Fear foods

I generally consider myself to be in recovery from my eating disorder. I am and have always been a pessimist in that eating disorders can be in remission, but very few people who have eating disorders ever 100% recover. Mainly because in my experience, your thinking is never quite the same even if your behavior is perfectly healthy. Part of that is just that even non-disordered people think and act differently around food. They diet, they may skip meals, the overeat, they eat things others would find bizarre.

In my case, I know mentally I am not fully in recovery. I don't purge anymore. I admittedly vomit a lot because of the alcohol, but I actually make an an effort not to and to eat in a way that it happens less. I am actually trying to increase how much and how often I eat.

This has led to me challenging some food fears that I really never tried to conquer. I can convince myself that they are rational, but I know that they started when my eating disorder did and so logically they are ED related. One is my fear of fruit. When I first was diagnosed in college, I went through phases of obsessively counting calories. I didn't own a food scale, so I preferred packaged foods and things with nutrition labels. I wasted money on individual serving packages because it was safer. Fruits and vegetables were not safe because they come in all sizes and varieties. What qualifies as a small apple? Is that calorie count for granny Smith or red delicious? I can remember sitting with a ruler measuring the diameter of a plum.

I loved fruit as a child, but until I went to treatment I basically stopped eating it. Even then I managed to negotiate my evening snack to be a starch and not fruit. And after treatment I slowly eliminated it again. When I relapsed in grad school, I would buy fruit and it would go bad because I couldn't make myself actually eat it. I would nearly panic over the idea of buying apples, so I convinced myself it was practical to never buy fruit. I would eat it if we had it at a family meal or at work because I didn't care about calories. I just couldn't buy it myself. Then there was yogurt. The brand I bought in college (there was so much less variety then) was I think 10 calories less for vanilla than for fruit flavors. I absolutely convinced myself for years that I preferred vanilla. This became true for any brand. I admittedly dislike certain berry ones with seeds, but I ate plenty of flavors before my eating disorder. I was probably irrationally proud the first time I bought and enjoyed a different flavor. I think I texted a friend (who I knew through ED support groups and so knew that I wasn't being weird). I also only bought nonfat.

Well, today at work I ate a whole milk, honey flavored yogurt. I almost didn't buy it, but I fucking love honey with yogurt, and it was amazing. I bought a strawberry quark for another day, and I am definitely going to be buying that brand of full fat (which is only like 5g) yogurt again because the texture was so much better than the stuff I can buy at work. I have been eating fruit. I have been drinking liquid calories like chocolate milk.

I still cling to my disorder. I still follow ED accounts on instagram. I still go to some let's say non recovery oriented websites, but I am having to challenge fears. I am able to eat alone in restaurants, which is important because I don't cook. I am eating what I want and not worrying about it being normal. I just ate rice cakes with mustard, which is probably not a normal combination, but it sounded like something that would taste good and not make me throw up. I am fairly certain I have lost some weight, but I refuse to weigh myself because that is a slippery slope.

Tomorrow I am thinking of buying protein shakes or bars to get more protein and help with the weakness. I am drinking stupid pedialyte (liquid calories) to keep my electrolytes at reasonable levels. And mainly I am eating what I want because not eating just makes things worse. Lately that means a lot of French onion soup from Panera and at work yogurt and fruit and at night popsicles.

I don't know the point of all this.. other than just that I ate a full fat yogurt for the first time in probably years, and it was fucking awesome.. and not many people will understand the significance of it, but some of you might. These fears become so deep and we convince ourselves they're rational (surely the lower fat ones are better for us?) It becomes so hard to remember that this is the eating disorder that has twisted our thinking to defend itself and make us believe it is protecting us, and it is really just preventing us from eating and doing amazing things. I will not get fat off one yogurt, although I probably will only buy it sometimes. It doesn't fucking matter if I know if it's a large or medium apple. It matters that I wasted years convincing myself that I only liked vanilla yogurt and that fruit was a waste of money, when I know as a child I loved strawberry and blackberry and all sorts of yogurt and pineapple and grapes and almost every fruit. It's just odd that it took alcoholism and my stupid stomach to make me actually face this.