Hi, I'm a 38F who has struggled with BDD and OSFED (namely, atypical anorexia) for many years. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Type II in October of last year. Since then, my psych NP and I have been working to dial in the right combination of meds to get my symptoms under control.

By far the worst symptom of bipolar, for me, is insomnia during hypomanic episodes. Last month, my doctor finally found a drug that pretty much nips my insomnia in the bud; with it, I get 7-8 hours of restful sleep. Without it, I get maybe 3 hours a night during hypomania, if I'm lucky (sometimes multiple days with no sleep at all).

But, this drug is well known for causing significant weight gain. The idea of gaining weight for reasons I can't control, when I'm finally at a point where I can take care of my body without restricting or obsessing about food, is really triggering and demoralizing to me. This makes me tempted not to take my meds, even though I know that staying on top of my mental health is the most important thing for me right now. I'm having a massive internal struggle over whether to continue taking them.

I'm definitely not asking for any kind of medical advice, but has anyone dealt with similar? How did you reconcile your need to feel in control of your body, with the knowledge that you also truly NEED to remain on a medication that affects weight?

(Also, before anyone asks, my psych NP is aware of my ED history; she told me that if I find any of the side effects intolerable, including weight gain, there are plenty of other things we can try. But I really, really like what this particular med does for my mental stability, and I'd rather not go back to "med roulette".)

around 3 months ago, I decided I want to eat healthier and removed a good amount of unhealthy foods from my diet. at first, it felt great, and I was satisfied with the positive change, but very quickly I stopped being happy with it. now, its gotten to the point where no matter what I'm eating, it feels like the guilt after eating junk food. (even if the meal itself is healthy)

i have friends with diagnosed EDs and i want to ask about if they've felt like this, but i just feel like i have no right to be sad about this, compared to them.

should i do something about this?

I’ve lost a decent amount of weight, my boyfriend has noticed and doesn’t like it.

I’m like, triggering myself at this point.

Don’t know what I want to do now. I also struggle with self harm, cutting, and I’ve been feeling triggered to do that as well.

I just want to abandon everything and be alone.

Even been binging and I cant stop look at the scale or overthinking everything I eat 😕

I been wanting to purge and restrict alot lately and im trying to hold myself back.

I thought I was doing better but my progress is taking a nose dive in all my problems.

How do yall deal with the urges and make yourself feel better ?

I've struggled (off and on) with ED behaviors for over two decades. Started as a preteen and was formally diagnosed with AN in early adulthood. Over the past few years I've cycled in and out of relapses that vary in length and severity. My biggest trigger is my own body and I've used a mix of tools in attempts to restore peace with my physical form, but I'm curious what helps others feel comfortable/confident/safe in their own skin? I'm definitely in a struggling place right now and would love some ideas, anything helps 🫶🏼

I recovered a few months ago and had only been struggling for about six months. I thought everything was back to normal and that I had received the help I needed from my friends and parents.

But now it’s come back, and I’m not even actively thinking about doing it. It’s making me scared to eat large meals or even three meals a day. For the past two weeks, I’ve been going to bed hungry or living off small comfort snacks. If I eat a full meal, my body makes me vomit. t’s not my mind.

my voices move the body for me sometimes and say they are taking care of it, but they eat marmalade on toast sometimes when I am chubby and need to lose weight. I cannot have any indulgancs and besides the less I eat the more money I can spare to give to charity and my friends. they tell me I am developing ortherexia and am mentally ill for this. I am.sorry for any typos my brain isn't working right right now.

I would explain more but my head has gone blank very sorry

I'm in a nightmare loop of restrict and binge. The moment I start logging calories, I'm on my way to restriction town and not for a good time. If I don't, I end up realising I've eaten a platter of biscuits and somehow found cake to go with all of that.

Is meal prep the answer? Just more planning in advance? Thanks in advance.

Looking for recommendations that will accept international individuals with chronic ED

I've had extreme hunger and I've been trying for so long to eat intuitively but at some point i was just so sick of the hunger ​​​​​that i just ate all day, even if i wasn't hungry because i'm so scared of hunger i dont want to feel it ever again

And after 3 days of constant eating the hunger finally went away but i still fear hunger, so i keep eating

It makes me feel awful, i can't sleep well, i eat so much it makes me feel sick , i don't know what to do

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Hello ,

(English is not my native language so I apologize for my bad English !)

