u/instead_of_texting

I was my all-time lowest weight in April of this year. I felt lean, beautiful, divine, and was happy to be intimate with my then-new partner for the first time.

I was thinner in April than I first was with an ED in high school.

I’ve gained a significant percent of my body weight since then (compared to my lowest weight, I mean).

Very little is muscle, it is mostly fat.

I feel grief and I feel trapped in my body.

It is so much easier to gain back fat than it is to lose the last of it.

It took months and months of consistency and restriction to reach my perfect thin body.

I am frustrated because objectively, my life is improving now, after having escaped almost a decade of abuse with a former partner last year, and experiencing the drawn-out death of my immediate family member in late March of this year.

I’ve been consuming food in a leisure way. Eating for fun, going out, eating other people’s cooking. Eating foods I craved, like PB&J sandwiches.

I have less of a tolerance for my own misery and restriction than I used to have.

I’ve had a taste of a better life and I’m too fucking stupid and sick in the head to just embrace it.

I was my all-time lowest weight in April of this year. I felt lean, beautiful, divine, and was happy to be intimate with my then-new partner for the first time.

I am thirty years old. I was thinner in April than I was at seventeen with an ED in high school.

I’ve gained about fifteen percent of my body weight since then (compared to my lowest weight, I mean).

Very little is muscle, it is mostly fat.

I feel grief and I feel trapped in my body.

It is so much easier to gain back fat than it is to lose the last of it.

It took months and months of consistency and restriction to reach my perfect thin body.

I am frustrated because objectively, my life is improving now, after having escaped almost a decade of abuse with a former partner last year, and experiencing the drawn-out death of my immediate family member in late March of this year.

I’ve been consuming food in a leisure way. Eating for fun, going out, eating other people’s cooking. Eating foods I craved, like PB&J sandwiches.

I have less of a tolerance for my own misery and restriction than I used to have.

I’ve had a taste of a better life and I’m too fucking stupid and sick in the head to just embrace it.

I’m curious what the reasons are for you.

I saw this question recently and have been trying to work through the limiting belief that “thinner is better”.

I do not think my reasons are actually “true”, for myself or anyone else. These are just the answers I came to when I asked myself honestly.

I feel like a thin body represents character traits that I value:

- discipline
- dedication
- temperance
- the absence of gluttony
- a commitment to oneself/one’s goals, despite fleeting desires
- resistance against the normalization of toxic food ingredients
- consistency in one’s habits

Another big part of why I strive for thinness is because it physically feels better to be in a thinner body.

- A heavier body/body with more body fat feels “cluttered” to me. I feel overwhelmed and trapped in a body that has body fat, and feel that with muscle as well.
- I do have OCD, so the “feeling right” aspect of a thin body is the main reason I seek to be thin. At my lowest weight, I felt I was in my “true form”.
- I chase the feeling of lightness in my body.

The most shameful part is that I get a sense of superiority about my thinness. I feel like it is an “elite” way to be, which I know is wrong on so many levels.

Thirty years old. I have been binging for months.

I gained true weight after a very shameful, painful, long, out of control binge period. It started when I tried to prove to myself that I was willing to get better (stop restricting) for the sake of my relationship and having a long, healthy life.

I have gone from my lowest weight, where I felt hot and immaculate, to a weight higher than I was before my ED relapse started last year.

I feel repulsive. Unfortunately, I am someone for whom thinness does a lot of heavy lifting in the looks department. It really does make me more beautiful.

I’ve been stressed, crying, binging then restricting, sleeping a lot. I look more tired than I ever have in my life.

I’m considering ending my relationship because I feel resentment that he thought I was too thin at my lowest weight (and that I started this whole binge in attempt to gain weight, out of fear he would end things, even though he was not going to do that).

I feel pressure from myself to be better than I am. I want him to have better than what I can give him.

I feel so ashamed and sad of who I am. I have definitely grown and changed in my life, but I am not adding enough good to justify being the toxic damage by I cause others by being around them.

I’ve had to use my prescription Lorazepam a lot recently and it works to dull my emotional intensity, but it gives me this heavy, hopeless ache in my heart when I’m on it.

My mind is never quiet.

I’m constantly assessing and reassessing my thoughts, emotions, reactions, behaviors, decisions, options, my past, my future, “what-ifs”, plans and backup plans, worst case scenarios, my body, my food intake, my responses, my body language.

Constant awareness of all these things, it’s like my head is screaming.

When I meditate, sitting there in stillness, I feel my body gnawing at itself to escape, my mind feels like it is ripping and tearing itself into shreds to escape from itself.

