Might not be a good place to visit for you! But if you are having issues because of isolation and chaos and it would be helpful for you to share them, here you go. Let’s not use numbers, okay? I am not going to moderate this so let’s try to stay supportive and all about validation and sympathy.
I’m doing okay but I’m losing weight from stress and accidentally doing the “eat essentially nothing and then when I think I’m going to pass out, I have a small square of cheese” diet from Devil Wears Prada and I’m juuuuust trying to monitor that and be aware of it.
There are many, many ways of having disordered eating and if you are bingeing or restricting this is something a lot of people in various stages of recovery are finding tough to deal with in our current situation. I love all of you.
i am really trying my best, but every meal i eat is a struggle because i live alone, so who would know if i just... let my disordered thoughts take over? every morning i wake up and think "what if i didn't eat today?" and every morning i make myself make breakfast and it's so hard i almost cried over my scrambled eggs today. i am trying my best and so far i am winning but i am SO TIRED and SO JEALOUS of people who can just? put food into their mouths? like it's nothing? i'm so tired guys.
Thank you for this - can I share something positive? My friend posted on instastories last night " see a roll, send a roll" and so I responded with a (relatively much larger) stomach roll, saying "did I do this right?" and I thought it would be some "haha we're gonna get soooo fat" like all the stupid memes but she just said yes! and a heart eye emojis and I just felt SO BEAUTIFUL in that moment and it was lovely.
I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from some of you, it seems. I'm eating my feelings. Because I can't go to the gym and I haven't been going for walks, my body is changing quickly.
I saw a Tumblr post the other day that resonated: "Even if I don't like my body today, I will take care of it."
Now it's just a matter of getting my dopamine from another source.
I hate that I'm excited about being too depressed and anxious to eat because I keep being like, well maybe I'll lose weight during all this bullshit and I know that's not a healthy way to think and that it's not going to help me care for myself, but here I am!! Also the very real economic insecurity right now makes eating complicated because I don't know how long I'll be able to afford food/be able to afford "good" food ugh!
OMG crazy that you would bring this up because I kind of thought it was not a relatable thing? The chaos and lack of control in my life has caused me to pretty much stop eating all together. Why!? It's annoying, and the worst part is that as the numbers on the scale keep dropping, my desire to eat decreases. It's some kind of fucked up vicious cycle.
I’m having such a hard time with seeing the panic buying and feeling like I need to hoard food and secret eating and then swinging to the other end of the spectrum and not wanting to eat food and ration because what if there’s no more food? I’m managing it okay, but I have to remind myself that I’m not starving and this isn’t a zombie apocalypse.
I had (have had) binge-eating disorder for years and I THOUGHT that I had finally kicked it, but nope, nope, I am binging again, it is stress, it is horrific stress, and at the moment my choices are (buy some junk food from the store when I do go grocery shopping, eat it but don't touch my For Emergencies Only can stash) or (shop healthily, but effing binge-eating the food that's only supposed to be for emergencies), and, uh, at the moment the former is safer than the latter, but aaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
I am moving in with my girlfriend in about 2 months, circumstances allowing. She has a severe eating disorder and I have a mild one—for fear of triggering her or bringing up a topic that may be more difficult for her, I rarely bring up my own issues with food.
Quarantine is obviously a weird time for food, I have gained a few pounds because of stress eating and I hate this. My particular neurosis has to do with a very specific weight that I feel I “should” be at, and if I go over or under it I tend to go a little crazy. I don’t know how to address this with my girlfriend, what I want to say is that if we both have gained a few pounds when we next see each other, that’s okay? But this feels inappropriate to say even as a joke. I know I am a trigger for her in general because I am smaller than her, and it never feels helpful to say anything or complain about my body.
Anyway I am making cinnamon rolls today, I am waiting for them to rise.
I’m struggling. I love baking and cooking and eating, but i also hear and see all this “use this time to get right and lose weight.” In the past week I’ve binged, thrown up, and just not eaten for a few days. I live alone so it’s so easy and there’s so much time to just think and be bored.
I'm a competitive powerlifter who dropped 3 weight classes in 2 years so I could qualify for Nationals. Qualifying meets are cancelled, Nationals are probably cancelled, and I have no motivation to eat right or train in the homegym that I'm lucky to have. I'm eating no protein and all the sugar and carbs and liquor. I feel awful and out of control.
It's so weird. Because I usually make most of my meals at home anyway. And not having to think about if it'll pack to commute to work should make things easier. But I've completely lost the plot on how to feed and water myself this week.
I did notice that there's definitely an element of exerting control involved, if I can just master my own appetite that's something within my power when almost nothing else is.
I have binge eating disorder and my ED group ended a couple weeks before everything shut down and neither of my regular clinicians do much with eating disorders. So that’s been hard. And right now I’m very focused on being fat and how that may (I can’t quite tease it out) be a huge risk factor for covid....and then I start thinking about how it’s likely that even though I’m youngish (34) I’m fat and have a new diagnoses of diabetes and maybe the doctors wouldn’t save me; probably they’d triage me out.
