25. mai 2016

Phases of recovery, in short.

Found on Youreatopia.com:http://www.youreatopia.com/blog/2012/11/23/phases-of-recovery-from-a-restrictive-eating-disorder.html

Phase I- Edema
Digestive distress is common in this first phase: bloating, gas, pain and abdominal distention, diarrhea or constipation. You can alleviate this a bit by eating smaller amounts more constantly throughout the day. Despite all the physical discomfort of these early days, many experience a tremendous sense of relief and initial joy at eating in an unrestricted way. Carbs, sugars and fat feature prominently in the early phases and protein makes a surge later on. Hopefully, your craving for dietary fat has been strong (an important factor in healing the central, peripheral and enteric nervous systems). However, the restrictive eating disorder will not allow that relief to stand for very long. Soon you will find yourself starting to feel edgy and anxious.
  1. Extreme hunger is a normal progression in recovery. It does not last. You do not ‘habituate’ to 6000-10,000 calories a day, but you need that energy during refeeding.
  2. No one keeps gaining and gaining.
  3. Your body has an optimal weight set point that it can and will defend.
  4. Pain is normal. Rest. No weighing or exercise.
PhaseII
The body preferentially lays down fat around the mid-section to insulate vital organs from hypothermia.
For many this tends to be a phase of extreme impatience—following all the guidelines day and day out and yet still wearing floaty and stretchy clothes and feeling like an alien in your own body seems unfair. You may still be restoring weight and that will bother your eating disorder-generated anxiety. Your body may additionally need to temporarily overshoot its optimal weight set point in this process in order to return to a correct fat mass to fat-free mass ratio.

Phase III—bones, muscles, almost there
Assuming you have been purposefully eating to your minimum guidelines and responding to extreme hunger without compensatory restriction up to this phase, then you start to get rewarded for all your hard work.
Osteopenia and osteoporosis begin to reverse (the completion of that may take up to 7 years, but it begins to reverse in this phase).
The fat deposited around the mid-section is now beginning to be redistributed throughout the body. Fat mass increase disproportionately to fat-free mass in the beginning of recovery, and the fat-free mass play 'catch-up' with the fat mass. so, both fat-free mass and fat mass are proportionally present after a solid recovery effort, that is, eating plenty and resting plenty.
Hair, nails and skin begin to have increased pliability and suppleness.
You also start to feel more connected and self-imposed isolation diminishes. You feel less emotional blunting and start to want things for your life.
This occurs for many at around the 4-6 month mark, but for others it takes shape between months 8-12.

A warning from G. at youreatopia: Many lower intake because they confuse weight restoration with energy balance. I call it "recover, but not too much" and it's driven by sociocultural silliness rather than scientific evidence supported by the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and Andrea Garber's analyses of IP settings.
So keep eating minimum after weight restoration. The extra energy will be used for activety when it is no longer used for healing.



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