a good chunk of the recovery weight, but im still far heavier than I have been the majority of my adult life. This makes it hard to admit the following.

I'm burnt out. I'm done and I've been done. Every day for the past month when I've used behaviors I think to myself, "I don't want to do this, i have all the tools i need to NOT do this, and yet here I am doing it." And I do it because I'm scared. Because not doing it would leave me swollen and bloated from lack of purging, because not restricting would make me swollen and bloated too. Even if im not eating weight gain amounts, I will gain weight from cessation of behaviors alone. And that's terrifying. And what if I can't stop the behaviors ultimately anyway? What if I gain weight from horrible and uncontrollable binge eating like I did last time, rather than normal structured eating? And so it goes. Fear keeps me sick. Fear of my own track record.

But every day I wonder why this is so important to me. Boyfriend likes to gently remind me that my thinking and logic around it all is warped and I need to trust that it will eventually unwarp if I give it time in recovery.

I want to be a woman who reads. I want to be a woman who cooks. I want to be a woman who garden's, who goes to the gym, who goes on fun trips, who gets married.

So I ate dinner last night and kept it down. I ate and kept it down Saturday too. I still purged both days earlier in the day, but im not going to do that today.

I don't have all the tools i need but I have enough. In a couple weeks I'll look into getting a regular talk therapist, just as another tool. Maybe medication. I've got a prozac script I've been sitting on, im afraid to take it because of the heartburn it might cause. Again, fear.

I have so much to tackle. But I think part of why I've been struggling so loudly these past few weeks is I am, actually, done. And every second I'm participating in the ED, half my brain is screaming and rattling the cage.

Just had to get this out somewhere. Thanks if you read it. Chances are I'll be back to posting about weight gain regret and behaviors in like 24 hours. We'll find out I guess.

Update: Only took 4 hours. I've lost all motivation. I want nothing more than to just go home, binge/purge, go to bed and go back to restricting tomorrow.

Something I'm noticing more and more over the last few weeks....

I'm fully aware that starvation strips a lot of us of our ability to regulate emotionally - for me it generally manifests through my anxiety and OCD. Those two conditions increase exponentially when I'm restricting heavily.

However, through the decades I've always been able to keep a lid on most of the mood swings in regards to how they land on others. I've been able to present relatively normally.

Maybe it's because the weight loss is so slow this relapse, despite the lengths I'm going to to lose it, maybe it's just that I'm burnt out cognitively from so many years of this bullshit, maybe it's because this relapse specifically feels like it's happening to me, rather than by me.....but I'm losing it. Genuinely. I'm irritated as fuck by the tiniest things, sometimes by nothing at all. For example, I was on my way home from work the other day and I was just SO angry. Seething. Simply because my Pandora undownloaded some songs. My rage was wildly disproportionate with the actual issue.

It all came to a head so to speak yesterday when my boyfriend wanted to come over. It's difficult for me to hang out with him on weeknights, because delays my routine of ED behaviors in the evenings and thus cuts into the amount of sleep I get. But I always say yes when he asks, even when I genuinely don't want to.

He got there and asked to go for a walk. That set me over the edge. I was so tired and burnt out and I could not keep any semblance of a poker face. I threw a little bitch fit and he handled it kindly and well, but that is not appropriate behavior on my part and not at all fair to him.

Emotional overflow like that is becoming more and more difficult to control all of a sudden and I need to nix it asap, but I don't know how. I value my relationship more than basically anything and I'm terrified I'm going to push him away. He's only human and can only put up with so much for so long.

I guess I'm asking if this is a thing for anyone else. I know there's no real solution for it other than better self control, but in those moments self control is the one thing I do not have. I can't make sense of it.

Tw for ED chatter.

Monday night I pulled some bullshit and kept down a binge. It was not enough calories to cause the weight gain it did. Im still over a pound heavier than I was Monday morning.

I expected to feel better today, as I was feeling better yesterday. But unfortunately last nights bp cycle wasn't thorough enough. I've been doing this shit for 25 years so an incomplete purge is rare for me. Ive got that shit down to a science. But I woke up a couple times with heartburn last night - that should've been sign 1 i didnt get everything up. Sign 2 is how bloated and full and awful I feel this morning. I don't know how it's possible that I didn't feel it directly after purging last night but do today, yet here we are.

