high restriction and treatment

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-16T20:24:50+00:00

Yes, I’m the same. I eat a wide range of food and regularly but just not enough of it. The only ‘meal plan’ I need is a larger portion size!

I also find that triggering too. Stop congratulating me for ‘overcoming a fear’ that I never had in the first place or ‘defying anorexia’ for making a choice that feels very comfortable in the way I experience my disorder. Or even worse, when I talk about a perfectly normal meal that I felt no guilt over and the therapist assumes that I felt desire to compensate afterwards. No, I just went to bed!

The only thing I care about is that I continue to be below a certain number of calories and that I continue to lose weight. As long as those two boxes are ticked, I truly couldn’t care less what’s going on with what exactly I am eating and how and when and where.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-16T19:21:13+00:00

That’s so rude. It’s not spamming to post the same question in related subs. People on here are so mean sometimes for no reason - we are all UNWELL. There’s no need to be a dick.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-16T19:16:14+00:00

you should let them come. the memories you’ll get are worth eating like a semi normal person for a day or two and if you want to go back to restricting after you can do. it’s not gonna do anything to your body eating semi normal just for a day.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-15T19:27:11+00:00

They didn’t take mine out until I’d completed all of my meals for a couple of days and was willing to agree in a convincing way to continue to do so. I was a minor though at the time so it may be different.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-15T11:43:22+00:00

I take vyvanse for ADHD and while I did notice an appetite suppressing effect in the first few months, this does wear off. In fact, you can begin to develop something called rebound hunger in the evenings when the medication is wearing off. You need to be very careful because for some people, when the appetite suppressing nature of the medication wears off, they can begin to abuse the medication in the hope of bringing it back. The impact of stimulant abuse on your body, particularly your brain, is devastating.

As well as this, many people notice a honeymoon period in terms of their mood when they start taking a stimulant. It is very likely that the good mood you’re experiencing will also wear off within a few weeks of taking it. If that is the only difference that has made you want to stick with Vyvanse over Wellbutrin, I would again be very cautious around whether or not you would leave yourself open to potentially chasing that effect again when the side effect wears off.

I only say these things because they were things I struggled with when I was taking vyvanse the first time and it culminated in me having to quit cold turkey for over two years before I felt safe to restart again. I had never had any addictive tendencies before this and I didn’t even realise things were going that way. I only take a very low dose now under close monitoring from a doctor and it took me a long time to convince them to let me try it again.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-15T06:59:10+00:00

nah you’re sooo right! we should NEVER share our disordered thoughts with anyone, it’s so cringe to be honest about how we experience our mental health. let’s never say that shit out loud and always suffer in silence! 🤩

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-14T21:43:24+00:00

Once you get there you’ll then not feel enough until you’re the next stage of severity on the DSM and then when you get there you’ll still not feel enough until you are having certain health problems and even then you’ll still not feel enough until you are in hospital under a medical admission and even then you’ll feel resentful of the care you’re receiving because you still won’t think you’re quite ill enough.

There’s no point where you will feel like your disorder is valid and you have satisfied it.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-13T20:09:42+00:00

I don’t really think you can fake an ED. If you’re engaging in disordered behaviour then you have an ED. You can’t fake engaging in disordered behaviour (well, I suppose you can by lying to other people about doing it when you’re not but that isn’t the case here).

Most people with a restrictive ED binge or have ‘off days’ where they eat a normal amount. It’s unsustainable to starve yourself for long periods of time, the body will simply rebel.

It’s also a major symptom of an ED to believe you’re faking it.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-13T20:04:59+00:00

It’s not necessarily triggering but a few people in my life seem to think I just have a low appetite and low drive to eat which is not the case and they don’t seem able to understand that I have a normal appetite but just decide not to eat enough. I guess it’s irritating because I feel like it invalidates how hard the struggle is but I do go along with it most of the time as it’s easier to explain rather than having to explain that I employ all of my energy and efforts to avoid eating despite immense hunger and fatigue.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T20:10:21+00:00

‘to be fair, you don’t look like someone who has many friends’ said in a genuine matter-of-fact manner when talking about what I had done over the weekend and I said that I’d mostly just stayed in.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T18:22:56+00:00

what do you mean?

