So frustrated at myself

Maybe you should talk to somebody about your eating habits. You also might want to try and do something else when the urge to eat comes, you know unless it's like breakfast, lunch, or dinner, but when the need to emotionally eat comes. Something like draw or write or another way to express your emotions other than through food. I know that you can overcome this (*hug*)

 

If you're still frustrated with the idea of it happening, then you haven't lost control. I would talk to somebody in a professional setting about this - if you're seeing a counselor, then talk to them. If you aren't yet, then look into counselling services offered by your school - they should be able to set you up with something fairly quickly.

Keep posting in any case, though - talking about your feelings about this can only help.

 

Hello Cornella93,

Please pardon me if I'm jumping to conclusions (I don't know your full circumstances, after all), but I have a feeling you should be congratulating yourself for binging rather than feeling frustrated. I'll confess that my own internal alarms might be prone to overreact to these kinds of things since I have my own history with eating disorders, but what you're describing does not sound to me like it's just a case of "emotional eating."

How much food do you normally take in per day since you've been trying to lose weight? One of the beginning signs of starvation (and one of the textbook signs of a restrictive eating disorder) is the urge to binge. A lot of behaviors that you've described (purging, feeling disgusted with yourself after eating "bad" foods, feeling like you need to lose more weight, needing to feel in control) also point to an eating disorder rather than isolated episodes of "emotional eating." Your lack of motivation and feelings of depression you've described elsewhere also lend evidence to this view.

It is very possible that as you've been dieting, you haven't been giving your body the energy it needs. The body's response is then to try to force you into giving it more energy with an intense psychological urge to eat more and more and more. Many anorexics and bulimics get misdiagnosed as having binge eating disorder because they find they can't stop eating and eating. But all of this is energy that their bodies need, not only to gain the weight unhealthily lost through restriction, but also to repair damage to bones and organs that the body has needed to tap into to make ends meet.

Your vision of an anorexic may be of someone who subsists on 300 calories worth of celery every day, but restriction has the same impact (if different magnitude) in the long term whether you starve yourself on 100 calories a day or 1500---you're only starving yourself more slowly if you pursue the latter.

If I remember correctly from your previous threads, your beginning weight before you started dieting was at the upper end of what's considered healthy for your height/gender/age. You might be thinking to yourself that you're still at a "healthy" weight, that at where you started you weighed too much, that your BMI is still a long ways from the clinical anorexia marker (17.5) or even the underweight marker (18.5). How could you possibly be experiencing symptoms of starvation?

But let me tell you about set points: one person's body might be healthiest and function best at BMI 25 (the upper limit of a healthy weight by official accounts, but that number is actually still too low---but that's a rant for another day) and another person's might function best at BMI 20. Imagine both of these people get restrictive eating disorders. The second person starves themselves down to BMI 16 and gets shipped off to an inpatient facility by their loved ones to be treated for their anorexia. The one who is healthy at BMI 25 starves themselves down to BMI 21 and receives compliments on how good they look and how much improvement they've made for themselves. Both have eating disorders and have done an equal amount of damage to their bodies---one just doesn't show it as much.

If any of this sounds like it could be true to you, I'm going to give what might seem like odd advice: if you feel the urge to binge, let it happen. Your body has a massive energy deficit to close, and it needs all the food it can get.

Even if you have not restricted to the point where you are physically in danger, I am going to recommend that you see a counselor specifically trained to handle eating disorders. These thoughts and feelings you've been having about food are not healthy, and could develop into a full-blown eating disorder if you don't nip things in the bud.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

 

If your current therapist doesn't seem to 'fit', you can ask to meet with someone else. Counselor-patient relationships, like all other relationships, are compatible or incompatible to varying degrees. People are different and need different things, and if they are not helping you or make you feel bad, don't think every counselor will be like that.

But from what it sounds like, this is a good first step, so keep talking to them for a little while and see how it goes. I am wishing you the best of luck. Just do your best and when things get bad, it's ok for them to be bad, and you are not a bad person for coping how you have to. There are just other ways of coping that are a lot healthier and will make you feel good instead of bad. I hope working with the therapist and continuing to talk about this will help you find other options.

 

Then dont worry about it you wont gain it all back. You made a drastic change and it would have to take a whole lot more than a week of unhealthy eating to put yourself back in the same situation.