No formal eating disorder diagnosis, but I know my relationship with food is terrible. I'm fat and diabetic. I was on insulin for awhile, along with some other things and just...stopped. No matter how hard I tried to stick to the regiment and take my medicine and cut out unnecessary sugar, every time I checked my blood sugar and saw it in the 200, 300, 400 (my record high is 496) range, even with increased insulin doses...eventually I became so discouraged and frustrated and full of self-loathing because obviously I was a complete failure that I just gave up. So now I'm living with uncontrolled diabetes, my house is full of sugary food, and now I'm home all day every day, working remotely at my sedentary job while my feet continue to swell and grow numb because I can't get out of the house. I ordered a footrest and compression socks, but I'm looking at a month-long wait for delivery and have been using my Squatty Potty in the meantime, which is about as uncomfortable as nothing at all. The stress of all this plus my total lack of self-control has put any good eating habits I might have had in the trash and I hate myself for it. I know I'm killing myself, but since I've never landed in the hospital or had anything amputated yet, I guess the stakes just aren't high enough for me to have the motivation to get my shit together. I know I need to start seeing a doctor again, but I'm afraid. I know that's stupid, that this will only get worse if I don't, but I'm paralyzed by fear and my brain convincing me that I don't deserve to get better or help. That my diabetes diagnosis is my fault and I deserve to suffer. I'm just self-aware enough to know that this isn't true, but can't get out of the spiral. I also know I need therapy, but the task of 1. finding a therapist that's 2. in my network and 3. accepting new patients and 4. is someone that I'm comfortable with is so daunting that I can't even start.
Okay, this became A LOT. I don't know what I'm looking for. Advice? For someone to tell me that putting in the work to get better is actually worth it? I don't know. But thanks for providing this space, Nicole. It feels slightly okay to finally get it out in the open. I hope I'm not hijacking by not focusing entirely on disordered eating.
I don't know if this is disordered eating/exercising. I certainly wake up and drink 3 cups of coffee and come 4pm I'm ravenous and sad and eating a block of cheese.
But I also have a neuro-muscular disorder, and exercise is a prime thing that keeps it from progressing with alarming speed. I had a good regimen going for about six months, and I felt strong and confident, and now I'm just worried all the time about regressing. If I regress, there's no assurance I'll be able to get that strength back. I can't run - I physically can't run - and I need braces to walk any distance. Ellipticals were the only place I felt stable without the braces and like I could do cardio.
Last Friday I literally went down the street and bought a used bike and I'm so scared our governor is going to close the parks and enforce people being on the streets. I don't know how my body's going to come out of this. How much function am I going to lose?
I'm just going to say that even those of us who don't struggle with disordered eating are having trouble keeping on an even keel these days (I had to talk myself into dinner the other night, which is... not what I usually do). These are very stressful times and folks should be especially gentle with themselves now.
I really needed this thread. I feel like I'm bouncing between the urge to eat out of boredom and the fear of eating of boredom while not exercising, and the desire to indulge my disordered eating thoughts. I've been generally recovered for about 5 years but I still have a lot of body image weirdness and disordered eating thoughts, and shockingly, being in a situation where everything feels out of control and stressful is bringing back disordered eating thoughts as a way of having some feeling of control
I keep seeing so much information about how eating vegetables is good for you while you're indoors, and I just don't want to buy them because I'm afraid of the food waste (I live by myself, I don't go through a ton of veggies that fast). But then I feel bad if I'm just eating comfort food? I'm keep trying to tell myself that as long as I eat something, it's okay, but I made a big salad last night, ate maybe 1/3 of it and just decided to eat a bowl of tater tots instead. Which is FINE but then I feel guilty for not eating vegetables. Also, so many people talking about at-home movement, which makes me mad, because I want to REST but sitting too much is making me so stiff and in pain, so now I'm just like WHAT DO I DO BESIDES MEDICATE MYSELF INTO OBLIVION.
I am also getting married (circumstances permitting) in the fall and it is SO. HARD. to avoid all of the "wedding diet" thoughts and propaganda and comments. I keep telling myself I don't have to be a particular size at my wedding but another part of my mind keeps telling me I need to look perfect. and I have no energy to exercise, then I feel guilty about not exercising, then I want to restrict to make up for it, and it's been.... not great!
I'm very glad you're talking about this. My dad (in his early 60s) is just out of a 5-month outpatient anorexia & exercise addiction treatment, and lives alone. I know he is struggling daily, being newly in recovery, and feeling a pull to exercise/walk/not eat.
If anyone has some tips about ways I can support him, I'd love them. I don't want to call him up and say "are you eating? what's for dinner?" all the time, but don't want to not talk about it, since I know he's having such a hard time.
I am not currently dealing with this, but I just want to say that I had been fairly recovered for almost a decade and then had it flare TF up in the winter, and I'm sure some of you are dealing with that now. It's okay! You'll be okay. You are not a terrible person because of it, and you will find order again soon. :) I love you all.
Luckily I’m quarantined with a supportive partner who doesn’t have much work to do, so he’s been helping keeping me fed, but despite that, I just want to over exercise now. I went so hard for so long at an empty park by our apartment that I can barely move today. Just can’t stop obsessing over fitting into my jeans once again when this is all over.
I'm wishing all of you so many good things; we're all in the same leaky boat right now. I've been... really struggling. I knew I needed to get help (read: medication) for binge-eating before this all started, but it just seemed like too much to deal between doctors' unhelpful hours and bad insurance. Regretting that so much, especially now that I don't know whether I'm getting laid off or not. It's never exactly prime hiring season for corporate rare books librarians, you know?
Every day, my (anorexic, of course) mother leaves for her post-retirement job and I immediately start planning everything I can eat without her noticing. A couple candies, a couple cookies, some chips out of an open bag, a spoonful of peanut butter, until I have to stop or get caught. The only thing that stops me is the shame. Today, I ate a day's worth of food by 11:00 am, so I've been struggling not to eat for, oh, almost 8 hours now. Not that she doesn't know. Yoga pants don't hide much.
