Self-Indulgent Anorexic Notes App Word Vomit
Trigger Warning: Detailed description of eating disorders
I'm sitting here laying in bed, it's 2pm and I haven't eaten anything since 11am yesterday. I can still feel the two chicken tenders I had for brunch sitting heavily in my stomach. It's not like I didn't consume anything with calories though, at work I had a fancy bottled craft soda and then I came home and downed a pint of orange juice. I can feel it weighing me down. I think I was at like 650 calories for the day yesterday? Still feels like too many. I haven't been like logging my meals or anything. The lifesum app I use during these relapses stays untouched in my "games" folder on my phone. I feel like I have to hide it for some reason, even though I bought this phone and pay for the plan. I don't know if I actually ever recovered for real. Maybe I did, and then the experience of being unemployed and having no money for food led me back down this path.
I didn't even really recognize that I had been falling into a relapse until I panicked at the thought of eating that fucking pad thai. Better to not eat at all if I don't have to. Better to not have to feel so disgusting anymore. I'm at the lowest weight I've been since I was 16, and I feel so disgustingly overweight. I feel like I have my own gravitational pull bc of how heavy I am. I don't even have a goal weight anymore. This is the number I've been chasing since my eating disorder started to get real, when I woke up one day in rehab at 18 and decided to kneel over the toilet and not get up until I figured out how to empty my stomach. Like I guess I have a number, but it's not the perfect weight like my current (I should say current as of last week, I'm lighter than that now) one. I really genuinely thought I'd be happy with my body once I reached this. 195 was supposed to be my magic ticket to self acceptance.
I knew it was a lie but whatever. Now I just want to see my body eliminated of all excess matter. I want to see the hollows of my cheekbones and be able to count the ridges in my sternum. I want to see the bones in my fingers. I want to be skin and bones and organs. It's sick and it's fucked up but I want to have some dramatic catastrophic accident caused by my ED. I wanna be so sick that my body stops functioning while I'm like at work or some other incredibly public place while I'm not alone. It's not even really about the desire for attention. Honestly it's more a desire for warranted concern. For the people in my life to be forced to care. And to be so undeniably thin that my body can't function normally anymore. It's this whole not wanting to grow up thing. Or maybe it's mourning the way I never got to experience actually being cared for.
It's odd how people talk about the process of losing your hunger cues. They use language that implies they just stopped eating one day and dealt with the hunger until it went away. That is not how that works. It's nearly impossible to deal with real hunger if you're used to eating regularly. There's no amount of mental strength that can make you stop eating cold turkey and just ignore the stabbing in your gut. It's why people on extreme diets can't stick to them and eventually cave. Your animal instinct will take over and make you eat.
It starts small, because restriction starts small. It starts with ignoring midday hunger during the workweek because there's other shit to do and you'll eat when you have time. That's not the hunger I'm talking about. I'm not even talking about the hunger that comes when you miss a couple meals in a row, or leave the house without breakfast and realize when you get home 14 hours later that you're ravenous. I'm talking about the desperate last ditch signals your body sends you when you can't remember the last time you had a full meal, when you're laying awake at 4am because your body will not let you rest without fueling it. Resisting that feeling takes purposeful conditioning. Sometime before you get to that point you start to learn to enjoy being able to feel a constant light hunger.
I stopped eating for satiety, and started eating until I was just barely not hungry. It feels wrong to feel full, or even just sated. I feel sluggish and uncomfortable. I started unintentionally extending the amount of time I could sit in the painful, panic inducing type of hunger because I had learned to view it as a reward. That's the difference in this relapse I think, the reason why it's so intense. Usually I use hunger as a punishment, I'm weaponizing the withholding of food to force myself to do things. But this time there's nothing behind it, no deliberate usage of my eating disorder to create some sort of change in my life. It's simple. It's starving for starving's sake.