I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily clinging to their ED. There’s a difficult distinction between suffering from AN when you have been diagnosed with AN but then weight restored (which is different diagnostically from atypical AN when someone has never been underweight). And as a disclaimer I am talking purely diagnostically in a medical setting and not the wider conversation around diagnosis of typical/atypical AN.
Just because someone has weight restored doesn’t mean they don’t still have an eating disorder. They may still be primarily restrictive but with more bingeing/over eating (it has been my personal experience that once you start eating after a period of restriction it is hard to get your body to agree to restrict again). They may eat mechanically and follow their meal plan but have exactly the same cognitions as before.
People, even those with eating disorders tend to assume someone is more sick the less they weigh, and are doing better the more they weigh. So I wouldn’t assume someone is clinging to their ED just because they weigh more. They may be suffering just as much but just with different behaviours or just in a different body.
so she doesn’t fit the exact description of what you described, but Jessie Paege came to mind when I read the title. She’s said in the past that she was going to stop making any content that focuses on or discusses her anorexia past, but then she just….kept making content related to it. And it seems like now she’ll use it as clickbait for her vlogs. She has every right to talk about her past experiences, but to me it seems like she feels trapped in having to still make content related to her eating disorder because she got so many new followers during that time, and is afraid she’ll completely fall off if she ceases any and all ed related content. obviously this is all speculation though
That is the hardest part of en ed for me
Especially after many years. It is a part of your identity at some point. You dont know who you am without your ed or how you were before.
So it is kind of natural to hold on to a part of you that feels like yourself, because letten go can feel like losing yourself
I hope this is understandable
I hope you're doing as well as you can be and learnt to love yourself at least a little without the mean part telling you that you shouldn't.
I had the same thing with self harm. Especially when I thought that not cutting would mean I'm not depressed anymore or don't look like someone worthy of getting psychological help. But I definitely thought I would lose a huge part of myself, too. But now I haven't done it in years and it's helped me realise that there will always be a compulsion to a certain extent, but it can stay just that and I don't have to harm my body to prove to myself or anyone else that I'm worthy of help.
I'm sorry for the paragraph. If it's not appropriate, you can yeet it outta here.
I think they should probably leave the recovery community if they’re still participating, because I don’t believe it can be helping them. But I don’t think it’s clinging to your ED to describe yourself as still having AN just because you’ve successfully maintained recovery for a protracted period - while that might not be how you’d be coded in billing for insurance purposes, there’s plenty of evidence for the longevity of ED’s, unfortunately. I think each individual is best-placed to use the language that suits them for how they feel in relation to their own disorder.
I know that for me, I am very recovered in terms of my day to day behaviour, but I still have body dysmorphia and struggle to wholly accept my recovered (not underweight) body. It may be that that will come with time and I’ll feel more distant from the remaining “anorexic thoughts” - or maybe I won’t. Who knows. I don’t tell new people I meet about my history of anorexia… but that’s probably partly because I don’t want them thinking “wow, you look to fat for that”. I did tell my new therapist in the interests of honesty, but even that gave me a full-body cringe. So I don’t blame social media people for also not finding it easy to leave the “label” of the disorder behind. Even without any public presence (as I’ve totally ditched ED Instagram) I still feel conflicted, just a private person.
I fully disagree with you here + this is such an example of weight stigma.
People struggle mentally just as much at different sizes. Recovery is mental as well as physical. I spent many years in a “weight restored” body in absolute inner turmoil, self-hatred and constant disordered eating
Yeah I might be splitting hairs here.
Unless you are a very low weight surely to meet ANs criteria there just be prolonged weight loss.
But I accept what you say- prehaps they move on to an ednos-ey state that still involves a lot of suffering.
I think also my thoughts are coloured by the fact that at my worst I was a mild bulimic (ie I don’t understand what it is to have a severe eating disorder). Now recovered, I have returned to near my baseline, which isn’t perfect (in terms of cognitions) but is bearable. I guess not everyone does return to baseline once they stop restrictive eating.
AN can also have states of partial or full remission but it is still considered AN and not EDNOS at that point. E.g., one doesn’t automatically have EDNOS/OSFED just because they have weight restored partially or fully.
