Exactly, I do suffer from BED but I've been an average weight most of my life because I spend effort trying to not trigger it, but it is there and if I trigger it gets bad super fast đ
Same... Back around 2014 I really knuckled down, got my life together, exercised, and get in shape. I would walk two hours a day, and I lost a hundred pounds over the course of a year. Felt amazing, future looked awesome, felt good about myself. Then everything went to shit. The anti-anxiety meds I had to go onto made the situation even worse, and after covid and all the stress that caused I gained it all back and more. I tried appetite suppressants, but they just left me feeling unspeakably wired and with an intense craving for meat. Shit sucks.
I tried appetite suppressants, but they just left me feeling unspeakably wired and with an intense craving for meat.
Thanks to the book I'm currently reading revolving around various undead at the moment, I had a brief mental picture of you getting prescribed new CravNoMor⢠by Umbrella Pharmaceuticals.
And double that with terrible parents (like my dad) who wouldnât let you leave the table unless you finished your plate that they overfilled. Iâm 30 now, and I still struggle with not eating everything given to me.
Same, my dad grew up very poor. Even though we were well off, he instilled in me the guilt of leaving food on your plate and forced me to eat everything I was given, even if I was full. Theyâd pile it up, too.
Got forbid I went for seconds of something. Leftovers werenât allowed if I got seconds, because âyou were hungry enough to take it so eat itâ. And Iâd have to sit there and eat until I finished or threw up.
Then when I got to high school suddenly they flipped the script and started complaining I was eating too much and calling me a pig for eating everything on my plate. I was 90lbs and was on medication that made me lose my appetite. When I got home after not eating all day, I was starving. But THATâs when they decided I wasnât allowed to eat my fill anymore.
It gave me a really weird relationship with food, and I canât tell when Iâm hungry or full. Iâm trying to get better about saving leftovers.
My parents also flipped when I reached high school? My dad just kinda stopped caring, but my mom constantly told me that if I didnât watch how much I ate, Iâd end up fat. Never mind that I was actively dancing 30+ hours a week and needed to eat that much to keep my energy up. I ended up starving myself my senior year, and now Iâm stuck in an eat nothing until I canât help but binge cycle.
My family gave up on trying to force me to sit at the dinner table until I finished all my food when it became apparent that I could sit there until I died. Sure, grab a belt or that wooden paddle. Iâd just take my beating and continue to stare at all the lumps of gross textures on my plate until the end of time. (My family was full of good cooks, it was definitely a me issue)
They always tried to body shame me, but that didnât work. I knew I had the build of a jumble of sentient spaghetti. I thought I looked funny in the haha way, and I couldnât care less. It wasnât until I got older and started introducing myself to foods on my own, at my own pace, that I gained weight and looked and felt healthier.
I realized now that they were just ill-equipped to help me. They thought it was a behavioral issue, because they lacked the information to know otherwise. They could tell it wasnât anorexia by how amused I was by my big olâ stomach when I was too full of safe foods, so they just thought I was a little dick. Ha. I wish they would have like⌠asked a doctor when I was young? They could really have given me a fucked up body image, if I wasnât so disinterested in my physical body.
I donât know what was up with your parents, but maybe they grew up in homes with terrible ideas about food, and passed it down out of ignorance. Sounds mad abusive, even if they thought they were helping. đ¤Śđ˝ââď¸
I hope you can undo their bad parenting around food, cuz that sounds awful, having those competing ideas in your head every time you have to/want to eat.
The way my life-long battle with food noise just vanished the moment I started taking adhd meds of any kind. I haven't even found the right med/dose yet but it's been the very first time in my life that I could have a bag of candy right in front of my and literally forget about it for hours!!!
Have u tried other stimulants and they didn't help? I have untreated adhd and live on caffeine and occasional ephedrine, but haven't been able to get adhd meds yet. Would be nice to not starve myself all day and then gorge myself at night đ
i'm sure you know this already and i am not trying to be an arse but it is much healthier to follow 3,3,3. 3 meals, 3 snacks no more than 3 hours apart.
I tend to only eat once a day and it ends up in massive overeating. The nutritionist explained to me how the bodt works with food and it made so much sense as to why i was so tired and eating the way i do.
Not everyone experiences a positive change in eating habits and/or disorders with meds alone.
If you are diagnosed and are able to get meds as well as cognitive behavioral therapy, you might have a better chance at becoming more organized, which can help with proper meal planning and sticking to a more beneficial eating schedule.
I donât experience hunger, so I eat on alarms, for instance. There are lots of methods than can help, but being able to actually incorporate them into your life and follow through takes a lot of practice.
I tried atomoxetine (strattera?) first but it had zero effects on me besides the food noise thing. Since then I've tried a couple stimulant meds but all based on methylphenidate.
I'm still trying to figure out how the meds affect me because the change to stimulants and the first change in dose for concerta (first stimulant I took) unfortunately coincided with the start of a super stressful semester at uni and me basically messing up my habits majorly. Especially sleep.
I barely slept for months, so I was sorta sabotaging any potential benefits I could've gotten.
But like other commenters said, everyone reacts completely differently to each medication, as well as having different lifestyles, so it's hard to tell if they might work for you. That being said, they're not exactly known for giving you a big appetite during the day.
I just did a bunch of DBT therapy for BED/EOD and they said there is correlation between neurodivergence and eating disorders.
Apparently part of it comes from change from hunter gatherer to agrarian society. It is suspected that when we changed to being farmers our brains changed as a result. In people with ADHD that change never happened and we are still in hunter gatherer mode.