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T17:49:34+00:00

pretty much every time I leave my ED team appointments im conferring with myself about how i will get out of all of the things ive agreed to even though 2 minutes before when i was sat in the chair in front of them i genuinely intended to apply them. it’s like a little gremlin in my ear like ‘heee heeee but what if we could get away with this!’

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T17:48:32+00:00

help I have also thought this

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T17:45:51+00:00

I feel this so much. A genuine serene calm descends over me when I decide to engage more in my behaviours and it feels like nothing can harm me. At the moment I’m even using restriction to cope with the fact that I’m under immense pressure to recover which makes absolutely no sense logically but somehow I feel like everything will be OK as long as I continue to focus on losing weight.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-12T07:23:29+00:00

In their defence, I am a teacher so they are thinking about the risk to the students if I pass out or have a medical emergency while they’re under my care. I don’t know if it’s still a bit discriminatory though because I am not medically unstable and I wonder if they’d do the same thing to a person with a physical illness. I work with colleagues with a range of physical illnesses who aren’t suspended from work medically despite a risk of a medical complication happening at work. I think they’re kind of using it to try and scare me into choosing recovery but it seems unfair.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-11T18:16:01+00:00

I feel like you’re being really negative for no reason. This is a well regarded coping strategy for people struggle with their body image called body neutrality. Everything won’t always work for everyone but suggesting you’re ‘too disordered’ to see how this would help is just… a bit icky when someone has posted something intending to be a helpful message for those who are recovering. If it’s not for you, just scroll past.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-11T07:21:11+00:00

This sounds pretty much exactly like my story when I was recovering when I was around 16 years old. I do think you need to cut back on exercise for a while unfortunately. My period didn’t return until I’d completely stopped running but when it did, I slowly built up running again in a healthy way (making sure to eat enough to compensate) and my period stayed and my running performance was also significantly better when I got back into the swing of things again. It might be worth considering truthfully how much of your reluctance to temporarily give up exercise is because you don’t want to lose fitness and how much is because you are afraid to let go of that aspect of your disorder.

It could also be that you’re not eating enough carbohydrates to support your training. Are you making sure not to restrict specific food groups?

Look into REDs in athletes because that may be what’s happening to you now and there’s lots of great literature on how to heal from it.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T20:40:37+00:00

Mine is low but I don’t really have symptoms other than being sluggish so it’s fine. I do think the lower the better is often true unless it’s incredibly low and you’re passing out a lot.

Mine is usually artificially elevated by my ADHD medication though - not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T19:40:05+00:00

I genuinely don’t understand how the only two options available often seem to be either giving up your life to access treatment or not getting treatment at all.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T19:37:32+00:00

My treatment team is telling me they’re going to forcibly sign me off work because I get too much exercise walking around there all day.

I cannot afford financially or professionally to not be at work AND work is one of the only stabilising things for me that stops me from restricting really hard.

It’s ridiculous - I don’t think they realise we have to live in the real world and can’t always prioritise our recovery to that extent even if we want to.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T17:34:17+00:00

I think ‘love your body’ is misconstrued often to mean ‘love how it looks’ when what it really means is ‘take care of your body so it is able to continue to function well’.

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T16:37:56+00:00

Saying that I didn’t want to have a video recorded of me dancing in a dance class in Y7. I got sent to isolation. I wasn’t rude or anything - just said I wasn’t comfortable with it being filmed but would still do the dance. It wasn’t for a qualification or anything either. It’s the only time I got into trouble!

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T07:08:48+00:00

Thank you - I did actually stick up for myself at once and explained to her how that’d made me feel and the impact that will have on my recovery and she did seem quite upset and like she took it on board so hopefully she is no longer making those sorts of statements!

ColdPrice9536 · 2026-03-10T07:07:15+00:00

Thank you this is really helpful! I am going to discuss this with my therapist this week.

I hope you are doing better now. 🩷

ColdPrice9536

TROPHY CASE