If you are like 99.9999999% of women who are undertaking recovery from ANY eating disorder/disordered eating, I can pretty much guarantee that everyone’s number ONE FEAR IS WEIGHT GAIN. I mean, it makes perfect sense. You’ve spent however long desperately trying NOT to gain weight and just as long trying to lose the weight you did gain when you went “off” your diet. Psssstttt – here’s a secret, the only reason you fear weight gain is because society has programmed you to fear it – that’s for another day.
In the mainstream world, we are now starting to see that diets failed 95% of the time. What does this mean? I mean’s that you’re going to gain the weight back (if you are too far below your set point weight). Other people all over the internet explain this FAR better than I do. Maybe I’ll take a stab at it in another blog post.
Take a quick inventory of those people around you who have struggled with their weight. I need you to only include the ones that have been trying to lose weight for at least 5 years. Try to think how often they yo-yoed their weight. How many times did they crash diet in January, look “great by summer” and then gain it all back in about 2-3 months over the holidays? And then repeat the SAME thing every year? How many of them did you see “break their diets” in front of you? Eating carbs on special occasions, breaking their intermittent fasting earlier than they were supposed to? Eating processed foods on Whole 30? Except for that SMALL percentage, an overwhelmingly majority of the people who diet, fail. BUT WHY? WHY do they fail? The plans are laid out so beautifully for them! They have a wonderful support system preparing their meals and cheering them on! Some pay thousands of dollars to have perfectly portioned meals and snacks at the perfect calorie amounts. They give you lists and lists of food that if you eat the things on that list you’ll lose weight. HOW CAN YOU FAIL AT THAT? Because biology that’s why.
Wait, what? Biology you say? YES – BIOLOGY. Whatever you may have heard over the years about the purpose of human life, first and foremost, the body’s NUMBER ONE JOB IS TO KEEP YOU ALIVE. Think about that for a second. What exactly does “keep you alive mean?”. Well, it has to keep your brain and heart functioning as well as the millions of other things it has to do to ensure you don’t die. So, let’s take the example of anorexia. Food is needed for human survival. We have seen the horrific process of people dying of starvation and we know it happens. But what happens, as in my case, when I give my body juuuuusssttt enough food to squeak by? Juuuuusssstttt enough food to keep my brain, heart and other organs functioning? Well, the body had to choose where to send the calories I ate 3 times a week. I can tell you where my body STOPED sending them!!? I was losing my hair, my nails were brittle and weak, I had extremely dry and scaly skin, my acne was raging, my period was irregular and often times non-existent, my stomach stopped growling, my digestive tract was completely shut down, I was only having 1 bowl movement a week, I was irritable, annoyed, frustrated, impatient, depressed, and anxious. I was tired ALL the time, had a hard time sleeping through the night, was always cold despite having layer and layers of clothing, extremely low blood pressure, abnormal thyroid bloodwork and cavities every 4-6 months for decades. But guess what! My body did it’s job – I was alive. The body didn’t particularity care about all the other symptoms I now had, it was doing the best it could with the calories it was given. It kept my heart pumping and brain working (if you want to call it that).
