Medication paradise

I had a weird experience today. I found my new medication Lamictal take away my stress the first day I used it, my constant little fear. Today on day 3 it has made me think differently about my body! My husband said I looked stronger today after I had been to the gym, but I said he probably just imagined it. I felt sad he thought I lifted heavier and heavier and that I had to tell him I can not, that I am not strong, I am not having enough fuel to replenish afterwards, I get too much pain and what not. Really unhappy because I could not train to get stronger as he thought. I asked myself later why I got sad because of that when I have always wanted to look skinny and not be muscular. Then I saw an image of myself as bigger, with more muscles and more fat and I loved that image of myself. I was like: What? How is that possible? That has never happened before! It must be the medication that makes me think differently as it removes my fear. Without the constant fear I no longer see the need to be skinny. It is so weird to be changed so radically and that rapidly! But it is also great. It means I can get much healthier. I can allow myself to increase my calories even when I start to gain weight from the number of calories I eat in the reverse diet that I do, because I will use that energy to get healthy and strong. I then asked myself: If I knew before taking the medication it would make me want to gain weight willingly, would I still take it? The answer was no, no way.! But now I am happy I am one step ahead. 

ED is just fear based! When the fear is gone the ED is out the window with it. Before this happened, at the gym, something happened that can be related to the change of mindset. I had to cry, which I normally do every day anyway. The difference this time was that an image of my mum looking malicious came up with it. It was like she came up through my throat and I had to feel her on the way out of me. By seeing and feeling this evil aspect of her I felt so much better afterwards. Was I relieved from the cause of my fear? She used to scorn me. Always hanging over my shoulder to look for something to criticise me for. It made me into a perfectionist, constantly stressed and afraid of criticism ever since. Seems like my ED is an evil spirit created from the traumatic impact my mum had on me. She became a part of me; Just like she harassed me in my childhood she harasses me in my adult life as a spirit within, making me just as unfree as when she hung over my shoulder. Well, that was up until now. She is out now and no longer have any power over me because the fear is gone.

After a day or two another cause of why I get stressed appeared. What I assume others expects from me. Now I will try to ask people directly if I worry they expect something I don't want to give them. The reason why it stresses me is that my mum used to criticise me and complain when I did not live up to all her unreasonable expectations. I also was in a relationship with a selfish guy who did not talk to me for a week or two if I did not do as he wanted me to, which happened a lot.

Then the third and last, it seems, reason came to my awareness. That I put the bar high for myself to always give correct information and be totally honest. Before I started the medication and lacked patience and detachment to my thoughts it was hard to prepare what to say properly. I also tried to say what I was to say as quick as possible because I  feared the attention span of the listener was very limited. Because I often didn't express myself as correct as I wanted to I was sometimes worried my message was misunderstood and had to correct myself afterwards. With Lamictal I am not so impatient, are calmer and are more detached to my thoughts so I can prepare better what to say so I fulfil my own expectations to be correct better,

This is how you can stop purging. Reverse dieting and self control.

Consider how much you can eat so you don't starve so much you lose control around food when you get upset and not too much you feel fear of weight gain. If you eat very little and then binge and purge I recommend you go from low restricting to high restricting now and do reverse dieting to stop the unnecessary pain related to low restricting.

If you eat less than 700 calories a day (except binge calories) I suggest you start with 300 calorie meals 3 times a day. After a week you can have 330 calorie meals. The week after that again you can have 360 calorie meals, then 390 and so on till you eat 500 calorie meals. Then add calories in a slower manner, like adding just a snack of 50 calories a day that gets more calorie dense each week by 50 calories. You may choose to add just 30 when you are close to your TDEE. Here is a calculator:https://tdeecalculator.net/

To sum it up it may look like this:

300 300 300 (Start here if you were very low restricting).

330 330 330

360 360 360 ( Start here if you ate 1000 a day)

390 390 390

410 410 410

440 440 440

470 470 470

500 500 500

500 500 500 50

500 500 500 100

500 500 500 150

500 500 500 200

500 500 500 250

500 500 500 300

500 500 500 350

500 500 500 400

500 500 500 450

500 500 500 500 

(continue adding 50 if your body needs more)

You will most likely experience weight loss while reverse dieting all the way from just 900 calories a day. When you have been reverse dieting for several weeks and start gaining (not food, water absorbed by carbs or salt, muscle or poop weight, but fat) you can consider if you want to maintain on the amount you ate the week before or if you are still hungry for more allow yourself a bit of weight gain, remove some fats from your diet, (vegetable oils except olive oil and coconut oil slows down metabolism according to Ray Peat) burn it off with exercise or build muscles with it through strength training. 

