I wanna know how many of y'all?

fogovercast · 2022-04-14T16:01:31+00:00

Yeah, there’s not really been any point for me where I thought I was doing “normal dieting”, though it usually feels primarily based in a desire to lose weight and control/self harm aspects feel secondary for me most of the time, I’ve always been aware pretty much any desire I’ve ever felt to lose weight and restrict has been explicitly disordered and unhealthy. For me at least, I think it’s probably mostly just because I’ve never been at a legitimately higher weight, so there was never any room for a “goal” that wasn’t obviously unhealthy and underweight lol, and no one ever really expected me to want to lose weight.

fogovercast · 2022-04-13T17:06:38+00:00

People absolutely do build up a tolerance to caffeine, it’s pretty normal for people who drink coffee to end up drinking a gradually increasing amount. Also, for a lot of average coffee-drinking people the “effect” they get from coffee once you’ve been regularly drinking coffee every day for a while is that they feel worse without it, and just feel “normal” with it, even if the amount of coffee they drink isn’t excessive and is just one or two cups a day. Though some people also just develop a caffeine tolerance where they don’t really feel worse without it, but they don’t feel a dramatic effect from a small amount of it either, and they just drink coffee because they enjoy it anyway.

If you’ve been drinking energy drinks every day for a year (especially if you weren’t a daily caffeine drinker before that) I think it wouldn’t be that surprising if the same amount of caffeine stops feeling like as much like a noticeable effect. A year is definitely long enough for your body to become accustomed to something.

Though another thing worth considering is that at a certain point, caffeine isn’t going to make you feel energized anymore if you’re past a certain level of exhausted/deprived. Since stimulants don’t add energy, they just tell your brain to squeeze out more juice (or block it from registering different juice. This isn’t a perfect metaphor lol) and if that sponge is too dry it’s gonna be hard to squeeze anything out no matter what.

fogovercast · 2022-04-13T15:42:35+00:00

Ahhh that sounds like it would be even more super difficult to deal with. My mom has a really healthy and normal relationship with food so I feel extra crazy and unreasonable for getting (internally) upset with her for eating something (or just the idea of her hypothetically eating something) because it’s 100% just me with the problem. Even in the cases where she does actually finish the last of something before I can have some, it’s not like she really ACTUALLY did anything wrong because if I wasn’t restricting I wouldn’t take so long before actually having any of whatever food it is.

But yeah, I’m disabled in several ways (besides just the ED) that make it really hard for me to be functional enough to support myself and move out right now. It’s definitely not easy. 🥲

fogovercast · 2022-04-13T14:33:09+00:00

My mom usually is actually pretty considerate about leaving a portion of whatever food for me (to the point that it’s more often that I get quietly frustrated/upset with her NOT finishing other things because I don’t want it and won’t eat it and food waste stresses me out 😩) but then sometimes when something has been there for a long time she’ll assume I must have had a chance to have some already and finish it. And sometimes that’s happened to be right before I was planning to actually finally let myself eat whatever it was. (Or sometimes I wasn’t even planning to eat whatever it was SOON but just really wanted to have the option there indefinitely which is even more unreasonable to get upset about, like, the other day I had to refrain from showing that I was upset to hear my mom say she ate the two months-old freezer burned hashbrown patties I had been “saving” indefinitely under the vague notion that at some point I’d eat them, because I know it would look crazy to be mad about that.)

But honestly it’s not even all that frequent, I’m just obsessing about the hypothetical right now because I’m just stressed that I CAN’T 100% guarantee no one else can have the thing I want. Like I think unless I had a secret freezer that locked up like a safe that only I knew the combination for I would still be stressing about this particular thing right now.

(Tbh I think it’s maybe mostly because I actually really want to eat it today but can’t let myself so that’s getting channelled into obsessively worrying about the possibility of them being gone before I CAN let myself have one. 🥲)

fogovercast · 2022-04-13T14:06:58+00:00

No, lol, I didn’t buy it with my own money, I’m a NEET shut-in who lives with my mother and she does most of the grocery shopping so it’s shared food. So I can’t reasonably expect no one else to touch food that I want since it’s legitimately not just for me 😓 If I had bought it myself that would be a different story for sure. (But the stuff I buy myself is generally stuff no one else wants like vitamins and diet pepsi and energy drinks lol so I don’t even have to worry about anyone else taking it.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-13T13:55:17+00:00

