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I have been recovered from anorexia for 5 years now.

My ED began when I was in college. I was maybe slightly overweight to begin with, but not much, maybe 10 lb. I have a history of depression going back as far as I remember, but I'm not sure what was the cause of the depression or the ED. I had an angry, controlling father and didn't feel I had much control over my life growing up so maybe that was it. I wasn't physically abused, but I always felt the threat of physical abuse from my dad and he was always mad and yelling.

My ED began with an exercise obsession. At first, I exercised normally, just a few days a week, and I started losing weight. I don't know how it got so out of control, but I began losing more and more weight and feeling I had to exercise more and more. I started restricting food too and then using diet pills and laxatives and purging. When my ED was at its worst, I was exercising 4-5 HOURS a day (mostly running), severely undereating (less than 1000 cal/day) and just became obsessed with food and exercise. My weight plummeted to 80 lb. I'm 5' 4". I'm lucky I didn't kill myself. This ED went on most of my college years; I got help the last year because it was controlling my life, I was suicidal & severely depressed, and I couldn't sleep at all. An ED causes insomnia when the brain is starving, and I was getting 1-2 hours of sleep a night if I was lucky. I remember going 3 day stretches without sleep. It was miserable.

I hit rock bottom one day when it was cold and rainy (winter time) and I still went out for a 1 1/2 hour jog in the cold and rain and then nearly blacked out in the shower afterwards. By this point, I was in very bad shape. I hadn't had my menses in over a year, my hair was falling out, my skin was flaky & sallow, I had heart palpitations, and felt very weak and just generally unwell. Suddenly, the thought of having to continue to live the rest of my life that way--dieting so much and overexercising--just exhausted me and filled me with despair. I felt I would rather be dead than to continue living life that way until I did die.

I don't know how I turned things around. Honestly, I probably should have been inpatient at such a low weight, but somehow I managed to pull through.

Mostly, I came to the realization that I would never be thin enough for my ED. Even when I was at my lowest weight, I still felt fat. So I pretty much decided, I could be a normal weight with body image issues (which definitely still persist) but feel well physically & mentally or I could be depressed and super skinny but still feeling fat and feeling like crap all the time. Really, the ED was consuming my life; it became my life. I was always obsessed over food and exercise. I was spending so much of my day exercising and thinking about food. Plus, I was doing weird stuff like hoarding food under my bed (supposedly hoarding is common in ED sufferers) and spending hours wandering around grocery stores and then buying something trivial like 1 apple. I became consumed by cookbooks and the Food Network on TV, and really, it was my whole life. I wasn't focusing much on my college classes at all. It was a very shallow existence.

I finally started giving recovery a chance after spending a couple years in pseudo-recovery--claiming I wanted to recover but doing everything to thwart it. I had therapists and psychiatrists and dieticians along the way. I was hospitalized twice, but both times for the depression & not the ED. I don't know. All of that may have helped some, particularly the dieticians I saw--they worked specially with ED sufferers and hard core athletes like marathon runners. The dietician who owned the business had suffered from anorexia in the past and my dietician told me that while she never had a full-blown ED, she came very close at a point in her life, so I felt they could understand where I was coming from.

Really, it was a lot of hard work and determination on my part and work at breaking old habits. For example, my habit to overexercise. I used to have to exercise at least XX amount of time each day, but I determined first, I would only exercise 1 time a day when I did exercise and then I would exercise no longer than XX amount of time (a much much smaller amount of time than I exercised when the ED was full-blown). I had to start eating meals and stop kidding myself that my ED meals were actually meals. For example, I used to call a low calorie microwave TV dinner a meal, when really it had too few calories to be considered a meal. I used to consider a small box of plain frozen veggies a meal and really, that is not. I had to stop kidding myself. The hardest habit to break was purging meals, which I had done occasionally with the ED. That was probably the last habit to go even though it was really the ED behavior I practiced the least? But the purging gradually became less and less until it went away altogether. The main thing is to ignore the ED thoughts. I definitely still have them; just don't act on them.

I started doing what is called intuitive eating. Eating when I'm hungry and stopping when I'm full. It is basically listening to what your body tells you. This is tricky with an ED because the ED will tell you you are full after 1 bite, no matter what. You have to pay attention to your stomach telling you when you are full, not stuffed, just comfortable. Any time I start feeling weak and tired and haven't eaten in several hours, I listen to my body and have a snack, usually something that is high in protein.

I still cook healthy meals, but they are healthy meals, not ED meals. Really, I don't pay much attention to calories and focus more on protein and fiber. Occasionally, I go out and have junk food. I eat a few pieces of chocolate each day (more around my period!).

I also had to completely stop weighing myself during the recovery. The weight gain was too scary and it gave the ED too much power. Only after I was recovered a couple of years did I really start weighing myself again. Even now, I only weigh myself once a week and never the day after a large meal/party.

Recovery really is wonderful, and it can be done. The best part about it is that I'm actually happy most of the time! I'm not depressed every day and wishing I was dead. I am also off all antidepressants for over a year now. I still have body image issues, but I try to focus on the fact that I am healthy, energetic, and my weight is in the low end of normal for my height, I have not ballooned up out of control, and my life is not focused around food and exercise. I can concentrate on other things like my writing and gardening.

Feel free to PM me if you like.