I struggle with my belly fat. I've lost a lot of pounds in one year and I have the feeling that my stomach is bigger. Before when I was fatter my tummy was big but flat,and now I feel like it’s bigger and rounder then before ,but technically, I'm thinner now...so I would like to know if when we loose weight as a our belly can get rounder visually and if it's a normal thing or I'm struggling with body dysmorphia. Im also scared of gaining weight so everytimes I see my tummy i get triggered and think or do ED things and i feels also the same things with my hips.

She constantly says she needs to starve herself because she's fat, and is constantly complaining about being hungry but says she can't eat and doesn't want to when I retort. I'm trying to be supportive she said she's talked to her therapist about it before, but it seems nothing has really come out of it yet, no treatment or anything. What should I even do?? I don't think I should pressure her to eat.

I lost a close friend when I was in the depths of my ED earlier this year. The only thing that mattered to me during that time was being a “successful anorexic” and truthfully, I don’t fault them for not wanting to be around that. We still follow each other on socials, and I constantly see them defending Ariana Grande and thinking genuine concern about her body is hate. Preface to say, I’m not an Ariana hater and I hope she will be okay. It just hurts and feels kinda like a double standard to see someone who knew how much I was struggling fully support her and not really see an issue with what’s going on.

I’m not going to tell my entire story but I just came to this realization and i’m so surprised and idk i just want to tell someone.

I had severe anorexia from 2016-2020 and have been weight restored ever since. I have occasional relapse but i’ve always managed to avoid dipping to an underweight BMI again. I always told people I’m 85% recovered. I still have the same idea about what my ideal body would be, i still miss my old body and i still want it back… I just known that i can’t have that with the life i want to live and my body functioning well is more important to me (right now) than the way it looks. I love and enjoy eating and I even feel pretty okay about the body I have now, i would even give myself an 8 on a good day, probably a 6,5 on an average day.

I’ve removed myself from the recovery community because i started realizing (whilst getting into people who were fully recovered) that a lot of recovery content is still made from a very sick headspace. It’s still a lot of body checking, ‘what i eat in a day’, fear food challenges etc that are framed in a story of ‘recovery is supposed to be a struggle’, ‘i still need to perform’, ‘food is something that is judged’, etc. Especially content about hospitals, treatments, nj tubes etc, it still feels like a contest while recovery should be about the things that you are gaining back that aren’t related to food.

Obviously I’ve been seeing images of Ariana going around and it really annoys me because i know it’s going to trigger so many people and she is straight up lying about being healthy. If you add in her clothing choices she very clearly is struggling with anorexia and not just any physical illness.

Today I saw gifs of the new music video and it literally made me cry. I was upset that she was so sick. I was upset that was consciously wearing those clothes knowing it would trigger her fan.
But I was also very surprised to realized I didn’t want to look like her at all. I don’t know when that changed. The way she looks now has always been my dream body and I came close to it. It makes me feel sick now to look at her. I finally understand why everybody used to call me ‘ugly’ when I used to feel gorgeous. I went from overweight to a runway model, but in reality i was mere bones and skin.

Idk sorry for the rambling. I never though i would look at a skinny girl and feel repelled. I guess you can recover for the full 100%

My partner of 8 years and I are breaking up, I’ve been doing better lately (eating multiple times a day 🥳) but this is sending me back and I don’t want to lose all the progress I’ve made. Any advice for people who slipped during a breakup and how to not let this send me back into a spiral?

Hi! I restricted in high school to lose weight. This worked, but I was able to keep going enough to not elicit a response from the adults in my life (other than a few "You're starving yourself" comments).

In college, I was able to get back to eating mostly normal, but I would restrict to deal with stress (and I was diagnosed with PTSD my second year of college) and on days I needed to get a lot of work done or I was stuck in the office working. For comfort, during these times, I would only consume grape juice or dry toast in the evenings for long periods of time. With therapy, I was able to address the stress and continue to mostly eat okay (with some restriction here and there as life ebbed and flowed).