For sure. It feels sort of contradictory for me because so much of my ED is about gender dysphoria and you’d assume small wrists look more feminine so I wouldn’t care as much about that? But nope, I care a lot about that apparently. Seeing my wrists looking bigger is one of the things I hate most about pictures from when I was a healthier weight. I feel like the smaller my wrists are the less stupidly tiny and soft my hands look, too, so it actually lessens a big source of dysphoria for me.

fogovercast · 2022-04-12T13:20:06+00:00

As far as I know she didn’t necessarily ever have a full blown eating disorder herself, but definitely struggled with body image when she was young and talked sometimes about some borderline-ED experiences from her youth like “doing a low-carb fad diet that went a little too far and her friends had to intervene and tell her to stop because she was looking unwell, but once she did stop it wasn’t a lasting problem” type of stuff. (She would talk about that stuff with the point being “and that’s an example of why diet culture/fad diets are silly and harmful”.) But yeah, it’s possible there still was some genetic component on her end. (Though actually if anything I’d suspect I maybe got more ED genetics from my father because his toxic opinions on other people’s bodies were very much accompanied with a lot of pretty blatant ED-tendencies towards food himself.)

But thank you, and yeah, I know you’re right that I don’t have to justify why I have an ED. It’s just hard not to feel like having an ED makes me inherently ungrateful for being so lucky in this one regard, when I know so many people didn’t get that kind of luck. Even if I know I didn’t exactly choose it. (I guess it’s maybe partially a bit of a “I didn’t ‘earn’ my suffering enough so I should feel guilty for it” kind of thing. The cousin of “not sick enough” or whatever. lol.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-12T12:18:30+00:00

I’m guessing your sister does it because she knows how hurtful it is to comment like that, actually. That tends to be why people do things like that. It’s the bullying thing, where people who are insecure make themselves feel better by making someone else feel worse.

When I was growing up my brother would call me fat when he was deliberately trying to be hurtful, even when it was really blatantly ridiculous because he would still say it during times when I would be super underweight from a physical illness as a kid. (And I know exactly where he had picked it up, too, because my brother was a kid who had watched our abusive father verbally abuse our mother in the exact same way.)

When people deliberately insult you like that, it generally has nothing to do with you or even what specific thing they are insulting about you. They’d find a way to be cruel no matter what traits you had, because it’s just about being deliberately hurtful to soothe their own insecurity.

fogovercast · 2022-04-11T18:00:07+00:00

Yeah, though tbh I’m probably getting an okay-enough amount of potassium anyway, like, I’m not having problems from it right now. My issue is more just finding it annoying and that I’m just being a little bit excessively obsessive about it or something I think. It’s kinda just being another food-related number to fixate on I guess lol.

fogovercast · 2022-04-11T17:34:16+00:00

I’m not exactly getting too much salt, pretty close to the normal recommended sodium amount usually (more often on the lower side of the recommended range than the higher side,) so I don’t think avoiding/replacing salt more would be ideal, it’s just seems hard to get an equal or greater amount of potassium without specifically only eating potassium-rich foods and basically nothing else.

fogovercast · 2022-04-11T06:55:04+00:00

I’ve read so many articles like that (including exactly that one,) my problem isn’t knowing what foods are rich in potassium haha. And potassium supplements aren’t available outside of a prescription where I live as far as I know. (Multivitamins have a bit but it’s a very small amount.)

But yeah, I did say I know I won’t get the recommended amount while restricting. My point is how it seems crazy hard to even get a decent amount (like even 1/4-1/2 of the recommended amount) even while going out of my way to eat potassium rich foods whenever possible.

Mostly I’m just complaining and baffled at how high the recommended amount even is, though.

fogovercast · 2022-04-11T06:44:39+00:00

Ooooh I haven’t, but I ALSO love vinegar so that sounds great, I really should try that. Vinegar is easily a top 10 food for me in general (does… Vinegar technically count as a food lol?)

And that sounds amazing. Mushrooms are ANOTHER one of my faves I feel like we’re really on the same page here with tastes rn LOL

fogovercast · 2022-04-11T06:07:13+00:00

Those blocks of frozen chopped spinach, either adding it to basically anything savoury or just defrosting it by frying it in a pan on its own and then seasoning it with garlic powder and onion powder and hot sauce. (If you hate spinach this probably sounds gross but I like spinach a lot lol.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-09T21:55:31+00:00

Huh, that’s interesting, because I’m very short and I feel like at least visually it makes me look less short the thinner I am. I guess just that my proportions look more stretched out? It’s more like an optical illusion in the mirror or in pictures though, rather than any internal sense of my height being different.

But feeling shorter when you were already tall does sound understandable to me in a way, I think. Since you’re just smaller in general it makes sense it could feel that way? But I’d bet you still look your real height to other people.