To be able to do this you need a food scale and a calorie counting app. I use diet.no and are reverse dieting now myself. I am up to 1850 calories a day now and have not gained anything yet. My BMI is 17,7 and I may allow a little weight gain because I strength train and may gain muscles instead of fat. 

Obstacles you may experience:

Emotions: If you don't know how to deal with emotions when you get upset I found a solution to that too so I never rushed out to buy fast food ever again to binge and purge. Just find a quiet place for yourself and lie down and feel your emotions, cry out loud, feel the frustration, anger or what ever you feel. Feel it until you are calm. One can not run away from emotions and pain. The only way to get rid of them is to feel them. The same goes for thoughts. The same ones may show up again and again. To push it aside won't help if you don't give it attention first and think it through. Try to accept everything that comes to you on the inside and outside by giving it the needed attention. That way you are free. You are not free when you run away from or try to fight things you don't like. 

Fear of weight gain: If you weigh yourself from day 1 you may freak out by the first sign of weight gain that is just water and food. You may want to wait with weighing your body till later on, give it away or keep it and stick a note to it saying it is just water weight. If you are a woman you may experience several kilos of water weight coming on and off every month related to hormone levels. This can be felt under the skin and be confused with fat. So try to be rational to avoid the sabotaging fear. You can not gain fat when you are just eating 1300 calories a day. Remind yourself of that or get more knowledge about it if you need more convincing. Fear is your response to a challenge. Try to overcome the fear with bravery believing you do the right thing.

Too much weight loss: If you are the type who never were always lean because you have a high metabolism and a tendency to lose weight rapidly it is important to add more than the suggested calories the first weeks. My suggestions above is not for your body type. If you low restrict I suggest you follow this plan or increase calories even quicker. Instead of increasing every week you can do it every five days:

300 300 300 (This low in calories to avoid refeeding syndrom)

400 400 400 200

500 500 500 100

500 500 500 200

500 500 500 300

500 500 500 400

500 500 500 500

500 500 500 500 100

500 500 500 500 200

500 500 500 500 300

500 500 500 500 400

500 500 500 500 500

When you have reached this point I hope you have already found food freedom and no longer see the need to measure your food nor your body. You listen to the signals given to you by the body, trust it and take care of its needs.

While doing reverse dieting as someone with an eating disorder I recommend finding support from someone around you and/or by watching helpful youtube videos about recovery from an ED. I have a list:

Kayla Rose (she used the all in method, not reverse dieting, but is helpful anyway), Follow your intuition (had bulimia), Tabitha Farrar (had anorexia and exercise addiction), Ro Mitchell (anorexia), Lilykoi Hawaii.

How does our ED serve us?

Do we need to look thin to be loved? Do we need to be delicate to get the attention we need, be noticed and cared for? If you imagine yourself at a normal weight will you panic and be afraid you will just blend in and be left unnoticed and not cared for? Be uninteresting and boring, not worth attention?Do people think we are strong if we are not skinny so they won't think of giving us any compassion and support and just ask for our attention? Are we surrounded by people who are too busy or self centered to pay attention to us we have to be destructive in a desperate attempt to be seen and loved? Will the self centered people care more just because we get skinny, though? Will they not just get stressed and push us to get well so they can continue paying attention on what they normally pay attention to?

For me anorexia is three fold. It is a metaphore for how starved I am for love, a hunger strike towards unfair treatment, as well as an attempt to not need what I desperately long for (love). "I don't need food = my mums love, at the same time I wish she will finally feel compassion for her starved daughter. Meanwhile I cope by pretending I don't need anything. I am fine. I feel hunger for food, but I can control that. To control the love from others is not easy, but I try, by starving myself.

Thing is, I will never succeed. I will never get love from people who has no love to give. I will never feel loved if I am loved just because I am skinny either. If I got love because I got very skinny from the people I hope will love me it would only be temporary, till I was recovered, so I wont recover. I dont want to lose their love.

If I find out they don't love me if I am skinny and choose to recover because my plan to get love did not work, I have to find something else to do to be loved. But I dont know what that should be so I just continue doing what I have always done, even though it does not work. And maybe to recover will make my mum care even less, be disgusted even. Scary, to feel even more rejected.