I am a doctor with ADHD (freshly diagnosed, yay!) who just started working in ED, and it's really messing with my food schedule. I tend to forget to eat, especially if my day is busy and/or unstructured, and working in an emergency department is nothing if not busy and unstructured, lmao. Yesterday I was working 2:30pm-midnight, which meant I forgot to eat in the morning because of sleeping in and playing animal crossing, then didnt have time to eat at work (there aren't any defined break times, you just have to grab them when you can), then got home at midnight both intellectually knowing I was really hungry but physically feeling utterly unable to eat anything, like I'd suppressed hunger for so long my body was just refusing to acknowledge it needed food anymore. (And there was a little sprinkle of "which of these stockpiled quarantine foods should I eat first, maybe I shouldnt eat anything to make sure I have enough for later" anxiety for spice.)
Plus now we have to wear surgical masks at all times in the department, so I can't have a quick snack at the desk in between patients like I could before - I have to physically get up, go to the tea room or the corridor outside the department, take off my mask, wash my hands, and THEN eat or drink whatever it was I wanted, while feeling guilty, like someone will yell at me if they catch me Not Working. And half the time when I go to do this someone calls me wanting something written up or a patient reviewed, so I have to do it all in reverse before going back in even hangrier than I was before 😭
Anyway. It's not strictly disordered eating I guess, more a side effect of ADHD, but I've gotten down to a dangerous weight with this before, and I'm really worried it'll happen again now that I have very little structure and lots to do. 😣
Oof, thanks for starting this thread. I'm in eating disorder recovery right now and this is a terrible time with food, and everyone suddenly posting about their quarantine workouts.
My disordered eating hasn’t been this bad in decades. I feel awful in every way, even worse, I feel my problems oozing out and affecting my children. I have two daughters, and since my oldest was two, I have doubled down on all of my efforts to speak kindly about my body, and really actively try to find joy in food. But this whole situation has MESSED ME UP. I’m not eating, and worse, I’m commenting about how much my family is eating (like I actually told my child she couldn’t have a second bowl of cereal this morning because scarcity, I guess?) What is happening?? I feel like a terrible person, a terrible mother, and a terrible partner. Did NOT expect to feel like a monster throughout this quarantine. I’m also COVID-19 unemployed now, so that’s made things even messier. Thank you for giving me a place to say all of this. I’m trying so hard to maintain some semblance of positivity any time I talk to a real person, so this is really so appreciated.
Eating gets really hard for me when my anxiety gets high, and a lot of it almost feels like decision fatigue for me? All the little considerations about what to eat just pile up and make eating impossible.
The problem now is all of my coping mechanisms rely on eating food out. I know a lot of people aren’t like this but releasing control helps me actually eat and I can’t do that right now. The couple places I am an accidental regular at because I can always make myself eat there I can’t go to. I’m trying to eat at least twice every day, which had been sorta working. I’m just so tired, and so much energy is going to this.
Binge eater/bulimic. I'm stress-eating a lot but haven't returned to purging. I still have to physically go into to work (medical manufacturer) and the pressure of trying to keep the medical supply chain moving, plus the fact that so many co-workers aren't taking it seriously is really getting to me. My husband is working from home and has serious cabin fever so I go from a crowded, busy factory to a husband who has had no human contact all day. Winter has finally decided to arrive here, so it's too cold to go running. I'm trying to placate it with bodyweight work at home, taking walks and hikes, and remembering my mantras. I had to cancel therapy this week because I couldn't handle the stress of having to talk to yet another person.
I'm isolating with my senior parents and it's difficult in some pretty predictable ways. My dad has always talked about weight and bodies in a way that's pretty unpleasant for me to hear/grow up with. It also doesn't feel like a great time to have a frank conversation with him about my concerns, as I fear spiraling upset and blowups.
(FYI, he's not commenting at my body specifically, he'll just comment on people's weight/loss/gain, say "good for them" in odd/condescending ways, use "being bad" type language, generally very uncritically reiterates fat = bad/unhealthy and calorie reduction = good reasoning, and does binge/portion control himself in ways I find concerning.)
My mom was similar when I was growing up, and put pressure on me to be skinnier from a young age, but has deliberately changed her behavior when I pushed back as an adult. I appreciate how she's worked to curb weight talk. She was concerned I've lost weight since the pandemic and was worrying I was portion restricting to save food for them, which I haven't been.
I'm feeling a lot of love for everybody, and the many ways tension and fear and potential shortages are messing with us and our varied relationships with food and family and our bodies.
Also where I live at the moment there's not super stable supplies of food -- add this to the fact that I'm in a high-risk group and thus can't venture out much, and my past two weekly grocery store trips have been like "what's here? oh, random stuff? cool, guess I'm eating random stuff this week" which is SO SCARY for someone who normally needs to protect her mental health by really carefully planning her diet.
(Also when I was a kid I was, bitterly ironically, caught in a small epidemic that resulted in me spending a few weeks with very little access to food, so in addition to the past three months of flashbacks to me being a small child and seeing a bunch of people around me get sick and die, I'm now like "sh*t, I gonna be starving again, won't I?". Which is such a selfish response, given the very real current global horror, but that's where my brain's at.)
I am! Struggling! Up until recent events, I was forgetting to eat so often that I had to set alarms on my phone, and that was working pretty okay, but now that I’m home all the time, I’m oscillating Wildly between forgetting to eat and eating when I’m nowhere near hungry, and I can’t seem to get the signals between body and brain settled.
I have a newborn (it's been a weird month) and remembering to eat at all is... hard. I was at my pre-pregnancy weight a week postpartum, and I know I haven't been eating enough since but time is even more immaterial than it would have been were I just "normal" self-isolated, and actual decent food in is happening... once a day, maybe.