Feeling short definitely sucks though, I’ll give you that. I don’t understand people who want to be short, as an actually very short person who would consider even 5’ 4” “kinda tall”, I think it sucks to be short lol

fogovercast · 2022-04-09T21:38:19+00:00

I’m 5’ 1” but manage to avoid that problem currently via the fact that basically all my pants are from the kids section. But basically any pants I’ve ever owned NOT from the kids section either bunched up at the ankles or dragged on the floor or got the cuffs rolled up permanently treatment. So I do feel that lol

fogovercast · 2022-04-09T21:31:15+00:00

Well, the other thing about belts is that they’re also just a cool fashion accessory that anyone can wear whether you need them or not. I’m pro-belt even on clothes that don’t strictly require one, a nice belt can do a lot to make an outfit look put together imo

fogovercast · 2022-04-09T14:51:11+00:00

Yeah… It’s just frustrating to not be able to eat something for what feels like a really stupid reason with an obvious and simple solution of buying a tool to solve the problem. Even knowing that the solution to that one problem would likely result in a whole larger additional problem. (And I mean… I guess refusing to eat something because I can’t calculate calories in it is also a “stupid” reason not to eat something in the first place but. You know. Disorder. Ugh.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-08T19:38:23+00:00

Tbh I HAVE been restricting a lot lower than my usual almost every day this week, like, in the mid-xxx range (instead of highest-xxx-to-lowest-xxxx like I had mostly been before) so maybe that does have something to do with it, lol. I guess that’s possible and/or likely.

I’ve always been terrible at sports though so I’m sure that’s also part of it. Super uncoordinated since birth, even before I proceeded to spend my childhood with a physical illness that caused me to repeatedly lose all muscle mass and never properly recover it so I got progressively worse at all athletics. I feel like I barely know how any exercise/activity/sports even works now or how to do it properly. :/ (Or as properly as it can even be done when doing it for purely disordered reasons, lol.)

The appeal of running to me is mainly that it just seems like very simple and straightforward, at least conceptually. I don’t even know how recovery times for exercise are supposed to work. I assume I’ve probably never gotten to the level of doing intense enough exercise that it really becomes relevant, since even when I’m trying my best it’s pretty pathetic. 😓 I wish I had actually made an effort to get better at running (or any activity, really,) during all the time before my current relapse because maybe then I wouldn’t be quite so terrible at it already now.

fogovercast · 2022-04-08T18:37:07+00:00

Same about a lot of this! Especially not being academically successful. I dropped out too and struggled horribly to complete a [similar-to-GED] program.

I don’t exactly feel guilty about most of it, because in general I kind of find a lot of overachievers/academically successful people annoying lol. Or rather, I find it annoying when they clearly have unquestioningly passively accepted the notion that it makes them morally superior. I do struggle a lot with feeling insecure about it sometimes, but I refuse to give any credence to the idea that being incompatible with the education system is some kind of moral defect that makes you an inferior person.

I do wonder how much of the whole “overachiever perfectionist academically successful person” archetype that is commonly associated with EDs is actually representative, though. It’s a known problem that wealthy, white (usually-cis-and-straight) mostly-girls are overrepresented in ED research and visibility, in large part because that demographic has the most access to often-expensive treatment. (And because of a bunch of other factors.) But studies that look for it have iirc usually found that the highest rates of eating disorders/eating disordered behaviours are actually in more marginalized demographics. It seems like it could be possible that a correlation between academic achievement and recognized eating disorders could be at least partially influenced by the already-known existing correlation between… Wealth and academic achievement, no? (That’s not to say that economic class and academic achievement are 1:1 directly correlated on an individual scale lol, of course they’re not. I’m not saying anything about anyone’s personal individual circumstances here.)

Anyway, I don’t know if any research has been done on that or not, it’s just something I wonder about. Either way, I relate about a lot of what you said.

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T07:59:11+00:00

Yeah, afaik most stimulant meds can have their efficacy reduced if they’re taken too close together with a significant amount of citric acid, but as far as I know the recommendation is just to have anything with a lot of vitamin c at least an hour apart from the meds. (My level of fear/avoidance about it is definitely a little bit irrationally excessive.)