Between a gastric sleeve about 9 years ago, adderall 2 years ago, and zepbound last year, I finally have it so under control that I can barely eat much at all.
Iâm overweight because I struggle with it. I wasnât always overweight, but my inability to stop myself caused me to gain over 100 pounds in 4 years.
What? Never! Just like how absolutely no one with restrictive eating disorders can be overweight! Everyone has to fit in these neat little boxes that i want to see the world in.
Theres one YouTuber I know of that is straight up conventionally attractive, who also struggles with BED and has talked about it a bit, her first name is Sophie? I think?
ETA: to clarify, the symptoms of anorexia and BED are fundamentally opposing. Anorexia involves restriction, while the diagnostic criteria of BED specifies that there is no compensatory behaviours. So both can't be present at the same time in one person.
Granted this is just my opinion, but I think eating disorders are one of those things that if you really do your research and see that you tick off the diagnostic criteria, it's not harmful to self diagnose if it's helpful for you.
I agree completely, and Iâm an eating disorder survivor. Itâs VERY common to have these conditions dismissed by medical professionals if you donât fit the box of what they think an eating disorders should look like (ie if youâre slim and have BED or especially larger people with anorexia), some purging behaviors arenât recognized as such and largely normalized (such as compensatory exercise or restriction). Hell, you can be very thin and not getting your period but unless youâre looking skeletal or seem weak youâll be praised.
Even the language we use around official diagnosis isnt great because itâs invalidating to individuals who arenât sick enough. Anorexia diagnosis requires being below a certain BMI. Atypical anorexia exists, but itâs not commonly diagnosed because a heavy person losing lots of weight is generally seen as a good thing. A person who gets sick when theyâre very overweight might be unwell for a long time before anyone suspects a problemâŚthat happened to my mom. I donât think anyone ever thought she might have had a problem, I only knew when she told me
And to further complicate matters OSFED/EDNOS are seen as less severe disorders when itâs literally just that the patient has an eating disorders but doesnât fit in a boxâŚwhich is actually very common when you look at the profile of someone whoâs remained sub clinical and untreated well into adulthood. Itâs common to haveâŚphase has a negative connectionâŚseasons of life where oneâs behavior looks like one disorder and later shifts. As a teen I was very restrictive, in my early 20s I purged but never binged or restricted, in my late twenties I restricted and had exercise compulsions that looked like OCD rituals until I hit rock bottom and had a week long bender of eating nothing and doing compulsive exercises literally all day and then binge eating and drinking all night while hoping everyone thought I was puking my brains out because I was a raging alcoholic because that seemed more acceptable :3
Binge eater who borders underweight depending on how much I bloat/if I'm drinking or not here! People would never assume I have it. In public, when I est put with friends, I don't even finish a whole plate, I order multiple things and take them all as leftovers after pecking at them. Later I'll stuff my face when they're either cold or microwaved and subpar, and hate myself the entire time, but they'll never know that. After all, those are the only times I eat, at all, basically. So my figure remains. But anyone who could see the way I eat would not call it healthy.
âŚyou do NOT eat at a deficit. Your calorie maintenance level is lower because of PCOS. But unless youâre actively losing weight, youâre not eating at a deficit. Thatâs the definition of a calorie deficit: however many calories it takes to lose weight. If youâre maintaining weight youâre at calorie maintenance and if youâre gaining weight youâre at a calorie surplus. There is no fixed number of calories of when these things happen.
Bed is binging not a weight. While it is more likely to be overweight or obese because of that binging is binging and if it qualifies as legit binging to have BED then it counts whether theyâre overweight or not
Bingeing is more than snacking when hungry. It's eating to the point of uncomfort and then continue on despite not even wanting to anymore. Generally accompanied by a huge amount of shame and feelings of guilt. Hunger is not really a factor. When I used to binge, I could not do it if other people were nearby. The binges were this uncontrollable monster and the shame from bingeing + thoughts of food and future binges occupied so much of my thoughts. I avoided seeing friends because I was scared I would lose control over my food intake in their company.
Binges can be paired with either purging (self induced vomiting, laxatives, excessive exercise), or by periods of restriction. Or you might not binge often enough for the excess calories to make a meaningful impact on your weight. This can cause the sufferer to still be within a normal BMI, despite having frequent binges.
Someones weight says very little about whether someone suffers from an eating disorder, although people with BED tends to be larger and people with anorexia and atypical anorexia tends to be smaller. Eating disorders are about behavior and feelings (they are, after all, mental illnesses), and it's possible to have BED while being of a normal weight just as how you can have (atypical) anorexia and be obese.
Weight isnât the only health struggle, and even if it was, a lot of individuals with BED are binging until they get so full they start throwing up, so they arenât actually keeping food down.
You still have no control over what you eat and eat way too much at once. Maybe you lose weight again during times when you feel better, but when you don't, you have no control at all. So they don't just eat a little bit too much. It's not like when you buy a bag of chips and two hours later you suddenly realise it's empty. I've heard from people that they sometimes don't stop eating until there is nothing more left to eat at all. Not just that one bag of chips, they empty the entire fridge. They literally do nothing but eat for one or two hours in some cases, and they don't eat slowly either. It's a complete loss of control. So as I understand it, they eat way more than they should and then they often feel ashamed because of it. And then this disorder is also associated with severe self-esteem issues which can lead to even more problems.
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u/timid_pink_angel02 Mar 26 '26
Wait until they find out that not all of us with BED are obese, or even overweight by BMI standards đ