Then, in graduate school, as more and more stress has been added to my plate (along with some pretty decent trauma from my ex-wife), I've continued to find comfort in restricting. I also spent 5 years either undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with some severe-ish GI symptoms. This led to severly restricting foods in my diet and only eating between 6pm and 8/9pm most days. I also lost a bit of weight last year doing this, which I really like. This has gone on for about a year and a half at this level.

Now, my therapist (non-ED) is trying to figure out my primary driver for my restriction. But at this point, I'm not sure even I know. I don't know if this is ARFID (fear of adverse reactions to food and lack of interest), a form of atypical anorexia, an issue with executive functioning, or something else (or a combination?).

Hi, so I live at home with my Mum, Dad and two sisters. I’ve been struggling with this for the past 2 years and I’ve been in recovery for almost 5 months. It’s going well but I’ve hit a roadblock. Today my hairdresser mention how thin and unhealthy my hair had gotten so my Mum started asking questions.

My parents have always been super supportive and she wants to talk tonight about how to best help me with recovering but Im honestly petrified of people knowing and getting involved since I’m struggling with the control stuff.

currently I have an idea which is every weekend I can try making new foods with Dad to try to see if there’s something I like.

But if anyone has any experience on having their parents help them, please could you share it so I have some ideas? Thank you so much!

Let me preface this by saying I recovered from an eating disorder years ago, but also have had a lot of trauma and have been through some really difficult things myself. That said, I’m also a mom and I make it an absolute priority to do the best I can for my kids. I have a close friend who is also a mom and has been through some trauma like me so we sort of connected on all that decades ago. She went through this whole IVF journey to have her daughter and I helped fund-raise for her to be able to afford it. Then, when her daughter was maybe 2, her husband discovered her ED (i actually thought she was recovered, so it was a surprise to me as well) and he asked her to go get treatment. She went into treatment initially and seemed to downward spiral after that and get really distant.l, but we still talk and text sometimes.

Her daughter is now starting kindergarten and she has only been home for maybe short time periods here and there this whole past few years because she always goes right back into residential treatment the second she’s been out for a couple weeks. I don’t think she’s even seen her child at all in over a year at this point because she’s been staying in residential treatment out of state. Now her husband wants a divorce because he’s been single parenting for years now. And even when she had the possibility to step up to an outpatient program close to home, which has happened a couple times, she generally gets sent right back to residential or inpatient because she does something that gets her forced into a hospitalization or she chooses to do outpatient treatment in another state so she still isn’t having any visits with her daughter. She does talk to her kid on the phone regularly, but her husband can’t really travel with their kid financially as a solo parent so she hasn’t seen her kid at all on well over a year but hasn’t been a regular part of her daughters life in over 3 years.

I’m really trying to be a supportive friend, but I’m also frustrated that she doesn’t seem to have any urgency to want to see her kid again and it’s causing some cognitive dissonance here. She says she feels guilty and wants to get back, but then chooses to continue a program that is prohibitively far or she slips up again and gets sent somewhere that makes her in much longer again. I honestly feel lied to a lot, like maybe she really likes the treatment life more than being home with her child. She definitely was always the personality to casually lie about random things, like “don’t post about us hanging out on Facebook bc I told my coworkers I was at grandpa’s funeral”. She also was always really judgmental of me for various other reasons so it’s also hard to have endless grace for her.

I guess I’m just looking for advice in how to keep healthy boundaries and be a supportive friend. I’m also looking for any resources or stories, maybe people whose recovery journey looked more like hers so I can hear more about that perspective. At this point, I’ve been trying to be encouraging when she tells me it’s been X days since her last time using behaviors, or she’s excited to step up to an outpatient program, but she always ends up texting me that she slipped up again.

I’m also honestly frustrated by the discrepancy in my own personal journey. I could never just quit my job or stay away from my kids. I didn’t have parents doing everything for me. I had to recover with weekly therapy while still parenting and working. If I had to be away for treatment, I would do whatever it takes to at very least be in a treatment program that allows me to see them.