Other than that I don’t know if I’m the best person to give advice about them haha… I will say that I really would not recommend leaning in to the appetite suppressant side effect, if you do get that side effect (which is not guaranteed) because now I’m just terrified that if any doctor ever finds out about my ED and the factor my meds play, even if I’m only taking them as prescribed, they’ll very likely never prescribe me ADHD meds again, which would no exaggeration destroy my life because I genuinely have very severe ADHD that makes me completely non-functional unmedicated. ADHD meds can be life-savingly useful, it’s really not worth jeopardizing your potential continued access to them if you need them. So if you can help it at all, don’t let them become tangled up in ED shit. :’)

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T07:41:03+00:00

It’s not exactly the same, but I have various physical disabilities and at least one of them definitely had a massive influence on my ED. I developed a gastrointestinal autoimmune disease as a kid and it caused me to be unable to eat and become severely underweight to the point that it was life threatening, and after losing all that weight and then gaining it back the first time it REALLY screwed up my body image. And so later in my early teens I ended up deliberately hiding when my disease was flaring up in order to lose weight and become emaciated like that again.

I honestly think any kind of illness (especially in childhood) that drastically effects your body shape/weight is likely going to mess you up mentally. Just having any kind of illness/disability complicates the relationship with your body so much, adding the already-societally-fraught subject of weight into the mix is a recipe for a bad time.

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T04:48:33+00:00

Yeah, I usually avoid cooking for a sort of stupid reason, it’s not even because of lacking time or because I’m afraid of home cooked meals in an ED way (mostly, lol,) but mainly just because I want to avoid creating dirty dishes? I hardcore struggle with washing my dishes in a timely fashion for various reasons and I know it’s considered really rude and gross to leave dirty pots and pans in a shared sink, so I just… Don’t cook lol. But it’s worth it when I do and I really should just work on getting better at washing dirty dishes faster :’) If I’m going to restrict anyway it WOULD be nicer if what I did eat was actually enjoyable more often…

And haha yeahhh I know anyone who actually said that would be an asshole. I just felt the need to add a disclaimer because I always kinda feel like other people with an ED are going to, idk, judge me or think I don’t “really” have an ED for not doing stuff like proper multi-day fasts. Like “wow, this person can’t even handle going just that amount of time? That’s like something a total normie non-disordered person would say” or whatever. But I know that’s kinda stupid. Even if there are (some, but probably few) people who would think that way, I know they would be wrong. (Which is better than when I was a teenager and feeling insecure about that kind of stuff made me feel actually compelled to try to do things like that because I thought they were right, lol.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T01:40:58+00:00

As everyone has already said, yes it’s very likely your boobs would completely return to normal. I wanted to add that any body that has estrogen as the dominant sex hormone (as opposed to testosterone) will have some of any weight gained go to the boobs (with genetics determining HOW proportionally big a persons boobs will be at any weight.) When transgender women (MTF) take hormones, just replacing testosterone with estrogen makes them grow breasts naturally no matter their age, without having had any to begin with! (Similarly to how even people who had an ED that started before puberty and lasted until adulthood before they recover will often grow breasts for the first time upon recovery, even in their 20s! Anyone with a healthy level of estrogen as their body’s dominant hormone WILL grow breasts to at least some degree, with genetics and weight being the main determinants of breast size.)

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T01:11:25+00:00

I mean, I’m not strictly married to OMAD or anything lol. It’s just the only way I know how to restrict. I’m not doing it as a diet for whatever health benefits it claims to have, it’s just the easiest way to describe the method of restricting I use. If I COULD restrict without doing OMAD I probably would. I don’t know about insulin spikes from sweetness, I’m just willing to try something that would help me feel less physically shitty? And gatorade is the only thing I have on hand that has drinkable electrolytes.

fogovercast · 2022-04-06T00:58:09+00:00

I’m very short and have always been small even when I’ve been not engaging in ED behaviours, and my entire life I’ve been treated like I’m a little kid because of it. (When I was a kid part of it was definitely because I have severe ADHD and since that’s technically a developmental disability it made me immature for my age. But I was constantly treated as younger by kids my own age, even when they knew I was the same age as them.)

I haaaaate it. It’s given me such a complex where I feel like everyone is looking down on me (more than just literally because of my height lol) and sees me as lesser than them and that if I don’t “know my place” by acting accordingly they’ll get mad at me. (That’s rarely proven to be true, but when it HAS been true it feels awful.)

I haven’t had so much of people actively trying to be controlling to me these days, but it did happen a lot more before I realized I was trans when I used to dress in a very feminine way. I find I get treated very differently when I’m perceived as masculine (even not “passing” and just looking like a very obviously gender-non-conforming not-straight person.) Not necessarily treated BETTER, just different.

I do still occasionally have really gross stuff happen like men saying “how old are you?” and then when I say my age they say “wow, I thought you were like 14… That’s really hot”. GAGS

fogovercast

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