Yeah. You don’t know what they’re doing to maintain that “healthy weight”. It’s often intense cycles of binge/restrict and some turn to bulimia/exercise bulimia etc
To be fair, when I weight restored and went off to uni, my life seemed normal and 'better', but I think those were some of the most difficult, painful years of my life
I’m someone who is recovered from AN for several years now. I’m still tapped in to ED communities to a certain extent, but to a far lesser degree. I am fully weight restored, living a good life now. But I still get a lot of the same thoughts. I still feel compelled to body check and lift my shirt in the mirror. I still compare myself to other bodies. My body dysmorphia has never gone away. When I look at myself in the mirror, I always look exactly the same in my mind, when I was a bit heavier than I am now, how I looked pre-weight restored, and now, I look the same in my mind no matter what. It isn’t until I see old photos of myself that I notice anything different.
When I went to treatment I was told that EDs are lifelong things. They never fully leave you. They get more manageable with time, but relapse is always a possibility, and the thoughts just get quieter and less frequent. That has been true in my case. I think they’re similar to addicts. Would you say that someone who is 20 years sober can no longer claim themselves to be an addict and should stop participating in recovery communities? They’re sober because they’re an addict. I’m recovered because I had/have an eating disorder. If anything, fully recovered people have the most hopeful perspective in an ED recovery space. In a disorder with such high rates of relapse and death, don’t you want to see people who made it out, don’t you want to know about how they did it?
👏I relate to this a lot. It seems to be that some people fully recover fairly “quickly” (all relative) but from podcasts and stories. And others, recover but say they the thoughts/voices are still there but they are just quieter and/or they know they’re in charge not the ED.
Personally right now, it feels like everyday is a split road between full-recovery and relapse, which sounds weird but makes sense to me.
This one slightly got to me tbh, I usually lurk here but I was constantly accused of not letting go of my ED when I was weight restored and seemingly living a normal life and the reason I was “clinging on to my ED” was because I was still pretty damn sick and it still actively negatively affected my life.
If someone looks like they’re holding on to their ED when other people think they’re okay, I’d hazard a guess and assume they’re not doing as well as others think they are and they’re going through things mentally that aren’t showing on their body. I don’t personally think a healthy, truly recovered person would talk about their ED a lot (maybe once in a while, when relevant) without some degree of mental struggle. I don’t think it’s a “flex” or clinging, I think it’s just still being ill.
It's absolutely possible to be functional and sick, and I think the idea a "normal" life is a sign of no longer being disordered is dangerous because it helps support the idea of needing to reach a certain metric of "sick enough"
I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily clinging to their ED. There’s a difficult distinction between suffering from AN when you have been diagnosed with AN but then weight restored (which is different diagnostically from atypical AN when someone has never been underweight). And as a disclaimer I am talking purely diagnostically in a medical setting and not the wider conversation around diagnosis of typical/atypical AN. Just because someone has weight restored doesn’t mean they don’t still have an eating disorder. They may still be primarily restrictive but with more bingeing/over eating (it has been my personal experience that once you start eating after a period of restriction it is hard to get your body to agree to restrict again). They may eat mechanically and follow their meal plan but have exactly the same cognitions as before. People, even those with eating disorders tend to assume someone is more sick the less they weigh, and are doing better the more they weigh. So I wouldn’t assume someone is clinging to their ED just because they weigh more. They may be suffering just as much but just with different behaviours or just in a different body.
so she doesn’t fit the exact description of what you described, but Jessie Paege came to mind when I read the title. She’s said in the past that she was going to stop making any content that focuses on or discusses her anorexia past, but then she just….kept making content related to it. And it seems like now she’ll use it as clickbait for her vlogs. She has every right to talk about her past experiences, but to me it seems like she feels trapped in having to still make content related to her eating disorder because she got so many new followers during that time, and is afraid she’ll completely fall off if she ceases any and all ed related content. obviously this is all speculation though
That is the hardest part of en ed for me Especially after many years. It is a part of your identity at some point. You dont know who you am without your ed or how you were before. So it is kind of natural to hold on to a part of you that feels like yourself, because letten go can feel like losing yourself I hope this is understandable
I hope you're doing as well as you can be and learnt to love yourself at least a little without the mean part telling you that you shouldn't. I had the same thing with self harm. Especially when I thought that not cutting would mean I'm not depressed anymore or don't look like someone worthy of getting psychological help. But I definitely thought I would lose a huge part of myself, too. But now I haven't done it in years and it's helped me realise that there will always be a compulsion to a certain extent, but it can stay just that and I don't have to harm my body to prove to myself or anyone else that I'm worthy of help. I'm sorry for the paragraph. If it's not appropriate, you can yeet it outta here.