I get the overwhelming urge to closed-fist bash myself in the head, because I wish my brain would shut the fuck up, please just shut the fuck up, and let me experience life in the moment.

Let me actually feel gratitude, not just shame for the fact that I don’t feel grateful when I know I should feel that.

Let me feel joy, not just sorrow and premature grief about life’s eventual ending, as I let the beautiful moment pass by in front of me.

I’m not looking for any advice, just sharing my experience, and wondering what your experience has been with thoughts and feelings like these.

I live with a lot of shame, it is basically unbearable at this point. Thoughts like these are common for me but I have been especially stuck on this lately. I feel like I can’t move on from mistakes I have made and perceived harm I have caused (the harm I believe I have caused).

Here are some of the things I have said recently which have to do with my chronic feelings of impending persecution:

- I don’t want to be forgiven and I don’t think I ever can be

- I don’t think that I can “believe” forgiveness

- I feel like atonement is a never ending process

- “Your forgiveness feels like I don’t deserve it and like you are a good person who I am wronging, and it usually adds to the sense of the eternal tally list of harms I have caused” (said to my partner, when asked what receiving his forgiveness feels like for me)

- If I believe that I will not go to court/jail or have an eventual police interrogation for my behaviors, and I walk around casually, living my life, then I am a horrible person. So if I’ve been living my life, acting like I didn’t cause harm, and I am held accountable for it, it is disgusting of me to have assumed I had not caused harm or that the harm I caused was not grievous enough to warrant the punishment I will now be given

- There is something so distinctly awful about the human experience of not only doing terrible things, but thinking you can get away with it, that you deserve to have a fun little life in the meantime, that you wouldn’t be caught, that the person you harmed was so insignificant/the harm you caused didn’t matter. And you go through your life being a smug entitled piece of shit because you didn’t get punished for the awful things you did, and you think you’re in the clear and can just move on

- Thinking you can just move on, you’re in the clear, you get to live your life: that is a sensation I do not have. And it’s because of a lot of fear based reasons and the forms of harm I could experience if I were to just live my life. (One of the harms is the expectation that I will be someday caught and blamed for things, accused, maybe some things true some things false, held accountable or given a punishment for a false accusation)

- asking someone “Do you have a permanent eternal tally of mistakes you have made, and also never forgive yourself?”

My partner basically asked me if I would choose being underweight over being together, so now I’m thinking about that

I think that for me, recovery will only ever be behavioral.

Recovery behaviors are making me miserable. I’ve been binging too, which I know isn’t “recovery”, but it’s not prolonged restriction.

I can be doing the right things, eating, staying active, being consistent, have a measurably “healthy” body. But mentally I am suffering, I hate the muscle, I hate the layer of fat, I hate the fight to grow muscle for the right proportions.

I think I will always hate being in a bigger body. And I don’t think i can change what my idea of “bigger” is.

I just want to be thin. I don’t want to add to my frame.

I miss being lean, slender, and having such low body fat.

I was given this “reframe” recently, from someone attempting to destigmatize the behaviors and help me release the shame I have around the binge-restrict cycle.

I am not for or against that, I see as I write this post that “fasting” is a heavily moderated word.

What do you think about that reframe?

Feasting and fasting vs binging and restricting?

We are both thirty years old.

My mental problems and my body issues are probably 80% of what we talk about.

He wants to help me, but hearing him bargain with me is like listening to someone plead with an addict (to quit, to reduce, to only do it sometimes, etc).

I have been gaining weight to prove that I was committed to getting better and to being alive with him for a long time.

But because of that, I feel like this man didn’t appreciate and wasted my perfect thin body.

I had worked for almost a year to get down to the weight I was. I escaped a decade long abusive relationship, then created the body I wanted, which is the body I need to feel sexual at all, and I gave it to my now partner.

He thought I was beautiful but didn’t think I would be healthy long term at the low weight I was at.

Out of fear, I started binging, and I have been out of control since then.

I feel like I ruined my life. I finally felt good, I had the sex and the love I deserved, felt how I needed to feel, and then it was gone.

One way my partner has indirectly/accidentally enabled my ED is through calling me tiny when I was thinner, and still saying it now when I’m a higher weight, even though I am not tiny anymore.

Some of the ways it has impacted me:

- I don’t like to be intimate if I have eaten, and I have avoided or rejected intimacy during times that I had eaten prior to the intimate offer.

- I am long distance with my partner, so I feel the need to fast and prepare my body (like slimming down for an event) before we see each other, so that I can somewhat tolerate my body and be open to intimacy.

- I was my lowest weight when we were intimate for the first time, so I now chronically compare myself to that time.

