Yes, I feel like sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes it’s triggering. Usually unexpected situations are triggering, because I didn’t have an opportunity to prepare myself and my initial emotion is “I want it.” I don’t want it, but to realise that there’s a thought process in my head which needs to happen and if I didn’t have time for this though process (time to prepare myself), that’s when I feel the most vulnerable at the moment. For me it means that in such situations all I need to remember as a first thing is, that no matter what I feel or think at that moment, I shall give myself a bit of time before making any food decisions.
e.g. If I’d be visiting someone and suddenly they put a cake in front of me, even if I feel like maybe I could have one, it’s a special occasion, and other stuff what Ed can come up with, I should say that I may have one later and go away and think about it properly before I eat it or not. I believe that 90% of the time the cakes which are surrounding me are not worth eating as they’re just cheap and not nice things anyways.
Hello @Faugxh
I meant to ask you something, you may and may not know the answer, it’s your wisdom gained from experience which I’m after 
I exercised over the weekend (Sat & Sun - cardio, so calories burn). I felt much more hungry through both days which I expected a little bit, because I went from being ill and not moving at all to quite a busy weekend. So there was no chance that 3 meals in the day would do for me and I had to accept that I need some snacks between meals. I was ready for this so all good. BUT I still felt the same “hunger” yesterday and I don’t know why, when I wasn’t active. And I wonder why was that?
- Can it be that I didn’t manage to eat the equivalent of burnt calories over the weekend and so my body was still trying to refill the deficit?
- Maybe my body wanted snacks simply because I had them over the weekend?
I know you can’t tell 100% but I 'm just curious if something like this can happen, that not eating enough can lead to hunger and cravings in following days. I always had that mindset new day = new start but it doesn’t make much sense from the physiological side of things 
I know the best way of knowing would be to count calories in and out but if possible I 'd rather not go this route because I’d find it boring (which is the better case scenario), or I could be obsessed with it and go down a very different, basically the very opposite way than I want to…
Day 1522 : No binge today. 
@Jana1988 I can assure you that those triggering situations will get less and less with time. I’ve been free of sugar and binges for over a year now and a triggering situation comes up very rarely. Last time it showed up my hormones were running wild, I was extremely stressed, sick, and in a very difficult time in my life. Only then did something evoke some craving in me. Other than that my brain stopped sending me those signals.
As to why you were hungry after the exercise there may be all kinds of reasons for that:
- You actually did not get enough food, either energy wise or something specific like fat, protein, carbs or something else your body needs.
- If you have a history of compensating for “bad” eating behaviour with restricting and working out, your brain may have learned that this huge expense of energy is not going to be followed with enough food and will preemptively turn up the hunger signals to get enough food.
- It might be that your body’s recovery from the excertion is taking longer.
I would suggest to keep tuning in into your bodily signals about hunger and satiety and honoring them. When your body has learned that it gets fed appropriately with enough high quality food it will recalibrate itself.
448 sugar
312 UPF
186 gluten/dairy
Day 1523 : No binge today.
Good morning @acromouse I can’t even tell you how thrilled I’m to read that it gets easier. I mean, I can’t say that I have it hard now, almost scared to say that so far so good, but you never know when something comes up and I am freaking out that if I must watch out for triggering situations often for the rest of my life, that it will eventually throw me out of my saddle of this “sobriety” in eating.
So thank you for sharing your experience as it is reassuring & calming 
Yeah, I’ll have to figure out what it is about my hunger. Most likely I just don’t eat enough. I didn’t feel hungry only the week when I was ill. I was eating three meals a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and I had no issue with it, I didn’t feel hungry at all. It also can be, because I started eating regularly at the same(ish) time and so my body now knows that it’s feeding time and gets hungry in advance 
Like I get up and I’m starving within few minutes which I NEVER experienced before. It must be because I don’t eat after a dinner and I eat latest 8pm, besides before I’d binge righ until 10pm and then go sleep and woke up bloated and still feeling full in the morning not even wanting a breakfast, so I usually skipped it. I can see all the wrong things I was doing for so long!!
