stolen glow
Eating disorders steal so much from you.
So much revolves around food - work festivities. Meeting clients. Meeting friends in cafes and restaurants. Weddings. Having snacks during game evenings, movie nights. Activities like picnics. Visiting markets, trying out street food festivals. Birthdays. Religious days. Gifts. Traveling and experiencing other cultures is a lot about the food.
Sitting in your self-made cage is miserable. Not letting yourself try foods out of fear. Feeling left out because of it (not by others, but by your rigid rules). Feeling fat or unhealthy or fearful if you do indulge. Lessening the shared experience of it all. Feeling less connected to the group. Making weird excuses why you don't eat. Pretending you're already full, already ate, have a stomach ache, feel nauseous. It's like minimizing your participation in how to be a human. It's like you're an out of control monster that needs to be kept in check. It feels alien. Everyone else looks and feels normal and good and healthy to you, but in your eyes you're this grotesque thing that should be as small as possible.
I'm scared that recovery is impossible when so much of eating disorder behavior is encouraged or even needed in a world that throws so much genuinely bad, high cal food at you that isn't filling and that have you eat 2.500 cal in a single meal easily while barely sating you, all while keeping a sedentary lifestyle. I wish we never had to look at ingredients lists and calories and our TDEE. I wish foods weren't engineered to be a bit addicting. I wish we didn't encourage binge eating culture, encourage extreme mukbangs and milkshakes with an entire cake on top of the straw. I wish Ozempic and fasting and OMADs weren't so popular. I wish it wasn't so easy to choose something that would make any healthy, normal human gain weight because of how much added fats and sugar there are in it.
I see extremely small bars of chocolate that don't sate you at all have the same calories as a huge bowl of rice, salad, veggies, protein etc. that fills me for half the day. That's where the problem is. I could enjoy a bit of chips, a bit of chocolate and all that if it wasn't immediately such a huge caloric hit while giving my body absolutely nothing of value. And gives me gut cramps and bladder issues and pimples and heartburn too.
I was also triggered by cutting a piece of strawberry cake for myself (to participate and get over my ED behaviors) and it ended up the biggest of everyone else on the table and people commented on it too. I instantly felt like a greedy pig. My coworkers at the office also still can't stop talking about the other coworker who rapidly lost weight since December and looks severely underweight.
I don't know how to healthily judge what foods to buy and how much to eat and how much to exercise and how to say no to certain foods in a healthy, non-disordered way. It seems like it relies so much on the same mindset that makes me sick. I can't just do them "a little". And having a very visible, very memorable, very photo-heavy event coming up makes it too easy to starve for it.
I feel guilty for body checking in normal photos I post. I feel bad when me starving causes me to almost collapse at work. I feel bad when me not eating makes people around me prepare food for me so I eat more. I feel like a loser when I can't focus on what I am trying to learn because I don't eat enough, but eating to focus better also feels like a loss.