Also reddit just gives me bad vibes and I can't tell why. The posts there scream anorexic, even if the people on there write that they are far into recovery. I'm sorry, but which person, which is far into recovery, would hang out in an ED reddit that much? Exactly, nobody.

Reddit always feels like a competition. Everyone must be the most sick, recovering the hardest, struggling most, but also posting selfies where they look great. Even the "I'm suffering most" pics have a fashion model vibe, like, who on earth takes a perfectly lit selfie of their mental breakdown.

And if anything goes well for you, they'll point out you're privileged for owning a water kettle or have access to a warm shower.

 

Most recovery subreddits piss me off tbh, it's like they have rose-colored glasses on or are straight up delusional abt recovery to cope with it.

They tend to insist there's no such thing as binging during recovery and that it's all extreme hunger. If you dare to claim you developed BED due to mismanaged recovery you get an insta permaban, etc, etc.

Very toxic community too

 

Yes, super icky and not a good place to be on if you are in recovery, because in recovery you are in a very vulnerable state. A few wrong things and it could very much get stuck into your head

 

even outside of reddit i think most recovery spaces are super toxic, competitive, and just generally suck. on recovery tiktok i see ppl posting old bodychecks or talking in detail abt how disordered they used to be. genuinely more toxic and triggering in some of these spaces than non-recovery focused ed spaces. ppl always want to act recovered but then brag about how bad they had it and very obviously have very disordered thoughts still. id just stay away from these places tbh i feel like most ppl would have more success without them. and regarding the overeating, yea 8k is def binge territory. i dont think i ever ate more than 3-4k when i was in recovery from being in the high 14s, and even then it was mainly bcs my diet was majority super calorie dense things. for me i dont really think my hunger signals went back to normal even after being in recovery for 1+yr but i still wasnt eating more than 2-3k a day.

 

Omg not those super weird tiktoks, where they claim to be recovered but bodycheck every second. I also saw a lot of "recovery" accounts, where the people look very emaciated, yet claim to be in recovery and even MONTHS later they still look the same as when they started recovery. When you point that out in the comments, you just get attacked. I once pointed out that someone who was in recovery still looked like they were deep into their ED and some stupid people began to responds with "everyone's body look different" "why are you judging her based on her body" etc.

I personally struggle with B/P, so whenever I try to recover, I have to avoid giving into my binge urges. I know there is very thin line between your body actually needing to gain weight and your ED wanting to act out. A lot of sufferers from anorexia forget that they have tendencies to B/P or urges to binge. And well it might be due to extreme restriction, it can quickly turn into another ED. This does not mean people who try to recover will develop BED! I did not. But all ED's have the same roots and have a lot of similarities, so you need to be careful. And a lot of it has to do with actual wanting to take better care of yourself and treat yourself with respect. When I struggle with self-hatred or don't know how to cope, I turn to my ED or sh. And if you don't fix the problem itself, your ED will try to find its way back into your life.
And binging CAN give you A LOT of comfort and distract you from your problems and emotions. The problem is you forget how to eat and what normal portions are, and it is very easily to drown yourself in the distraction and "happiness" binging gives you.
Yes, if you are uw - like I was and still am (not much so I don't need to gain) - you need to gain weight. But you have to be careful, and using all those excuses to binge extreme amounts of food is just as much self harm as restricting. Not saying eating a lot is bad, it always depends, but you should fix your relationship with food and binging is not normal eating.

 

also i may be misinformed about this but i see a lot of ppl in these recovery spaces who are very overweight to obese who say this is healthy for them bcs they are intuitively eating or wtv but it honestly seems like they just developed a binge disorder. like i doubt it is normal to be gaining 50-100 lbs in a short span, and while it might be healthier than being severely underweight i think they are just replacing the issue with another one and they wouldnt be actually recovered.

 

Yes! I saw them too! Very weird and not healthy at all Being underweight or overweight is both the same just at the other end of the spectrum.

 

idk this one but don’t even get me started on r/fuckeatingdisorders

 

ed reddit (even recovery threads) is horrid i would stay far far away

 

I have been personally victimized by the online recovery community…it’s so much more toxic than the pro-Ana community.