I keep oscillating widely between bingeing and restricting. Bingeing all the comfort foods, then feeling guilty and shameful about it/my changing body the next day. It's a HORRIFIC cycle, even as I recognize that it is totally okay and normal for bodies to change over time, and we're in an unprecedented time period. I'm sending all the light and good thoughts to all of us!
oh my god, yes. I've already been talking about my disordered eating with my therapist before all this started because I have real issues feeling ok eating anything sometimes. this is making it worse because at work I can control the access I have to food (which sounds terrible and yes my therapist has heard me say this and has feelings about it that we process), but now at home it's like... the food is all here. and i'm scared of the food. My therapist is honestly so great and I love him, he's giving me homework to just try to eat midday sometimes. but this is hard. I feel bad about it though because I know food insecurity is such an issue all the time but especially now. a vicious cycle.
My disordered eating tends toward trying to eat "clean" "whole" foods so having to eat a bunch of shelf stable starches and carbs is really stressing me out and pushing me toward restriction. Part of that restriction is also that I'm nervous about running out of food, but I know that's mostly just a cover
I’m not exercising as much right now obviously (or at all if I’m being honest). So I was doing one meal a day and some snacks. But my therapist was like “eating breakfast will help you.” And she’s right so I’m eating breakfast right now.
Two meals a day and some snacks I think is probably the better choice.
Oh yes, thanks for this Nicole. I keep forgetting to eat! Any disruption to my routine is bad for my mental health but particularly my disordered eating. Plus, I feel like I am exerting less energy (I walked 1-2 miles each day during my normal work schedule because I had a sucky parking spot) so I feel like I "can't" eat as much :(
This is mine: I am insanely envious of everyone who stops eating when stressed, and I feel like a failure for not losing my appetite despite being stressed and anxious, for not having a "real" eating disorder. I love food, eating is the one thing that brings me comfort, and I am so disgusted at myself because I am eating normally (neither binging nor strictly restricting nor avoiding carbs) despite the restrictions on grocery shopping and dining out. Why don't I have the discipline? What is wrong with me that I can't do what so many can?
I typically walk four miles a day, and it's helped me get my body to a place over the past year that I liked it while not restricting my eating (I have a history of anorexia I have to be aware of), which has been rare for me since ... ever. Then this happened, and coincidentally a few weeks before I had stopped taking my antidepressants (for egg donation!) which also were suppressing my appetite a bit, and the results are just. Ugh. I gave my too-big-for-me pants all to neighbours already, so I'm living in leggings and trying so hard not to think about it. Knowing that people in my community are dealing with food insecurity right now just makes me feel worse -- I've been donating what I can, but here I am, absorbed with this objectively petty problem that isn't really a problem at all outside my own head. :T Solidarity to everyone in a similar position, it'd be nice if anxiety fixated on the rational.
I have autism and I’ve struggled with breakfast my entire life. I have awful hunger pains in the morning but the idea of eating is mostly repulsive. The only thing I can stand to eat in the morning is yogurt and all the grocery stores in my area are sold out... sigh.
Whew! Lots of panicking about eating in excess compounded by pregnancy. I was so sick in my first trimester that I lost weight (and a teeny bit proud of it, even though I was miserable - ahh c'est la addiction) and now that I'm heavier than my pre-pregnancy weight it also feels like one more thing I don't have control over. I'm still having cake today because it's my birthday goddammit, but very grateful I don't have a scale at home to obsess over right now.
Reading this has been a relief. I see so many ppl talking about eating all their snacks, etc and I’m struggling daily to maintain caloric intake. It’s made harder since my housemate has to use our small dining/kitchen area to work and I have mostly meals that must be made from scratch, so I feel intrusive. Then my guilt over having the luxury of food in general adds to it making me want to avoid food more. Sigh. Thank you all for sharing your struggle. It’s frustrating but reassuring.
I spent 2 hours making GF funnel cake but I can't bring myself to eat it. It was an attempt to have a "project" for the day. I took a few bites and spit it out immediately. This is happening at most meals. I can't bring myself to swallow food unless I am very very hungry. This results in about one full meal every other day and snacks when I can stomach them.
At first, I was very worried about running out of food so I started restricting and now that I'm weeks into Bunker Life and have made several grocery orders I am not so concerned about running out of food, but I am still not eating a whole lot. It doesn't help that my anxiety often manifests by feeling like my stomach is full of rocks.
I was actually trying to work on some disordered eating behaviours before all this started, focusing on eating with other people. I've always had social anxiety stuff which often manifests as nausea and then fixating on the fear of throwing up halfway through a meal - but only when I'm around other people (I think there's a 'must finish my plate so I don't seem rude or weird' aspect to it). So I was trying to work on chilling out about that, then we went into lockdown, and I live on my own so I'm not going to be eating meals with anyone for a while... It's fine for now, one less problem to deal with tbh, but I don't know whether that's just going to make it worse once everything does go back to normal and someone invites me round for dinner.
I think I've had a fraught relationship with food for most of my life, but didn't really recognize it in myself until last summer, when I realized I'd been doing the below-mentioned Devil Wears Prada diet for several weeks. No therapist, no money for one, no other appropriate and healthy person to talk to about it. For reasons I still don't really understand, partly but not exclusively work stress, hunger felt better to me than having eaten, as long as I wasn't so hungry my head hurt too much to move. The situation deteriorated quickly until I felt in imminent danger of lasting physical harm and impulse-quit the job (despite having no savings), and then it deteriorated more slowly for another month or two. Since then I've been dragging my unfocused self through yet another job search, making an occasional $100 with freelance work and benefiting from a lot of help my parents can't really afford to be giving me, so I'm always running from the side effects of challenging myself to need as little from them as possible. I like my increased resourcefulness w/r/t ingredients and am pleasantly surprised by my slightly increased speed in getting through a job application, but the Thoughts that are accompanying this extra introspection are ... not helping.
