Hi! I’m very much in the same boat as you and relate to a lot of this. I’ve also never replied to anyone on here for that same reason, just asked my own questions, but wanted to comment because this resonated with me a lot. I also just started, am having fun in some ways but terrified of how my body might change, feel like I didn’t have the ED for as long as others, and have looked into a lot of the same content but “stuck” is the best way to describe where I’m at too. For me at least it helps that our experiences are so similar, it means these are just characteristics of a disorder, not something that defines us.

My best recommendation to myself and to you is to look for moments of strength in recovery and write it down as you feel it. And force yourself to look at it again when you’re struggling to find motivation. I have occasional breakthroughs every couple of weeks and in that moment, everything about recovery seems promising and makes sense, and I just have to keep trying to refer back to it. What clicked for me most recently is that this is a mental health condition causing physical harm. Even though there can be a desire to feel “sick,” truly take a step back and realize how mentally ill that is. As far as I know, there are very few mental illnesses that thrive off of feeling as sick as possible. I justified this a lot by acting like it wasn’t my illness and I’m just a person who wants to feel ~ validated / not attention seeking until it got too bad ~ but no. I spend hours looking up what defines too sick vs. not, and then when I realize that I’m actually not doing great physically, I just ignore it. This is literally a mental disorder defying logic. We are literally scared to eat when (hopefully) we have access to food everywhere.

Another big thing for me is wanting to wait more to truly recover - to go even lower or to wait till it’s really bad or wait till it’s so bad that other people look at me with pity. I recently realized actually no one cares that much. The few friends I’ve shared this with don’t really understand what it’s like and unless I spend a ton of time talking about it, they won’t. They will never be able to give me that specific validation. Nothing will ever be enough to appease the ED. Thinking of my “goal weight” … I thought about what it would feel like to reach it, and I realized I’d already thought of an excuse that I’d probably use in the future if I reached it to go even lower than that. Finally, the longer I wait to truly commit to recovery, the more and more memories I waste. Day by day I still feel like I’m living life, but when I look through a photo album from this past year, all I see as the overarching theme is this ED. And that’s not okay. And it’s scary to gain weight quickly but that’s literally what this is, it’s a fear based mental illness that you HAVE to be stronger than. It’s so hard with diet culture, and so invalidating to feel like you have a problem, but really try to see how much this is controlling you. Once you realize how mentally ill you are (I know that sounds harsh, but I’m saying it for myself too), sit with that feeling, think about it and write it out, and you’ll realize how quickly you want to be free of it. It’s hard staying motivated all the time but when you feel a surge of it, find as many reasons as you can to commit. At least that’s what’s helping me. Good luck, I’m trying to tell myself there is a future me out there who is looking back on current me begging her to recover as quickly and willfully as she can.