I have been thinner than I am now. I have had worse physical symptoms than I have now, but my lifestyle is also different now which means that sometimes my present physical symptoms have a greater effect on me.
Having been both underweight bmi and healthy bmi during the last few years, I can honestly say that my weight does not change my mindset very noticeably. Whether or not I act on my ed thoughts is a matter of how I feel- and to be honest, sometimes I felt more depressed when gaining weight to recover than I did at my lowest.
Weight wise, I am presently between my lowest and “normal” body weights. I have steadily lost over the past months, after a horrendous “recovery phase”, which was actually the development of bulimia (not that I really told anyone that.) The bulimia subsided on its own, due to massive changes in my life causing me to feel compelled to restrict again. Now my anorexic thoughts and behaviours are dominant, but who bloody knows when that might change?!
Everything that I have experienced has really been making me analyse my own mindset recently. In some ways, I am a far stronger person than I was nearer the beginning of my eating disorder, yet I am also much more disordered at the same time: I am more entrenched in my thought and behaviour patterns, my attachment of lowering body weight and being happy is even stronger, and my worry and depression can be much more brutal than it was.
At the start, it was a constant underlying worry and sadness, whereas now, the sadness and extreme anxiety symptoms come in bursts (perhaps half the days of the week) and are much more powerful. Instead of feeling quite on edge all the time, I feel somewhat on edge most of the time and frequently feel so unbelievably anxious and/or sad that I can’t form a sentence, or move, or even quite workout what it is that has tipped me over the edge.
My weight might not be the lowest or highest it has been, but how I feel and behave is as extreme as it ever has been at either of those points. I am heading towards the lowest, but my mental state is already there. My disorder isn’t worse, or better. It is just different. But I’m different, in a different place, with different people, in a different living situation… I guess that no eating disorder ever repeats itself, it just kinda moulds along with you unless you are one of the minority that recover. Out of the “death, developing another ed, or recovery” options, I seem to have only done the new ed thing… not really the best outcome, but I will recover when I’m supposed to. I am always learning more about myself because I of my eating disorder, so maybe I just haven’t learned whatever it is that fate has decided I’m supposed to yet…
anadancer 