I’m doing okay but I’m losing weight from stress and accidentally doing the “eat essentially nothing and then when I think I’m going to pass out, I have a small square of cheese” diet from Devil Wears Prada and I’m juuuuust trying to monitor that and be aware of it.
There are many, many ways of having disordered eating and if you are bingeing or restricting this is something a lot of people in various stages of recovery are finding tough to deal with in our current situation. I love all of you.
i am really trying my best, but every meal i eat is a struggle because i live alone, so who would know if i just... let my disordered thoughts take over? every morning i wake up and think "what if i didn't eat today?" and every morning i make myself make breakfast and it's so hard i almost cried over my scrambled eggs today. i am trying my best and so far i am winning but i am SO TIRED and SO JEALOUS of people who can just? put food into their mouths? like it's nothing? i'm so tired guys.
Thank you for this - can I share something positive? My friend posted on instastories last night " see a roll, send a roll" and so I responded with a (relatively much larger) stomach roll, saying "did I do this right?" and I thought it would be some "haha we're gonna get soooo fat" like all the stupid memes but she just said yes! and a heart eye emojis and I just felt SO BEAUTIFUL in that moment and it was lovely.
I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from some of you, it seems. I'm eating my feelings. Because I can't go to the gym and I haven't been going for walks, my body is changing quickly.
I saw a Tumblr post the other day that resonated: "Even if I don't like my body today, I will take care of it."
Now it's just a matter of getting my dopamine from another source.
I hate that I'm excited about being too depressed and anxious to eat because I keep being like, well maybe I'll lose weight during all this bullshit and I know that's not a healthy way to think and that it's not going to help me care for myself, but here I am!! Also the very real economic insecurity right now makes eating complicated because I don't know how long I'll be able to afford food/be able to afford "good" food ugh!
OMG crazy that you would bring this up because I kind of thought it was not a relatable thing? The chaos and lack of control in my life has caused me to pretty much stop eating all together. Why!? It's annoying, and the worst part is that as the numbers on the scale keep dropping, my desire to eat decreases. It's some kind of fucked up vicious cycle.
I’m having such a hard time with seeing the panic buying and feeling like I need to hoard food and secret eating and then swinging to the other end of the spectrum and not wanting to eat food and ration because what if there’s no more food? I’m managing it okay, but I have to remind myself that I’m not starving and this isn’t a zombie apocalypse.
I had (have had) binge-eating disorder for years and I THOUGHT that I had finally kicked it, but nope, nope, I am binging again, it is stress, it is horrific stress, and at the moment my choices are (buy some junk food from the store when I do go grocery shopping, eat it but don't touch my For Emergencies Only can stash) or (shop healthily, but effing binge-eating the food that's only supposed to be for emergencies), and, uh, at the moment the former is safer than the latter, but aaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
I wish I had something constructive to add, but mostly I just hate my body/seeing my face on the webcam much more than usual
I am moving in with my girlfriend in about 2 months, circumstances allowing. She has a severe eating disorder and I have a mild one—for fear of triggering her or bringing up a topic that may be more difficult for her, I rarely bring up my own issues with food.
Quarantine is obviously a weird time for food, I have gained a few pounds because of stress eating and I hate this. My particular neurosis has to do with a very specific weight that I feel I “should” be at, and if I go over or under it I tend to go a little crazy. I don’t know how to address this with my girlfriend, what I want to say is that if we both have gained a few pounds when we next see each other, that’s okay? But this feels inappropriate to say even as a joke. I know I am a trigger for her in general because I am smaller than her, and it never feels helpful to say anything or complain about my body.
Anyway I am making cinnamon rolls today, I am waiting for them to rise.
I’m struggling. I love baking and cooking and eating, but i also hear and see all this “use this time to get right and lose weight.” In the past week I’ve binged, thrown up, and just not eaten for a few days. I live alone so it’s so easy and there’s so much time to just think and be bored.
I'm a competitive powerlifter who dropped 3 weight classes in 2 years so I could qualify for Nationals. Qualifying meets are cancelled, Nationals are probably cancelled, and I have no motivation to eat right or train in the homegym that I'm lucky to have. I'm eating no protein and all the sugar and carbs and liquor. I feel awful and out of control.
It's so weird. Because I usually make most of my meals at home anyway. And not having to think about if it'll pack to commute to work should make things easier. But I've completely lost the plot on how to feed and water myself this week.
I did notice that there's definitely an element of exerting control involved, if I can just master my own appetite that's something within my power when almost nothing else is.
CW: covid, death
I have binge eating disorder and my ED group ended a couple weeks before everything shut down and neither of my regular clinicians do much with eating disorders. So that’s been hard. And right now I’m very focused on being fat and how that may (I can’t quite tease it out) be a huge risk factor for covid....and then I start thinking about how it’s likely that even though I’m youngish (34) I’m fat and have a new diagnoses of diabetes and maybe the doctors wouldn’t save me; probably they’d triage me out.
Then I eat more.