- My partner expressed concern for my health after our first time being intimate, and I felt deeply rejected.

- I only feel physically horny if I am very thin and recently fasted, otherwise it’s just indifference and the desire to connect (but not the desire for sex)

I’ve posted about this a few times, about different aspects of this matter.

My boyfriend and I (both thirty years old) were intimate for the first time in April, when I was my lowest weight. I have since gained weight, to prove I am committed to our relationship.

At my lowest weight, I was often told by other people that I was beautiful, should be a model, they have to know my hair routine, I have beautiful delicate collarbones, I look like I could be one of Angelina Jolie’s children.

My boyfriend thought I was beautiful but that I should gain weight because I may not have health and longevity at that low body weight.

I now am average looking, honestly below average. My body being thin at times is the only thing that physically makes me special.

My face is not modelesque and defined, I am not tight and lean, my waist is a thick fucking cylinder. I’m gaining muscle and I don’t want to.

I know I should be grateful to have a partner who loves me and wants me to be healthy.

But I feel like my perfection was given to someone who didn’t appreciate it, my perfect body thrown out like garbage out of fear of abandonment, and now my beauty is gone. And this is the rest of my life, feeling inadequate, living in this repulsive hog body.

I know that is not truly the case because my boyfriend thought I was beautiful at my low weight, he just also thought I could get osteoporosis or die young if I stayed that weight.

I am thirty, I’ve had EDs since I was a pre-teen.

I traded bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating for orthorexia and a strict diet when I was in my early twenties.

Then in my mid to late twenties, I traded it all for alcoholism.

A little over a year ago, I quit alcohol, and lost weight from that, then fully relapsed into anorexia late last year.

I hit my all time lowest weight and have been gaining since then in an effort to “be healthy”.

I do not want to look “fit”, I want to be slender. Increasing my volume of exercise to match a higher volume of food may keep me alive for longer, but it’s not how I want to look.

I am gaining muscle and feel so disappointed. This is not what I want.

I’m trying to stop having ED issues so I can have a long healthy relationship with my partner, but I don’t really care if it’s just me.

I am thirty years old, I am consumed by this every day after relapsing. I feel it’s only a matter of time before I lose my “youth” and am entirely worthless.

I don’t think of other women like that, but it’s how I see myself.

My youth and my thinness are all I have. Otherwise I’m worthless.

I’m not trying to appeal to men, just to myself. I do have a partner who wants me to choose health and life. Live a long healthy life.

But what’s the fucking point if I hate myself and my grotesque fat body the entire time.

I am thirty years old and wanted a selection of new clothes. I bought sets of basic garments like sleep shorts and lounge pants, tank tops and a few cuter pairs of underwear. (Edit to add, I ordered them online during a sale so couldn’t try them on first.)

None of them fit. They are all so tight on my stomach.

I am between sizes, if I got the larger size, they would be loose. But this size is too tight on my waist/stomach.

I have gained weight in the past couple months, including quite a bit of fat around my midsection.

I am trying to focus on living a long time, having healthy body fat to age well, and wanted to feel good in clean new clothes.

I feel very sad and disgusted with myself. I’ve been having an okay time lately but this is very very sad for me.

Reposting without the website name.

I actually was seeking reassurance that I could tolerate myself at a heavier weight, that I’d look okay, but it was a bad choice to compare myself.

I just don’t look like those chicks do. They are all beautiful and hot, or still look thin despite weighing more than me. But I do not look good or look thin when I weigh that much.

Body composition plays a role, but even women without much muscle who are heavier than me still look leaner than I do.

I’ve always thought, “how come other women are able to be beautiful when they have body fat, but I am not?”

Then I compared myself to women the same height and weight (or lower weight) than I am right now, and I feel they all look better than me.

I recognize that this must be some degree of body dysmorphia, but it is sad to see beautiful women and feel in my heart that I don’t get to be one of them.

I ate a lot today, so I am feeling dark and sad about myself.

I actually was seeking reassurance that I could tolerate myself at a heavier weight, that I’d look okay, but it was a bad choice to compare myself.

I just don’t look like those chicks do. They are all beautiful and hot, or still look thin despite weighing more than me. But I do not look good or look thin when I weigh that much.

Body composition plays a role, but even women without much muscle who are heavier than me still look leaner than I do.

I’ve always thought, “how come other women are able to be beautiful when they have body fat, but I am not?”

Then I compared myself to women the same height and weight (or lower weight) than I am right now, and I feel they all look better than me.

I recognize that this must be some degree of body dysmorphia, but it is sad to see beautiful women and feel in my heart that I don’t get to be one of them.

I ate a lot today, so I am feeling dark and sad about myself.