If you force your body into making “fitness goals” while actively restricting, you are not going to see the results you want. You are only going to get sicker. Fitness is a physical, mental, and emotional thing. It involves striving for complete, overall health. If you are refusing to try restoring your body to physical health, you cannot improve your fitness. I’m sorry if I am sounding harsh, but I really hope you realize how disordered this thought process is. Picking up a new fitness routine while underweight, especially if it’s underweight due to ED, can easily kill you.

Trying to make fitness improvements while actively restricting is like saying “I’m going to learn to play the piano but I’m also deliberately going to cut my hands off.” I do strongly encourage you to make positive fitness goals! But, I recommend that you use your fitness goals as a way to cope with the scale weight you will gain during recovery. (or even better, maybe a goal to work towards is to not weigh yourself/weigh yourself less as you work on fitness and recovery?

I know it sounds like the most terrifying thing, but intense fear of weight gain is literally a mental, physiological side effect of physical starvation. If you gain weight, over time you will be less terrified of gaining weight because your body will no longer be panicking and your hormones will start to go back to normal.

It sounds like you may benefit from a little support (if you don’t have some already) so I will encourage you to check out the NEDA site and perhaps find a discussion group near you. These are open groups that are in a neutral, non-medical environment and are not overseen by medical professionals. If you need more resources, these groups are a good way to find them in your area.

Any recovery blogs that want to contribute to this response would be appreciated. And anon, we are here for you.

Reminder that “weight restored” isn’t the same as “health restored”. If you are eating the minimum amount to gain to a “healthy weight”, you are still not eating enough for your brain and internal organs to recover. You could be sitting “healthy” at BMI 20 or whatever, but still have weakened heart tissue struggling to regain its strength. Your skin is rushing to regenerate, your digestive system is working overtime to send wonderful vitamins and nutrients to the recovering cells, your muscles are trying to firm and tighten, your brain is restoring synaptic paths… all of those things require unbelievable amounts of energy, which you must give to your body, by way of food.

Please eat, beautiful. That arbitrary scale number has no idea what frantic healing processes are happening inside your body right now.

(tw: ED discussion)

Yes, from age 12 and up it had been an awful cocktail of ED, clinical depression, and self-harm. The depression and SH came first but over time I got so increasingly close to snapping and became obsessive over the idea of control. From age 14-15 I had cycles of extreme restriction (three-day fasts with one small meal a day after, I became terrified of all food for no reason). From 15-16 the year of restriction caused me to binge uncontrollably, which was physiological, but it led to a mental obsession with food/binging (nothing to do with hunger or restriction anymore) and also the constant obsession with restriction to “cancel out a future binge” which was hellish. 16-17 was mostly rebellious binge eating, or so I told myself it was rebellious, when in truth I couldn’t control it if I had tried. I was outwardly so “fuck you” but I was always terrified of how I was going to get all the boxes and candy wrappers out from behind my bed with no one noticing. At age 18 I “learned” how to purge but it was so mortally painful and unnatural that even my unwell mind couldn’t justify it often, and only did it when I had binged so badly that I could feel shooting pains in my intestines, blood pressure skyrocketing, dizzy/about to pass out, pretty sure I was going to throw up anyways etc. Through all of this I went from about 190lbs at age 12 to 265lbs at age 19. The restriction made it so much worse. It was obviously never diagnosed as a “thing” but I am now educated enough to safely call it EDNOS, which is no less serious than a “real” ED. Now I am 22 years old, still not entirely free of ED thoughts (and probably won’t ever be, but the idea of recovery is learning how to healthfully acknowledge and process those thoughts and habits without acting upon them, just like with SH) but working hard to be a positive and forward-thinking person each day. I’m a weight lifter now, so I refuse to restrict. Entirely SH-free for over two years. My last binge was in February, it was entirely physiological as a result of chaotic hormones and seasonal depression but I did my best to let it go, and my last time purging was over a year ago. I still find myself exercising compulsively on occasion, and each time this happens I remind myself to let it go with a yoga/rest the next day. Sometimes I become slightly obsessive over the scientific “perfection” of my macronutrient ratios/food “cleanliness” (i.e. orthorexic tendencies, but this is a risk I run as a weightlifter and fitness enthusiast). Overall I think I’m pretty okay these days but I’m going to stay mindful. Sorry for the novel of a response, haha.