No formal eating disorder diagnosis, but I know my relationship with food is terrible. I'm fat and diabetic. I was on insulin for awhile, along with some other things and just...stopped. No matter how hard I tried to stick to the regiment and take my medicine and cut out unnecessary sugar, every time I checked my blood sugar and saw it in the 200, 300, 400 (my record high is 496) range, even with increased insulin doses...eventually I became so discouraged and frustrated and full of self-loathing because obviously I was a complete failure that I just gave up. So now I'm living with uncontrolled diabetes, my house is full of sugary food, and now I'm home all day every day, working remotely at my sedentary job while my feet continue to swell and grow numb because I can't get out of the house. I ordered a footrest and compression socks, but I'm looking at a month-long wait for delivery and have been using my Squatty Potty in the meantime, which is about as uncomfortable as nothing at all. The stress of all this plus my total lack of self-control has put any good eating habits I might have had in the trash and I hate myself for it. I know I'm killing myself, but since I've never landed in the hospital or had anything amputated yet, I guess the stakes just aren't high enough for me to have the motivation to get my shit together. I know I need to start seeing a doctor again, but I'm afraid. I know that's stupid, that this will only get worse if I don't, but I'm paralyzed by fear and my brain convincing me that I don't deserve to get better or help. That my diabetes diagnosis is my fault and I deserve to suffer. I'm just self-aware enough to know that this isn't true, but can't get out of the spiral. I also know I need therapy, but the task of 1. finding a therapist that's 2. in my network and 3. accepting new patients and 4. is someone that I'm comfortable with is so daunting that I can't even start.
Okay, this became A LOT. I don't know what I'm looking for. Advice? For someone to tell me that putting in the work to get better is actually worth it? I don't know. But thanks for providing this space, Nicole. It feels slightly okay to finally get it out in the open. I hope I'm not hijacking by not focusing entirely on disordered eating.
I don't know if this is disordered eating/exercising. I certainly wake up and drink 3 cups of coffee and come 4pm I'm ravenous and sad and eating a block of cheese.
But I also have a neuro-muscular disorder, and exercise is a prime thing that keeps it from progressing with alarming speed. I had a good regimen going for about six months, and I felt strong and confident, and now I'm just worried all the time about regressing. If I regress, there's no assurance I'll be able to get that strength back. I can't run - I physically can't run - and I need braces to walk any distance. Ellipticals were the only place I felt stable without the braces and like I could do cardio.
Last Friday I literally went down the street and bought a used bike and I'm so scared our governor is going to close the parks and enforce people being on the streets. I don't know how my body's going to come out of this. How much function am I going to lose?
I'm just going to say that even those of us who don't struggle with disordered eating are having trouble keeping on an even keel these days (I had to talk myself into dinner the other night, which is... not what I usually do). These are very stressful times and folks should be especially gentle with themselves now.
I really needed this thread. I feel like I'm bouncing between the urge to eat out of boredom and the fear of eating of boredom while not exercising, and the desire to indulge my disordered eating thoughts. I've been generally recovered for about 5 years but I still have a lot of body image weirdness and disordered eating thoughts, and shockingly, being in a situation where everything feels out of control and stressful is bringing back disordered eating thoughts as a way of having some feeling of control
I keep seeing so much information about how eating vegetables is good for you while you're indoors, and I just don't want to buy them because I'm afraid of the food waste (I live by myself, I don't go through a ton of veggies that fast). But then I feel bad if I'm just eating comfort food? I'm keep trying to tell myself that as long as I eat something, it's okay, but I made a big salad last night, ate maybe 1/3 of it and just decided to eat a bowl of tater tots instead. Which is FINE but then I feel guilty for not eating vegetables. Also, so many people talking about at-home movement, which makes me mad, because I want to REST but sitting too much is making me so stiff and in pain, so now I'm just like WHAT DO I DO BESIDES MEDICATE MYSELF INTO OBLIVION.
Whew, that felt good. Thank you.
I am also getting married (circumstances permitting) in the fall and it is SO. HARD. to avoid all of the "wedding diet" thoughts and propaganda and comments. I keep telling myself I don't have to be a particular size at my wedding but another part of my mind keeps telling me I need to look perfect. and I have no energy to exercise, then I feel guilty about not exercising, then I want to restrict to make up for it, and it's been.... not great!
I'm very glad you're talking about this. My dad (in his early 60s) is just out of a 5-month outpatient anorexia & exercise addiction treatment, and lives alone. I know he is struggling daily, being newly in recovery, and feeling a pull to exercise/walk/not eat.
If anyone has some tips about ways I can support him, I'd love them. I don't want to call him up and say "are you eating? what's for dinner?" all the time, but don't want to not talk about it, since I know he's having such a hard time.
I am not currently dealing with this, but I just want to say that I had been fairly recovered for almost a decade and then had it flare TF up in the winter, and I'm sure some of you are dealing with that now. It's okay! You'll be okay. You are not a terrible person because of it, and you will find order again soon. :) I love you all.
Luckily I’m quarantined with a supportive partner who doesn’t have much work to do, so he’s been helping keeping me fed, but despite that, I just want to over exercise now. I went so hard for so long at an empty park by our apartment that I can barely move today. Just can’t stop obsessing over fitting into my jeans once again when this is all over.
I'm wishing all of you so many good things; we're all in the same leaky boat right now. I've been... really struggling. I knew I needed to get help (read: medication) for binge-eating before this all started, but it just seemed like too much to deal between doctors' unhelpful hours and bad insurance. Regretting that so much, especially now that I don't know whether I'm getting laid off or not. It's never exactly prime hiring season for corporate rare books librarians, you know?
Every day, my (anorexic, of course) mother leaves for her post-retirement job and I immediately start planning everything I can eat without her noticing. A couple candies, a couple cookies, some chips out of an open bag, a spoonful of peanut butter, until I have to stop or get caught. The only thing that stops me is the shame. Today, I ate a day's worth of food by 11:00 am, so I've been struggling not to eat for, oh, almost 8 hours now. Not that she doesn't know. Yoga pants don't hide much.