I think it is great that you are really trying to take care of yourself, but you should take a breath and slow down a bit. What exactly are you going for, because your weight is not that high for someone of your stature. Do you want to be more toned or have muscles? Because simply losing weight at where you are now might be a little too much. Personally I think size wise you look great. Whether there are some things that you want a little slimmer or not I would focus less on losing weight at this point and more on working out if you arent satisfied.

 

Don't hate yourself, as you know I'm still having my own issues with dieting sadly I was an my 900 cal diet for 10 days and then I used it to 1,200 cals a day, I ate 1,250 cals and I puked it up. That was yesterday, I know I'm crazy to only eat 1,200 cals and I can tell my stomach is shrinking due to the fct I can't finish a 4oz piece if salmon and 4 pieces if asparagus. I eat 5 times a day just small meals but I'm barley hungry which I don't mind but its when I smell food that I just want to eat it! But I am able to resist the urge to eat. I don't think I'm getting an eating disorder but I think my anxiety has taken over because I won't eat anytime that is processed because I feel like ill gain like 10 pounds from it. When I started the diet I was at 172 I'm now 158 I'm 15 days which is scary but I work out every day to, I am trying to eat more then I should just because I am only 17 so I can eat more but I'm so scared to eat anything thus not on my diet plan :0 but I am eating 5 times a day just not a lot so does that mean its still bad for me? Even though I am eating? 1,200 cals Aday?

---------- Post added 16th Oct 2012 at 12:17 AM ----------

I'm trying to gain muscle so my weight will go up soon I take protein drinks

 

This description sounds like something I myself could have written. I started in much the same way: I substituted vegetables for a lot of other things in my diet without realizing that they basically have no calories and ended up losing a bunch of weight unknowingly...but once I'd figured it out, I charged merrily off into Eating Disorder Land.

1700-2000 is not enough to sustain your daily energy needs. Someone of your height, weight, gender, and age burns about 2,800 calories per day...and that's assuming you sleep for 8 hours and then just sit idle all day! The amounts you've been eating do not even meet your basal metabolic rate (the amount needed just to sustain the activity of your vital organs), which is probably around 2,200 calories per day.

Do you exercise on top of that? Even if you don't, when you factor in activities that occur in your daily life (standing, walking to class, etc.), your daily energy needs probably require around 3,000 calories per day. Your "binges" have only been giving your body the rough equivalent of what it needs in a day!

If you've been making 1700-2000 your target for over a year, you've been consistently creating a deficit of around 1,000 calories. In all probability based on what you've told us, these binge episodes indicate that your body has entered the beginning stages of starvation. If you continue to pursue weight loss in this manner, you risk heart disease, kidney problems, osteoporosis, and eventually death.

The good news is that all this damage is completely reversible. The clinical guidelines for eating disorder recovery stipulate that a male under 25 eat at least 3,500 calories per day while cutting all non-essential activity. That number seems like a lot, but remember a guy of your age, height, and weight burns 2,800 calories just sitting around all day, and even more than that when you're up and about all day long. Your body needs the extra energy to repair the damage to organs and tissue that it's had to consume so that it can meet its daily energy needs. I would encourage you to go beyond the 3,500 if possible because it will only make your recovery faster.

The other important thing is to get a therapist specifically trained to handle eating disorders. You need to teach your brain not to be a jerk to you anymore, and having someone who can monitor your weight and whom you must be accountable to are essential in the recovery process.

To be blunt, it's really fucking difficult to free yourself of this idea that you need to lose weight, that no one will ever love you because of how your body looks, that you will always be disgusted with the way you look. But recovery is possible: I'm living proof, and I can testify to how much my quality of life has improved now that I'm no longer obsessing over how many calories are in one baby carrot.

I don't know if you feel ready to make this jump, but if you want any more information or just someone to support you, please let me know.

Alexander, the number of times a day you eat is irrelevant; it's the total amount of calories you consume that's important. 1,200 calories is still a dangerously low amount for you, and your appetite has decreased because of that. Follow the same guidelines I posted above: at least 3,500 per day with all non-essential activity cut. Because you've been experiencing this appetite issues, I would encourage you to up your intake by 250 calories for the first 2-3 days (so 1,450 then 1700 then 1950) before making the leap to the 3500 so that you can avoid something called refeeding syndrome.

You say that you don't think you're getting an eating disorder, but what then do you call having lots of food-related anxieties and substantially restricting the amount of energy you take in so that you can lose dramatic amounts of weight quickly?

 

I don't think I'm getting one again :/ even thinking of 3,500 cals scares me I've never eaten that much in my whole life :O I just can't be fat I can't I know I'm not fat but STILL ugh fuck my life