**TRIGGER WARNING – WEIGHT NUMBERS MENTIONED BELOW**
So what happens when you feed a starved body, actual, real food? You gain a sh*t ton of weight in a VERY short period of time. How much you say? I gained 75 lbs in 4 months. That’s an average of 19 lbs a month. Ok, so, let me start by saying that EVERY SINGLE person I spoke to during my recovery explicitly told me NOT to weigh myself. I obviously didn’t listen. And now let me tell you how many times I Googled “weight gain in anorexia recovery, how much did you gain in anorexia recovery, will I lose the weight I gained in anorexia recovery”… there were TONS of blogs telling me WHY is was needed and how it was healing my body and without the weight gain I would not recover. All wonderful advice – but give me the pictures – give me the numbers so that I can compare myself to someone else’s recovery (like exactly how you’re doing it right now – ha!). I found maybe 4 people? And TRUST ME – I DID LOOK. But the diet recovery world really shies away from sharing numbers and weight gain because, they say, it doesn’t really matter what you weigh. Yeah, I get that now, almost a year later, but HELL NO. Are you kidding me that it’s not relevant that I gained 75 lbs? Are you telling me that I’m not allowed to be scared out of my mind? That I have to put “weight loss” on the backburner? You’re kidding right? If you’re doing your math right, I started at 150 lbs, so 150 plus 75 = 225 lbs. OMG
The last time I even saw a number remotely close to that was the day I gave birth to my children, weighing in at 205 and 210 lbs respectively. What the hell indeed. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t remember gaining the weight, well, let me refresh; I knew I was gaining weight. It was obvious. But I purchased leggings in various sizes and oversized baggy shirts and sweaters. And since I was unemployed and rarely left the house due to COVID, I really didn’t notice how much I gained until I weighed myself. I freaked out. Like REALLY freaked out. I was sobbing and hysterical. And since I’m being totally transparent here, I’ll never forget the night after I weighted myself. I was crying uncontrollably in my room (my husband and I have slept in separate bedrooms for about 6 years – will get to that story soon and it’s relevant) and I started hitting myself. More specifically, I started hitting my stomach – slapping it, yelling at it, screaming and asking it why it was there and what I had done wrong and using A LOT of profanity.
At that point I had 2 choices:
-I could quit recovery and go back to my anorexia. It was waiting patiently to take me back to control – it had always been there and will always be there. It always told me about the good times but conveniently forget to remind me of the bad times. I could always go back. Nothing was stopping me. I could stop eating again. Sure, it would be hard at first, but I was a seasoned veteran. In fact, I welcomed the challenge of trying to get back to the precise control I had in the past . And this time, I vowed, I’d do it without cheating; without chewing gum or drinking coffee and diet soda.
-Or I could keep going with recovery. I spoke to my therapist and ED team several times a week for about a month after I weighted myself. They reassured me that it was totally normal. They also advised me that gaining the weight as quickly and as fast as I did was a good sign. It was developing trust with my body. And, the kicker – If I went back to restriction when I was 75 lbs heavier, my body may (may!!?!) stay there for a long time because it was now even more fearful of restriction because it had a taste of food freedom. This is an evolutionary process that kept our ancestors alive during times a feast and famine. But my body didn’t know that. It seriously thought I had been in a famine for the past 20+ years and was finally eating food. So it did was it was evolutionary primed to do – store all calories as fuel (aka gain lots and lots of weight, especially in the belly) in preparation for a future famine.
So “medically”, I knew what was happening to my body, but emotionally, mentally, psychologically? NO ONE can prepare you for what happens. I like to use the example of child birth. You can show thousands of child birth videos to prospective mothers, but every single one of them will tell you that the videos may be prepared for what giving birth looked like, but the emotional, mental and physiological toll it took to deliver, well, there isn’t a video in the world that could describe that. That’s what gaining weight in recovery is like. I read all the books, listened to all the YouTube videos, read stories of other typical anorexic’s who recovered (a lot of them gained 70,80,90,100+ lbs.)
I said something in a previous blogpost about recovering into a plus sized body. The typical anorexic who gains 100+ and goes from a size 2 to a size 12 is going to have a completely different journey from the atypical anorexic who goes from a size 8 to a size 18. WHY? Because one recovers in a body that’s ok by societies standards and the other has recovered into what society deems “fat, obese, disgusting, lazy, gross, unhealthy, etc…..” Explain to me how BOTH of these people were starving, but one is praised for gaining weight and saving their life while the other is ridiculed and shamed for trying to do the same thing? The difference is fat phobia. And that my friends is a PERFECT example of why there are thousands of women who are walking around starving themselves and they know, *THEY KNOW* that if they even try to pursue recovery, they will be marginalized and shamed for being in a body society does not deem acceptable. What a sad and horrible thing we have done. And I am ashamed to say I contributed to that shaming and fat phobia to family and friends in my own life for decades.
Oh, and just in case you wanted to know, since I’ve basically told you pretty much everything – my body continued to gain another 15 lbs putting my total weight gain at 90 lbs. To this day I weigh 240 lbs. And if you paid attention, that is exactly 100 lbs from what my goal weight was during my eating disorder days. Sigh…. sounds like my body had another number in mind.