I am a doctor with ADHD (freshly diagnosed, yay!) who just started working in ED, and it's really messing with my food schedule. I tend to forget to eat, especially if my day is busy and/or unstructured, and working in an emergency department is nothing if not busy and unstructured, lmao. Yesterday I was working 2:30pm-midnight, which meant I forgot to eat in the morning because of sleeping in and playing animal crossing, then didnt have time to eat at work (there aren't any defined break times, you just have to grab them when you can), then got home at midnight both intellectually knowing I was really hungry but physically feeling utterly unable to eat anything, like I'd suppressed hunger for so long my body was just refusing to acknowledge it needed food anymore. (And there was a little sprinkle of "which of these stockpiled quarantine foods should I eat first, maybe I shouldnt eat anything to make sure I have enough for later" anxiety for spice.)
Plus now we have to wear surgical masks at all times in the department, so I can't have a quick snack at the desk in between patients like I could before - I have to physically get up, go to the tea room or the corridor outside the department, take off my mask, wash my hands, and THEN eat or drink whatever it was I wanted, while feeling guilty, like someone will yell at me if they catch me Not Working. And half the time when I go to do this someone calls me wanting something written up or a patient reviewed, so I have to do it all in reverse before going back in even hangrier than I was before 😭
Anyway. It's not strictly disordered eating I guess, more a side effect of ADHD, but I've gotten down to a dangerous weight with this before, and I'm really worried it'll happen again now that I have very little structure and lots to do. 😣
Oof, thanks for starting this thread. I'm in eating disorder recovery right now and this is a terrible time with food, and everyone suddenly posting about their quarantine workouts.
My disordered eating hasn’t been this bad in decades. I feel awful in every way, even worse, I feel my problems oozing out and affecting my children. I have two daughters, and since my oldest was two, I have doubled down on all of my efforts to speak kindly about my body, and really actively try to find joy in food. But this whole situation has MESSED ME UP. I’m not eating, and worse, I’m commenting about how much my family is eating (like I actually told my child she couldn’t have a second bowl of cereal this morning because scarcity, I guess?) What is happening?? I feel like a terrible person, a terrible mother, and a terrible partner. Did NOT expect to feel like a monster throughout this quarantine. I’m also COVID-19 unemployed now, so that’s made things even messier. Thank you for giving me a place to say all of this. I’m trying so hard to maintain some semblance of positivity any time I talk to a real person, so this is really so appreciated.
Eating gets really hard for me when my anxiety gets high, and a lot of it almost feels like decision fatigue for me? All the little considerations about what to eat just pile up and make eating impossible.
The problem now is all of my coping mechanisms rely on eating food out. I know a lot of people aren’t like this but releasing control helps me actually eat and I can’t do that right now. The couple places I am an accidental regular at because I can always make myself eat there I can’t go to. I’m trying to eat at least twice every day, which had been sorta working. I’m just so tired, and so much energy is going to this.
Binge eater/bulimic. I'm stress-eating a lot but haven't returned to purging. I still have to physically go into to work (medical manufacturer) and the pressure of trying to keep the medical supply chain moving, plus the fact that so many co-workers aren't taking it seriously is really getting to me. My husband is working from home and has serious cabin fever so I go from a crowded, busy factory to a husband who has had no human contact all day. Winter has finally decided to arrive here, so it's too cold to go running. I'm trying to placate it with bodyweight work at home, taking walks and hikes, and remembering my mantras. I had to cancel therapy this week because I couldn't handle the stress of having to talk to yet another person.
I'm isolating with my senior parents and it's difficult in some pretty predictable ways. My dad has always talked about weight and bodies in a way that's pretty unpleasant for me to hear/grow up with. It also doesn't feel like a great time to have a frank conversation with him about my concerns, as I fear spiraling upset and blowups.
(FYI, he's not commenting at my body specifically, he'll just comment on people's weight/loss/gain, say "good for them" in odd/condescending ways, use "being bad" type language, generally very uncritically reiterates fat = bad/unhealthy and calorie reduction = good reasoning, and does binge/portion control himself in ways I find concerning.)
My mom was similar when I was growing up, and put pressure on me to be skinnier from a young age, but has deliberately changed her behavior when I pushed back as an adult. I appreciate how she's worked to curb weight talk. She was concerned I've lost weight since the pandemic and was worrying I was portion restricting to save food for them, which I haven't been.
I'm feeling a lot of love for everybody, and the many ways tension and fear and potential shortages are messing with us and our varied relationships with food and family and our bodies.
Also where I live at the moment there's not super stable supplies of food -- add this to the fact that I'm in a high-risk group and thus can't venture out much, and my past two weekly grocery store trips have been like "what's here? oh, random stuff? cool, guess I'm eating random stuff this week" which is SO SCARY for someone who normally needs to protect her mental health by really carefully planning her diet.
(Also when I was a kid I was, bitterly ironically, caught in a small epidemic that resulted in me spending a few weeks with very little access to food, so in addition to the past three months of flashbacks to me being a small child and seeing a bunch of people around me get sick and die, I'm now like "sh*t, I gonna be starving again, won't I?". Which is such a selfish response, given the very real current global horror, but that's where my brain's at.)
I am! Struggling! Up until recent events, I was forgetting to eat so often that I had to set alarms on my phone, and that was working pretty okay, but now that I’m home all the time, I’m oscillating Wildly between forgetting to eat and eating when I’m nowhere near hungry, and I can’t seem to get the signals between body and brain settled.
I have a newborn (it's been a weird month) and remembering to eat at all is... hard. I was at my pre-pregnancy weight a week postpartum, and I know I haven't been eating enough since but time is even more immaterial than it would have been were I just "normal" self-isolated, and actual decent food in is happening... once a day, maybe.
