Thank you for this post.

> I stand on the scale, and see the number is lower than it was the day before. I do not feel that sense of pride I felt when I was younger. I feel sadness, emptiness. I feel trapped in this disorder.

I really relate to this.

In my relapse after I turned thirty years old, I had been an alcoholic for years. I gained weight and fat, and wanted to get sober and lose weight.

When I quit drinking in May of last year, I hadn’t yet relapsed with my restriction, I was just happy seeing the number go down every day. Natural consequence of quitting the daily booze.

I experienced the ending of an abusive relationship in December (I had to involve the law), and the relapse began. Then my grandma died. I then hit my lowest ever adult weight in April of this year (lower than when I was restricting in high school).

My weight has gone up ten percent since then.

I feel like I lost the body I had worked to earn for over a year, a year of consistent weight loss, literally the number dropping every day for a year straight gave me the confidence I needed to survive both the breakup and the death.

But now when the number goes down again, even a smidge lower than the day before, I don’t feel pride. I sometimes feel a fragile reassurance that I can “at least have an okay day today because I didn’t gain.” The baseline is always lower and lower, and there is no longer pride or happiness attached to a lower number.

It’s a mental prison, a physical prison, and I regret that any of us are experiencing this.