I hope you are well - well, based on your 3 digits counters, I guess you are 
At least in terms of this. Thank you again very much for your insight, I highly appreciate it 
Day 13: No binging
Triggers & Cravings my biggest fear (and maybe fear of many of us). I addressed it yesterday. Because until now I was just walking around it on my tip toes with fear of disturbing the sleeping monster in my head. I worried that any attention could awaken it and cause the unwanted failure, relapsing, giving up …you name it.
But the opposite is true, dear reader! At least in this case it wasn’t so bad to face my fear and to discover that it’s not an elephant, but just a small mouse hiding there in my silly head 
What can I tell you… I realised that my thoughts are just thoughts which I heard for million times from different sources, but it hits you differently when it sits down with you and when you finally get it! Click.
What if I tell you that thoughts (as much as we like to say that they can be life-changing) are absolutely powerless without EMOTIONS assigned to them. Emotions give meaning to thoughts. And our emotions are a reflection of our beliefs (based on experience) and perception.
Imagine back in the day when you were in unreciprocated love. Did you feel powerless? You could say to yourself as many times as you wanted that you don’t love the person anymore, but it wasn’t true. People cope differently - some get angry, some will cry, some will close. Some would lie to themselves that love isn’t what they feel anymore. But in the end, whatever has been done still hurt and we still had to wait until time healed us. And more resilient to accepting what we really felt - the longer it took. And I believe, that it’s similar (if not the same) with any unpleasant feeling.
I believe that if you accept it without freaking out and acting on it - you can just “wait it out”.
The good news is, that cravings don’t need to last long with the right tools, mindset and knowledge.
I have rules as my most powerful tool. If you have a set of rules about your eating, (e.g. one of mine is not eating after 8pm), you don’t have to have the never ending discussion in your head related to food decisions. Because anything what goes against your rule can be simply dismissed and so no debate happens. You can also decide not to have rules but to make a decision at the moment, but that can be tricky, because we’re under the influence of our lower brain at that moment, and so we’re more vulnerable to make a “bad decisions”. That’s why I like my rules, they’re helping me to establish a clear path which I want to walk on.
Now, I’m less scared of cravings, because I know that all I have to do is to do nothing. Also, having certain thoughts and feelings can’t make me physically eat. It must be my decision to stand up, go, grab the food and put it in my mouth. I would do that only if I was about to die, but I’m never in such emergency. So knowing all of this helps me to fear less. And with cravings appearing - I can study them and practice dismissing them and creating a new habit there, so they’re now very welcome in my life.
Hey first of all sorry for the delay. I’m sick and everything’s hard. Especially reading and thinking.
Yes.
In fact. If you’re chronically underfed, your body will adapt and try to save energy whereever it can. The hunger won’t be so great, you’re used to it.
When a chronically underfed person (or say for example someone at the end of a diet) starts to eat more again, there’s a hormone that signals hunger called ghrelin that is elevated from the long period of starvation, and you’ll experience a much bigger hunger than during the starvation/diet. In your case, I would expect that to happen and also to contribute towards your fear of both eating more and counting calories. For this huge hunger and the experience of binges will make you think of going over the calories more than of filling them up. Which is what I would think you need to do.
Tbh it is not highly significant to say you have three meals, or five, snacks or no snacks, or eat until full, as long as it is not clear what the right amount is for you and that you’re eating that. This is the eating disordered thread. We all can’t rely on our hunger signals here and we all have obvs struggled w what’s good nourishing ourselves.* I know I can’t trust myself and it’s also not a battle I need to constantly fight. Unless I know what I must eat, I will either stress eat and emotionally eat all the time or potentially not cook but just eat breads and shit or undereat like you and then binge [in fact that recently happened to me at the and of my very planned out diet which I won’t attempt again, live and learn, something that’s common practice in the bodybuilding world but it’s not for me].
So I just eliminate this by roughly planning what I eat, the macros. Not bodybuilder level of accuracy by all means. Just basic. And it works for me and the level of intuition I have achieved by now, which is not bad at all for an ED person, I got there from that practice 100%. I can eat sweets and fruits, and sometimes even a bag of crisps when I want and it don’t derail me.