I'm just angry at myself. My digestion is snails pace, I'm constipated as hell and my dumbass didn't have anything left to wear this morning except jeans. I'm so fucking uncomfortable and my self loathing has hit an all time high.

Can't believe I have to sit at this desk for another 8 hours. Someone shoot me.

Listen, I know he meant well. I know hes not a professional and i cant expect him to say the right thing. But I got hit with a real doozy last night.

I'm a chronic an-bp and I've been struggling with relapse after a brief recovery attempt. I'm not emaciated like I once was but I'm underweight and struggling. Last night something in my brain snapped and I decided to just go to bed after inhaling maybe >!1300 calories!< in one sitting. I knew it would make me sick all day today and I didn't want to be alone with the guilt and shame, so I told my boyfriend about it before going to sleep. Hes fully aware of my issues.

He said, and I'm quoting here:

"Well...if it makes you feel any better, I'm doing the opposite. I'm too tired to eat."

GIRL WHAT

🫡🔫

Never eating again dawg

I guess this is a vent geared more toward adults/chronic sufferers more than adolescents.

After 25(?) years of AN-bp, this is the nutshell of why I keep relapsing.

I'm 33 and I've never maintained a very long stretch of recovery. I usually slam the breaks once i hit a certain weight and fall right back into it. This is largely due to the fact that my eating habits are all or nothing - I can lean into the illness - the carefully crafted, OCD based, daily binge purge cycle where I restrict heavily outside of that once a day cycle. This is how I maintained a very low bmi for the past 15 years.

Or I can "embrace recovery," which always leads to uncontrollable binge eating, rapid weight gain and crippling physical pain because my body can't digest food normally anymore. Even months in. (The longest I've gone without relapse is 4 months and it was genuinely the most miserable 4 months of my life).

I know rationally that my body will most likely heal and normalize IF I can eat normally without the binge eating. That's a big if. But rationally, if I were to try to halt this relapse and start recovery again, that would be the goal.

However, any amount of food at all just leaves me broken. Even if I don't eat until the evening when I can jist sleep after, I'm absolutely devastated the next day. Partially emotionally, partially because of the extreme bloating and sharp digestive pains.

I'm an adult and I have a full time job. I have to behave and appear professional. How do I try eating more and not using behaviors, when that renders me incapable of functioning in the day to day? Even if I ultimately know I must in order to be free of this bullshit, how can I shoot for the big picture when the immediate isn't sustainable no matter what I do? Maintaining the illness isn't sustainable and trying to manage it isn't sustainable. Recovery isn't sustainable either, even if I ever could manage to do it properly and without all the binging.

I've been inpatient more times than I can count. Higher level tx doesn't do jack shit for me and even if it did, it's not an option I would ever pursue again.

I just don't know how to proceed. I'm fucked no matter what I do.

"If you can't eat without binging, just be on a liquid diet for the rest of your life."

She's dead serious.

For fucks sake.

I tried explaining to her that it would make the binge urges worse, and it would also feel like starving without the benefit of being thin (because of all the liquid calories). She didn't understand and just doubled down.

I'm so humiliated.

Here's my dumb ass trying to stop a relapse, low end healthy bmi and thus feeling entirely invalid because I'm not even emaciated anymore so I dont deserve recovery ("haven't earned it yet"), and my boyfriend goes on fucking wellbutrin. The only mood stabilizer that actually leads to significant weight loss.

He's a hefty guy, not fat but not thin, and I love that. For a myriad of reasons, but also because I felt that no matter my weight I'll always be his smaller girlfriend.

Maybe it's shallow. I've been trying to eat maintenance, stop purging, and stop a bad relapse but the universe is screaming at me to keep losing weight. Hot weather, boyfriends losing weight, clothes are only just starting to fit again.....I've already gotten way more bloated and puffy and I don't want it to keep going.

I don't know what to do.

I hope it's alright to ask this here. I don't have many friends and the fashion subs are picky about who can post and how.

I have photos of the dress on my profile, but it's a white dress with flower print.

I've not been to many weddings and it didn't occur to me until this morning that white dresses are a no go, and the wedding is tomorrow.

I have a back up, I'm just not sure yet if it'll fit. Last I wore it I was very sick and 15 pounds thinner. It was pinned in the back, so there's a chance I can still pull it off.

Any advice is appreciated.