 

tons of people who claimed that eating such large amounts is normal.

very mixed opinions — i went into recovery a skeptic about EH's existence but definitely believe in it now (MANTRA recognises that hunger levels elevate although they call listening to that hunger 'binging' too and advocate for whiteknuckling it with a meal plan until you hit healthy weight, and i just wanted the food thoughts to go away — they did, completely, when i listened to it). for context i do a middle ground where quantities don't have a limit, but it has to be healthy/whole foods, minimally processed/types of food i wouldn't feel guilty (not referring to quantity in this point) to incorporate into another person's diet. this way i'm eating foods that have nearly always existed and not having my hunger cues fucked with by manufacturers who invented and marketed my snacks directly for profit.

saying this as someone who's always monitored for hunger/fullness, underlying emotions, boredom/understimulation (litmus test is "do the food thoughts conveniently disappear if mind and mouth are occupied, you read/listen to something and chew on your knuckle?" — if not, and i can't focus unless i've eaten, i decide it's a mental hunger cue and eat). i've definitely had 3k-4k days i no longer feel as bad about in hindsight because of how it tends to pan out ("am i really hungry?" after protein, fluids, vegetables, blahblah — yes, in a way i'd feel nauseous if i threw more volume at it — therefore what i want is calories and low density so that's when the pb jar opens), and four months in, intake's still elevated but it's not half a kilo of pb these days and satiety comes more easily. it's letting hunger do its thing that's the reason i can focus on anything else, finish books, listen to podcasts, watch films not about food — i don't doubt that, had i been on a meal plan, food obsession wouldn't leave me alone.

i've made a promise to myself that i can take a chance on this knowing that if it turns into BED (as per the 41% rate), BED has a recovery process too, and it might make things inconvenient but wouldn't end my world to have to do — it wouldn't end my world part of recovery's contract is about having the compassion and unconditional respect to treat yourself like a human being, even when the decision you make turns out to be the wrong one. i might be wrong about EH in the long term, and honestly, that'll be okay.

on the flipside, here's where i suspect we might agree: i think edreddit is confused as fuck about your body "knowing what it wants" and even more deranged "all food is healthy food". i also think it's a fallacy to present the "no food will hurt you like an ed can" as though your two options are eat junk or eat nothing at all (which isn't the case), or recovering on exclusively healthy food to be inherently orthorexic (stick with me here — people on /r/ultraprocessedfood aren't orthorexic for their choice to eliminate upf, it's an ethical stance against manufacturers/a health move. elimination diets aren't inherently orthorexic nor come with orthorexic thoughts, and i'm saying this as someone who self-identifies with the orthorexic description.)

it's wrong (like wrong as in incorrect, not wrong as in morally!) that craving upf is part of Your Body's Grander Plan, given study after study displaying that upf is marketed and designed to be addictive and hyperpalatable. your body is not "smart" in craving krispy kremes, it's doing exactly what the manufacturers intended — recovering or not, it's naive to think your intake won't have a positive/negative effect on your cholesterol, heart and liver. given that we're starving animals, feeding our bodies hyperpalatable upf pours gasoline on the standard starvation response — i strongly suspect it makes EH last much longer (by perpetuating itself) and be calorically higher for the contents of the products discouraging satiety. i'm content enough to "honour my EH" but it's not being honoured on chocolate and cheese: it's not a moral thing, it's not an intricate ritual intended to minimise weight gain, it's not "fake recovery", it's the fact that my organs are doing me a massive favour by healing and i want to help them help me — not cause more trouble than they're trying to fix.

 

unrelatedly tho: it's definitely given me new empathy for everyone who sees a dietitian, because i have more luck feeling prolonged satiety from a mediterranean restaurant meal than a meal of my own making (which is fine rn but to my knowledge the oil content is an exaggeration compared to oil in an average homemade meal) it's shown me how little i really know about balancing my plate to maximise satiety (and wind up mainlining fat-dense safe foods after a regular meal in order to access it 😑).

if it's confusing for me, people whose recovery diets are high-upf and further imbalanced would be even more in the dark than i am.

 

You should not be having extreme hunger at 8 months in anorexia recovery. I was bmi 11s and the EH did not last that long at all. I can understand if you're relapsing and still restricting heavily but not if you have been eating properly

 

is it fine to ask how long it took you and/or what food you responded to it with?