Imo, what you need to do is plan out how much your body actually needs. And then eat that. You don’t need to count calories, you can also count portions. Like say for example you weigh 60kg plus you’re a active runner and cyclist, you’ll need maybe 300g carbs a day (this is an estimation, I don’t know that exactly). One prortion is 60g. 300/6=5 so you eat 5 times 60g carbs a day. 60g carbs is for example 90g pasta or 400g potatoes etc etc. Then you count your portions.or make then bigger if you want to eat less times.
Same w protein and fats.
And you need that every day, not just when you’re active. Cos you have very little body fat (this is not to shame or praise, just an observation from your pics, visible abs on a lady mean: very low body fat), your body needs something to recover with on rest days. Especially when you’re sick you need to make sure to eat, you need to have energy to heal or you’ll go into your muscle tissue and take from that, making you weaker, less fit.
The chronic undereating is probably what makes you so hungry now that you eat a bit more. I think it’ll level out when you eat enough for a while. It might mean also accepting a higher body weight tho, tho ofc I can’t know that for sure.
I hope this makes sense and is well enough put. My head is killing me. I have a long day ahead of me and barely slept due to sickness. I feel awful.
Wish you the best girl!
*[I know Aga’s whole recovery is very diff from what I’m saying here, but we’re not all Agas. I think most ED ppl don’t have and very likely won’t achieve the level of freedom and intuition she has, also in this short time. It’s a wonderful goal, but in the meantime we can and should work w educating ourselves and working w discipline rather than attempting intuition straight away. Which is I’m pretty sure how Aga also got to where she is. Feel free to chime in Aga if I’ve got it wrong.]
PS if you want help w that you can just DM me your weight and I’ll send you some numbers and more examples like the one above w the pasta. It’s not a problem. And I won’t follow up on you or pretend like I’m a coach or some bs. Just a friendly offer as I see you have a mental hurdle there thinking about that and it’s easy for me. :-*
@Jana1988 You are plowing through it right now girl!
@Faugxh Oh I absolutely am not against planning what, when and how much to eat and eating accordingly. That’s what I did meticulously in the beginnig. I have a good idea now what and how much I need. The listening to your body and signals part is for the fine tuning.
As long as I was eating sweets and UPF crap, underating or overeating constantly, or being in the never ending cycle of binges and hangovers there was no way I could use my satiety signals for anything. They were totally out of whack. I needed to get that sorted out in the first place. I needed a solid nutritional plan, a grocery list and preplaned meals.
After a while I realised though that my body needed significantly more fats than was usually advised - I assume due to menopause and hormones needing lots of fats to be build. That I could only find out by listening to my signals.
Hoping you are getting better soon, especially with the headaches.
449 sugar
313 UPF
187 gluten/dairy
Ty I’m almost alive now. Thanks to pain meds and food and coffee. 
Out of interest: how much fat a day for you? 
I know I’m well in the 70s.
Im still like that if I don’t train. If I train, it’s good and I feel my hunger a lot and I eat like a horse. 
When things are out of the ordinary and I don’t train or I’m sick or I’m somewhere else for the day, I better make that conscious effort and rely on my habits that I built, my intuition alone is not a good enough measure for me. Maybe cos I’m such an emotional person idk. I feel extreme feelings all the time and I guess more often than not they’re more in the forefront and more urgent than hunger or other bodily signals (pain also, I can overgo pain a lot, same w tiredness). Just a thought, as usual nothing is ever one thing.
Glad to hear you are feeling a bit better. So many people are down with something miserable right now.
Absolutely. When I am sick, very much in pain, my hormones are on a rollercoaster ride, or my nervous system is constantly missfiring I can not rely on satiety signals. Then I will revert to my ‘rules’ and habits and not spiral out of control and feel worse as I would have done in the past.
I have no idea how much fat I actually consume now. I just know that in the beginning most macro calculators alotted more carbs and less fat than I actually feel good with.
I’ve realized I struggle with sticking to my own rules. Probably because I am a rule breaker in my life. So the addict goes “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”.
I want to stick to a rule that I don’t eat anything provided by work. I’ve tried and failed at this many times. I know every time I am creating a stronger connection to binge, so it’s hard to disconnect. I bring my own food and end up not eating it.