Unfortunately I can't ask in the fashion subs because I've never actually posted there, so I dont have enough karma or something? But I feel as though I can get some reliable advice here.

I've not been to many weddings and it didn't occur to me until this morning that this dress I ordered is white, and might be an egregious maneuver if I wore it to this wedding I have tomorrow. I don't know the people getting married, they're my bfs friends.

I have a back up, I'm just not sure yet if it'll fit. Last I wore it I was very sick and 15 pounds thinner. It was pinned in the back, so there's a chance I can still pull it off.

The pictures of the dress are on my profile. Any advice is appreciated. Thank you so much!

I'm trying to stop a relapse but I'm terrified of gaining the weight back that I lost.

I have a wedding on Saturday and not only do I want to be thin as possible for it but I also don't want to he sick for it, and eating might make me sick.

I'm so burnt out and all I want to do is eat normally and not have to use bulimic behaviors anymore. I want that so badly I'm genuinely fighting back tears at my desk. There's this muffin I bought on the way to work. I'm just staring at it like a dumbass.

That fucking wedding

Someone tell me what to do, I genuinely am borderline panic attack over it right now. Nothing seems fair. I just want to eat for christs sake

Ive hit the stage of the relapse where all I've been doing both at work and in my free time is watch food centered tiktoks. Nostalgic food, 90s mom dinners, Y2k snacks, WIEIAD, etc etc.

It itches my brain the same way eating would. I can't be the only one.

Heavy restriction feels horrible, yes. Especially after the hunger signals go away - then it's just nausea and exhaustion and starvation induced anxiety that makes your whole world feel unstable.

I'm no stranger to this.

Infact, I was feeling it so heavily that it even started to scare my ED veteran ass. So for 2 consecutive nights I ate some food and kept it down. About >!1k cals!< per night. They were binges, yes, but I figured at least my body would feel better for a couple days.

WRONG. Not only did I weigh in this morning >!1.6lbs!< heavier than I did friday but I feel like I'm dying. Dizzy, nauseous, hungry as hell (physical cue wise). My blood sugar feels tangibly far too low. I'm anxious and my bones are heavy. I'm exhausted.

It's like calories are what's needed but calories are toxic. My body just can't figure its shit out.

I tried posting this in the food safety sub, but they "dont allpw medical advice" and apparently this can be seen as asking for it.

I have a chronic and severe ED as well as chronic OCD, which I'm sure is at play here. I do apologize for how unreasonable this may sound, but I'm panicking.

I was low-key forced to order something for a work party after I told our office manager I have some food intolerances and will be happy with just a soda or something, but she didn't want to let it be (i was hoping to get out of the expectation to eat altogether). I chose a grilled chicken salad with nothing on it. I had no intention of actually eating it, just moving it around and sipping my drink which usually works in these scenarios.

When the time of the party actually arrived, the office had made it a whole Thing. Over the past 3 days my "salad with nothing on it" has become the topic of many jokes. Ive had several people approach me asking about what food allergies I have. I've been as vague and closed about it as possible.

All eyes were on me with this salad, so I ate 3 bites of the lettuce. It's a salad from a pizza place. I don't know how long the chicken was sitting out before the salad got to our office nor do I know how clean the lettuce was.

I'm now panicking about listeria, ecoli, salmonella etc. It's making my chest hurt, like I've eaten glass or metal.

What are the chances that the lettuce was contaminated and/or touched the contaminated chicken? And if it was, how sick will I get from just 3 bites?

I'm sorry, I know how this sounds. Thanks if you answer.

Tw for relapse chatter. I just need to get this out somewhere.

I'm mid relapse after a substantial recovery attempt. I'm only slightly underweight, so slightly that if I were to eat anything right now I'd be back to within a healthy range. This is a far cry from the low bmi I maintained for so many years and it makes me hate myself so much.

I don't have a right to be this hungry at this weight, but I am. Every day I wake up more and more exhausted. My body hurts from my once per day bp cycle. It's brief and controlled and thorough. It's exhausting.

I fast outside of that once a day bp. I've lost >!16 pounds!< in one month. It's progress. I can't lose the momentum.

But this morning on the way to work I stopped for food 3 times. I didn't actually get anything each time. I just wanted to have it. Just in case. I couldn't get that out of my brain, even though I didn't end up buying anything.

I'm existentially starving. I want to look as hungry as I feel. I miss being emaciated.