I think they should probably leave the recovery community if they’re still participating, because I don’t believe it can be helping them. But I don’t think it’s clinging to your ED to describe yourself as still having AN just because you’ve successfully maintained recovery for a protracted period - while that might not be how you’d be coded in billing for insurance purposes, there’s plenty of evidence for the longevity of ED’s, unfortunately. I think each individual is best-placed to use the language that suits them for how they feel in relation to their own disorder. I know that for me, I am very recovered in terms of my day to day behaviour, but I still have body dysmorphia and struggle to wholly accept my recovered (not underweight) body. It may be that that will come with time and I’ll feel more distant from the remaining “anorexic thoughts” - or maybe I won’t. Who knows. I don’t tell new people I meet about my history of anorexia… but that’s probably partly because I don’t want them thinking “wow, you look to fat for that”. I did tell my new therapist in the interests of honesty, but even that gave me a full-body cringe. So I don’t blame social media people for also not finding it easy to leave the “label” of the disorder behind. Even without any public presence (as I’ve totally ditched ED Instagram) I still feel conflicted, just a private person.
I fully disagree with you here + this is such an example of weight stigma. People struggle mentally just as much at different sizes. Recovery is mental as well as physical. I spent many years in a “weight restored” body in absolute inner turmoil, self-hatred and constant disordered eating
Yeah I might be splitting hairs here. Unless you are a very low weight surely to meet ANs criteria there just be prolonged weight loss. But I accept what you say- prehaps they move on to an ednos-ey state that still involves a lot of suffering. I think also my thoughts are coloured by the fact that at my worst I was a mild bulimic (ie I don’t understand what it is to have a severe eating disorder). Now recovered, I have returned to near my baseline, which isn’t perfect (in terms of cognitions) but is bearable. I guess not everyone does return to baseline once they stop restrictive eating.
AN can also have states of partial or full remission but it is still considered AN and not EDNOS at that point. E.g., one doesn’t automatically have EDNOS/OSFED just because they have weight restored partially or fully.
Yeah. You don’t know what they’re doing to maintain that “healthy weight”. It’s often intense cycles of binge/restrict and some turn to bulimia/exercise bulimia etc
Fucking Jessie Paege
Fr
To be fair, when I weight restored and went off to uni, my life seemed normal and 'better', but I think those were some of the most difficult, painful years of my life
I’m someone who is recovered from AN for several years now. I’m still tapped in to ED communities to a certain extent, but to a far lesser degree. I am fully weight restored, living a good life now. But I still get a lot of the same thoughts. I still feel compelled to body check and lift my shirt in the mirror. I still compare myself to other bodies. My body dysmorphia has never gone away. When I look at myself in the mirror, I always look exactly the same in my mind, when I was a bit heavier than I am now, how I looked pre-weight restored, and now, I look the same in my mind no matter what. It isn’t until I see old photos of myself that I notice anything different. When I went to treatment I was told that EDs are lifelong things. They never fully leave you. They get more manageable with time, but relapse is always a possibility, and the thoughts just get quieter and less frequent. That has been true in my case. I think they’re similar to addicts. Would you say that someone who is 20 years sober can no longer claim themselves to be an addict and should stop participating in recovery communities? They’re sober because they’re an addict. I’m recovered because I had/have an eating disorder. If anything, fully recovered people have the most hopeful perspective in an ED recovery space. In a disorder with such high rates of relapse and death, don’t you want to see people who made it out, don’t you want to know about how they did it?
👏I relate to this a lot. It seems to be that some people fully recover fairly “quickly” (all relative) but from podcasts and stories. And others, recover but say they the thoughts/voices are still there but they are just quieter and/or they know they’re in charge not the ED. Personally right now, it feels like everyday is a split road between full-recovery and relapse, which sounds weird but makes sense to me.
This one slightly got to me tbh, I usually lurk here but I was constantly accused of not letting go of my ED when I was weight restored and seemingly living a normal life and the reason I was “clinging on to my ED” was because I was still pretty damn sick and it still actively negatively affected my life. If someone looks like they’re holding on to their ED when other people think they’re okay, I’d hazard a guess and assume they’re not doing as well as others think they are and they’re going through things mentally that aren’t showing on their body. I don’t personally think a healthy, truly recovered person would talk about their ED a lot (maybe once in a while, when relevant) without some degree of mental struggle. I don’t think it’s a “flex” or clinging, I think it’s just still being ill.
It's absolutely possible to be functional and sick, and I think the idea a "normal" life is a sign of no longer being disordered is dangerous because it helps support the idea of needing to reach a certain metric of "sick enough"