Or should I just understand they will never love me and find someone who will? If I find someone who shows me compassion I can much easier find compassion for myself.

Even though some people who are important to us do not give as attention it has nothing to do with us. It is not our fault. It is not because we are boring or ugly. They just did not prioritise it or did not understand we needed it because they are self centered and busy. I hope my thoughts was inspiring somehow. I was inspired by this interview of Gabor Mate. Recommend to listen to it several times or stop to take notes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asiL0WY7gck&ab_channel=TraumaSuperConference-FreeGifts

Humiliations

I remember being humiliated several times and when it happened I was so embarrassed I wanted to disappear, shrink into thin air, but to walk away would not have helped. When I feel this I feel tiny and worthless, but from the outside, in others eyes, I see my body as huge because I feel so exposed, but speechless. I think this is why I want to make my body smaller. I try to avoid a new humiliation, to feel exposed and big. But it can happen at any size so it does not help at all. If I had expressed my anger the times it happened perhaps I would have kept my sanity. 

Why did you develop an eating disorder?

I have not yet found a common denominator among all who develop an ED. I can think of two that I have not seen mentioned anywhere and the first one is that we somehow- maybe from sexual abuse, comments on our body, growing up in an environment where looks is a hot topic, doing a sport that requires a thin body- was brought to focus a lot on our body and therefor used our body when we needed to solve an unsolvable problem. The unsolvable problem is cause nr 2. 

Lack of love. I can see many write on the famous ED forum they think they will be more loveable if they get thinner. I think they already lacked love in their life and because getting love is out of their control they try to do something to get it anyway. They try that by changing their body because of cause number one. A desperate attempt they know deep down will fail. If they grew up in an environment where being knowledgable was considered attractive I don't think they would have done the same. 

As a child we really need love from those closest to us so we pick up everything they say they approve and disapprove of. This way we also learn love is not unconditional; We have to be a certain way to be loved. If we hear a lot of talk about appearance we will believe this is highly valued by those who talk about it. No wonder we think of becoming thin when we need love then.

I don't think any of us would be destructive if we had the love we needed (the way we needed it to be shown to us) from those around us and was in a safe environment where we could be who we are. If those around us showed love without conditions we would not need to change, we could just follow our calling and live our life. 

As grown ups we can find people who do love us unconditionally and let go of changing our body.

Intuitive eating in eating disorder recovery

I understand it like it is about listening to both physical and mental hunger. In the beginning of recovery it is normal to eat more of the fear foods we have desired, but not allowed ourselves and you might fear that you will continue eating these foods forever, but you will eventually get used to them and desire vegetables and fruits again too. You can still use your knowledge about nutrition and. try to eat as varied as possible. You don't have to eat just chocolate for dinner, but have some after dinner instead. So if your mental hunger says chocolate it means you are hungry and want chocolate. Then you make sure you get food for the hunger and chocolate too. That is how I ate in my recovery and it worked perfectly. I felt I had full control even though I ate 3500 calories a day for several weeks.

Going all in is intuitive eating. You eat as much as you want and you allow yourself what you desire. We need the extra calories from our fear foods to be able to gain. When the weight is gained the desire for the fast food is low enough it is easy to eat less of it. It is normal to suddenly be less hungry, both mentally and physically, when the weight is restored, making it easy to eat normal healthy foods. If you have overshot your set point weight you will therefor naturally lose that overshoot weight because you eat less. Just let it come off by itself without pushing it by restriction. That last part is important so you don't end up where you were before the recovery attempt. In this phase it is important to focus on life and the mental aspects of the ED, not the body so much.

Body language

Anorexia was my body language

saying I am fragile, handle me with care.

An illusion I felt protected by

as a good girl who had learned

to show the other cheek

and not how to protect myself.

If someone forced themselves on me

I'd freeze.

After many attempts to get some attention, be heard and seen, for years, I gave up. Emotionally starved for attention, utterly lonely, I used the symbolic language instead. I did not really think it would work, but I had tried everything else to get attention/love and I was desperate. No one says: Please love me or please give me attention. No, so symbolic language it is.

I got a tiny bit attention that way, though. Anger from my dad and many years later worry from my mum when I had become very thin. It did not help because they did not ask why or what they could do to help. They kept on living their life with blinders on.

I am not a child anymore. I just thought I would share in case someone can relate. My suggestion is: Do not think you are unworthy or flawed just because they don't give you attention. It is not you, it is them who are flawed. Find someone who have attention to give, heal your wounds with the love and care about yourself and others.