Oh nooooo, I am so sorry that you’re not feeling well 
I was ill last week but I don’t think I felt this bad. I was still able to work from home. Even more I’m grateful for your exhausting reply, you had spend quite a time to write all of this down for me
It’s interesting seeing it from your point of view. And really what I’d need is to have you here (would you like to move in? ) so you could prepare stuff for me lol. Well, I’d have to start with buying a weight to weight the food and also a scale to weight myself as I have neither if you can believe it… 
Thank you for your compliments about my body fat. My partner says the same and I must admit that except for a belly I never had any issue thinking that I’m fat. My poor belly has been hated for very long time, fortunately my relationship to my body changed since then and I’m better, but even though you say I have ABS, I’m still not 100% happy with this part of my body and I don’t even think that I’ll ever be… 
I stopped carrying some time ago, but there are days when I feel good and then I can even take a photo. With the good angle and light it can even look pretty (at least in my opinion).
I was very scared of eating enough (or more) and I hope that I’m getting better in that, but it needs to be the right food! I could have a pack of crisps and not feel bad about it too (especially when it’s cycling season and I do burn excessive amounts of calories), but the thing is that I don’t want to, because it gives nothing good to my body (except for the energy maybe) and it rather harms me. It’s only 13 days of eating better and few days when I didn’t have any chocolate and I can’t believe how much my skin changed! I used to have small spots all over my back - I thought they were from sweat as I exercise and sweat a lot. Today after shower I was applying some body moisture and noticed I have no spot whatsoever 
Obviously I have no prove that it’s because not eating sweets, or eating better, but there’s nothing else I changed in my life, so it’s very likely to be connected 
I can’t say that I won’t have crisps ever again because it’s still too big statement to chew on for me now. But I will certainly try. And the same is for chocolate and other “crap”.
Thank you very much again for your time today. I hope you will feel way better soon!! Take care of yourself!!
I’m sorry @Passerina_cyanea I know I mentioned “rules” here few times, but the truth is that it’s quite a complex thing, not a straight forward like you just say you won’t be doing this and that and that’s it - you should be able to manage by using a willpower. Because it doesn’t work like it and I should give more context.
But I’m in a very early stage of this journey and not exactly confident, definitely not qualified to coach. All I can do is describe my own experience.
If you’d be interested, please, listen the podcast where it’s all explained very well: Defeat your cravings
Hope I’m not annoying sharing the link for a 3rd time lately but the podcast really helped me and maybe the structured plan of how to create new eating habits accordingly to your own needs could help someone else too🙏🏼
Thank you, @acromouse
Today I went to a shop just to buy some pastry for my partner because I had a way around this shop and asked me to. Before I went in I was asking myself if I want the pastry too and I decided that no, because it’s not a kind of food I want to eat anymore. When I said to the shopp assistant that I want 1 piece of that pastry she made me a special offer if I buy two. It was like 2 seconds in my head when I was considering to buy two and have one in the end, but then I was like “Nah, that’s silly, I don’t need two” and politely refused it. I can promise that this would never happen before!! I felt so proud of myself not to fall for this marketing trick.
Today me and my partner got delivered a new sofa and decided to have a takeaway to celebrate. It’s fine, because my rule is that I can have a takeaway twice a month. When it came, I took the bowl in which it’s been delivered and moved part of the food into the dish from which I eat normally. My boyfriend didn’t understand what I’m doing, so I explained that they tend to do the deliveries in bigger dishes and so it makes the portion looks reasonable but in reality you overeat. And indeed when I filled the dish I use normally I still have half left for tomorrow. After the dinner I had some cashew nuts in honey/lemon as my treat, my boyfriend wanted chocolate and this is perhaps first time in my life he could eat it next to me and I had zero desire to have some. The nuts were satisfying but I wouldn’t buy them again because of how much sugar they contain which I didn’t realise when I was buying them. (A good lesson to always check nutritional values!) But still much better than the choc. So I’m ok with it 
And all eaten before 8pm
Day 1524 : No binge today.
Day 14: no binging
Happy Valentine’s day 
450 sugar
314 UPF
188 gluten/dairy
Can recommend that very much!
Day 1525 : No binge today. Happy Valentine’s Day to those of you who celebrate it! 🩷
Congratulations on 14 days, @Jana1988! Keep it up! 
Thank you, @Aleyadaisey