I keep oscillating widely between bingeing and restricting. Bingeing all the comfort foods, then feeling guilty and shameful about it/my changing body the next day. It's a HORRIFIC cycle, even as I recognize that it is totally okay and normal for bodies to change over time, and we're in an unprecedented time period. I'm sending all the light and good thoughts to all of us!
oh my god, yes. I've already been talking about my disordered eating with my therapist before all this started because I have real issues feeling ok eating anything sometimes. this is making it worse because at work I can control the access I have to food (which sounds terrible and yes my therapist has heard me say this and has feelings about it that we process), but now at home it's like... the food is all here. and i'm scared of the food. My therapist is honestly so great and I love him, he's giving me homework to just try to eat midday sometimes. but this is hard. I feel bad about it though because I know food insecurity is such an issue all the time but especially now. a vicious cycle.
My disordered eating tends toward trying to eat "clean" "whole" foods so having to eat a bunch of shelf stable starches and carbs is really stressing me out and pushing me toward restriction. Part of that restriction is also that I'm nervous about running out of food, but I know that's mostly just a cover
I’m not exercising as much right now obviously (or at all if I’m being honest). So I was doing one meal a day and some snacks. But my therapist was like “eating breakfast will help you.” And she’s right so I’m eating breakfast right now.
Two meals a day and some snacks I think is probably the better choice.
Oh yes, thanks for this Nicole. I keep forgetting to eat! Any disruption to my routine is bad for my mental health but particularly my disordered eating. Plus, I feel like I am exerting less energy (I walked 1-2 miles each day during my normal work schedule because I had a sucky parking spot) so I feel like I "can't" eat as much :(
This is mine: I am insanely envious of everyone who stops eating when stressed, and I feel like a failure for not losing my appetite despite being stressed and anxious, for not having a "real" eating disorder. I love food, eating is the one thing that brings me comfort, and I am so disgusted at myself because I am eating normally (neither binging nor strictly restricting nor avoiding carbs) despite the restrictions on grocery shopping and dining out. Why don't I have the discipline? What is wrong with me that I can't do what so many can?
Eating?? In this economy????????
I typically walk four miles a day, and it's helped me get my body to a place over the past year that I liked it while not restricting my eating (I have a history of anorexia I have to be aware of), which has been rare for me since ... ever. Then this happened, and coincidentally a few weeks before I had stopped taking my antidepressants (for egg donation!) which also were suppressing my appetite a bit, and the results are just. Ugh. I gave my too-big-for-me pants all to neighbours already, so I'm living in leggings and trying so hard not to think about it. Knowing that people in my community are dealing with food insecurity right now just makes me feel worse -- I've been donating what I can, but here I am, absorbed with this objectively petty problem that isn't really a problem at all outside my own head. :T Solidarity to everyone in a similar position, it'd be nice if anxiety fixated on the rational.
I have autism and I’ve struggled with breakfast my entire life. I have awful hunger pains in the morning but the idea of eating is mostly repulsive. The only thing I can stand to eat in the morning is yogurt and all the grocery stores in my area are sold out... sigh.
Whew! Lots of panicking about eating in excess compounded by pregnancy. I was so sick in my first trimester that I lost weight (and a teeny bit proud of it, even though I was miserable - ahh c'est la addiction) and now that I'm heavier than my pre-pregnancy weight it also feels like one more thing I don't have control over. I'm still having cake today because it's my birthday goddammit, but very grateful I don't have a scale at home to obsess over right now.
it's hard to remember to eat when my body is stressed. I've definitely been getting the migranes/exhaustion element
Reading this has been a relief. I see so many ppl talking about eating all their snacks, etc and I’m struggling daily to maintain caloric intake. It’s made harder since my housemate has to use our small dining/kitchen area to work and I have mostly meals that must be made from scratch, so I feel intrusive. Then my guilt over having the luxury of food in general adds to it making me want to avoid food more. Sigh. Thank you all for sharing your struggle. It’s frustrating but reassuring.
I spent 2 hours making GF funnel cake but I can't bring myself to eat it. It was an attempt to have a "project" for the day. I took a few bites and spit it out immediately. This is happening at most meals. I can't bring myself to swallow food unless I am very very hungry. This results in about one full meal every other day and snacks when I can stomach them.
At first, I was very worried about running out of food so I started restricting and now that I'm weeks into Bunker Life and have made several grocery orders I am not so concerned about running out of food, but I am still not eating a whole lot. It doesn't help that my anxiety often manifests by feeling like my stomach is full of rocks.
I was actually trying to work on some disordered eating behaviours before all this started, focusing on eating with other people. I've always had social anxiety stuff which often manifests as nausea and then fixating on the fear of throwing up halfway through a meal - but only when I'm around other people (I think there's a 'must finish my plate so I don't seem rude or weird' aspect to it). So I was trying to work on chilling out about that, then we went into lockdown, and I live on my own so I'm not going to be eating meals with anyone for a while... It's fine for now, one less problem to deal with tbh, but I don't know whether that's just going to make it worse once everything does go back to normal and someone invites me round for dinner.
I think I've had a fraught relationship with food for most of my life, but didn't really recognize it in myself until last summer, when I realized I'd been doing the below-mentioned Devil Wears Prada diet for several weeks. No therapist, no money for one, no other appropriate and healthy person to talk to about it. For reasons I still don't really understand, partly but not exclusively work stress, hunger felt better to me than having eaten, as long as I wasn't so hungry my head hurt too much to move. The situation deteriorated quickly until I felt in imminent danger of lasting physical harm and impulse-quit the job (despite having no savings), and then it deteriorated more slowly for another month or two. Since then I've been dragging my unfocused self through yet another job search, making an occasional $100 with freelance work and benefiting from a lot of help my parents can't really afford to be giving me, so I'm always running from the side effects of challenging myself to need as little from them as possible. I like my increased resourcefulness w/r/t ingredients and am pleasantly surprised by my slightly increased speed in getting through a job application, but the Thoughts that are accompanying this extra introspection are ... not helping.