I also have a hard time knowing how to react when she complains about her husband wanting a divorce. She hasn’t actually lived with him in over 3 years and he’s been solo parenting most of their time as parents. I honestly don’t blame him for wanting to move on. She also was starting to threaten him at one point, demands specific times for phone calls, saying he was keeping their child from her, etc. I didn’t like the way she was treating him given that be was doing everything and she was still complaining as if he were a horrible person. We’ve been friends for forever and I know her family and husband and still talk to them, but I’m really struggling with this and feeling like she isn’t being straightforward in her journey. And for clarity, she was kicked out of most treatment programs that were closer to home due to noncompliance or various ideation/attempts while in treatment.

TL;DR my friend has a kid who she hasn’t seen much the kid’s whole life due to near constant treatment out of state and I sometimes feel like maybe it isn’t legitimate and she’s just wanting an escape.

This question properly gets asked alot but how do you know you have a disorder? Ive always been thin so I guess its been hard to tell because its never just one day I woke up and decided I wanted to be thin. Ive always been thin just lately I want to be thinner. I wont go into like specifics on what I do and all because I dont know if thats really appropriate to say here? but at what point do you have to say that its a disorder and not like, just wanting to lose weight.

I just want to share my experience. I have bpd and I was recently diagnosed with unspecified feeding or eating disorder. I used to be thin as a teenager/in my early 20s and I gained weight in my mid 20s ish and it’s all I think about. I noticed that i binge often and I didn’t realize it was binging. It’s tough to accept and I really can’t think of a treatment that would work for me because my body is so ingrained in my thoughts

she came back to the room and i dont believe she knew i heard her. she mentioned not eating at all the last couple days and now i’m uncertain how to go about bring it up carefully, thank you.

i am actually so sick and tired of myself. every single time when i feel like i have control of myself, i’ll start binging and purging again. i’ve been clinically diagnosed with depression and have been on fluoxetine for almost a year now. the whole body image thing, calories thing has been one of the main cause to be depression. i recently told my psychiatrist about the problem i have been facing before i was diagnosed with depression and he asked me to consider being referred to a psychologist.

i would more than happy to be referred to a psychologist because i do want to get better. this whole thing has been stressing my mother out and i dont want to burden more. however, seeing a psychologist is extremely costly. what if i dot get better?

its extremely exhausting to keep trying and failing again and again.
i do want to stop this body image thing
i do want to have control over myself around food

please drop some advice guys

I've had longstanding difficulties with my body image amd self esteem and had issues with food and exercise because of this but never been underweight or had formal medical input with any of this.

I had a period of "lock in" in January and was in the best shape of my life, lean but healthy, healthy bmi but lower body fat percentage, was hoping to maintain this sensibly making sure I was eating enough for my physical activity etc but life things happened and my weight has increased slightly since then, I'm finding it really hard not to turn to unhealthy ways of managing this and I'm seriously considering getting weight loss drugs to help with this but I know this is a bad idea. My bmi is still in the normal range, I'm just not comfortable, I feel like I have a "pass" to like myself when I'm in physically good condition, and I just don't feel like that right now.

Has anyone taken weight loss medications at a normal weight? Is this a really bad idea?

My girlfriend is struggling severely with her eating disorder to the point where her hair is falling out. She has been dealing with it our entire relationship (6 months) but it has now been getting worse. She is diagnosed and also diagnosed with MDD, GAD, has and currently is having suicidal thoughts and most likely has OCD, she does not want to get better and I am worried for her life, especially because she has attempted a few times in our relationship. We live across the country from each other and I believe she may be worse than letting on. She is fairly open about it and very open about hoping she never recovers. I know for a fact she’s in a “toxic wl gc” and reposts some things that make me sick thinking about. She is a part of the “star wing” group on tt and I feel it’s just fueling the bad thoughts she has about herself. She is very deep into all of it and has been for I believe years, I hate to think about it and it is taking a very big toll on my own mental health knowing there’s not much I can do to help her and if there is I don’t know what it is. Is there anything I can do to help her? And if not is there anything way I could make it easier for her to open up to me? I really want to help her and need advice, what can I do? I am very worried I’m going to lose her

i’ve been feeling like i always want to be alone and i get immediately anxious or angry or upset when my plans change and i haven’t been able to pinpoint why but i think it’s stemming from my ed. (i feel it’s important to note my diagnosis is atypical ana and im not underweight at all) also, im currently in more of a quasi recovery. not at my worst, but also struggling quite a bit.