So I (18F) have a very bad relationship with food. It all stems from a book I read when I was about 9 years old about a girl with an eating disorder, the book was supposed to raise awareness but it contained some really horrible comments about the mc body (she was a normal sized girl who viewed herself as fat) and included in depth descriptions of the way in which she viewed food and starved herself. I was never a fat child but when I looked in the mirror that day I thought of all the horrible things she said to herself in the book and I could see them in myself.
Being a child I had basically found a “guide to anorexia” book and gave myself a calorie deficit of about 1000 kcal a day. (I genuinely thought that was a sustainable amount). I have always been very good at maths so counting calories came very easily to me.
Over the next two years I became very skinny. But adults would comment on it all the time which I loved. Whenever I would leave the house I would get attention and it made me feel special. People would call me a model and I would feel peoples eyes be drawn my way when I walked into a room or passed them on the street.
Anyways around age 12 lock down started. I had unlimited access to TikTok and discovered all the body positivity content online. I was bored at home and had people online telling me that being fat was not something to be afraid of so I ate a lot. I think being so bored at home meant I was constantly eating. I also lost any sports I used to do as my mum could no longer afford them. As a result I reckon I gained more than 15kg in a year. This was probably like a 1/2 of my body weight at the time. Hard to know because I never had access to a scale)
When I went back to school after lockdown I was 13 and I was a normal weight for someone my age. But I hated my body. Girls around me started to experience eating disorders and I missed having the attention and control that being skinny gave me.
But I found it so much harder to starve myself now that I had been binging so much. The last 4 years of my life atp had been spent obsessing over food and I entered a cycle of restricting and binging that would last me until I was about 17.
At age 17 I weighed around 57-8kg and I scrapped the restricting all together and just binged. In 4 months I gained 5kg. I felt awful like my self worth had been lost. I struggled to find clothes I liked to wear. I felt miserable and couldn’t look at myself in photos.
This was last year. In March I began to restrict again. I went from 62kg to 58.1kg in 6 months. Which is not that drastic but that was 6 months of thinking about food non stop and restricting all day then binging at night.
From September to April this year I upped the restricting but this also meant I was bingeing harder too so I didn’t see any progress which further fuelled my frustration with food and my body.
I think I was so scared of feeling full but my body was constantly hungry because I wasn’t eating until 5pm every day. I wish so much I could just get on with my life and not even think about food. But I also have recently diagnosed OCD which I think plays a huge role in my obsession with thinking about losing weight. Like it’s no exaggeration when I say I don’t go an hour of my life without thinking about it.
I feel drained.
I feel burnt out.
I am scared that I have lost half my life to obsessing about food and that it’s never going to end for me.
I think it’s also important to note that my mother has a really unhealthy relationship with food. She binges a lot around me. She also pays so much attention to what I eat in the evenings that if I don’t finish my dinner I need to provide a list of excuses. The other day I snapped at her and told her that I am now an adult and can look after my own appetite.
But since April I have tried so hard to view food differently. I didn’t eat sugar for lent which has proven to myself that I can have control around food so my binge eating has improved so much. I can trust myself around large amounts of unhealthy food. I also now eat breakfast and lunch which I have always been so scared to do. I allow myself to be comfortably full instead of confusing it with the feeling of being over full. I still count calories because if I don’t I just binge (pls be considerate about how hard it would be to quit a habit of 9 years) but I am eating 1700 a day which is recommended for me. (Some days more) Surprisingly I have lost 1.5kg in the last 4 weeks. Weightloss is so easy when it’s not a method of self harm. I think that I have discovered intuitive eating doesn’t work for me YET because I can’t just drop the act after all this time and view food normally. But, I am giving myself meal plans and preparing food for myself that focuses on nutrition rather than being cruel to myself which is a lot healthier than I have been doing before.
I hope to weigh 55kg then shift focus on actually maintaining and not reverting back to binging. I want to passively listen to my body so that I can fuel myself without becoming obsessed with food. I am very committed to working hard for my future career and I need to be able to cope with the anxiety this causes me to succeed in the future.
Does anyone have any advice or has anyone experienced anything similar?
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/1tem1b3/food_noise_tw_discussions_of_eating_disorders/
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