Potential trigger warning: this post contains numbers as related to calories and may contain description of my own personal diet. This is not intended to be followed, and any individual should discuss with their doctor to determine what works best for their body. I am not a dietitian, psychiatrist, or any of the sort, just talk about my own personal experience in my anorexia recovery journey in hopes of helping others.
According to EDinstitute.org, extreme hunger is a common experience for almost everyone recovering from any kind of eating disorder. During this time, you may want and will need far more than the Homodynamic Recovery Method intake guidelines suggest, and find yourself consuming anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 calories in a single day.
Before I was released from the hospital, I made a promise to my doctors that if they discharged me, I would stick to any meal plan they gave me at home.
The numbers at the time scared me. I was still severely underweight and had to gain a significant amount to be in a safe, normal weight range for my height.
Although the numbers given to me scared me, my doctors encouraged me not to focus on the numbers, not to focus on the long-term in terms of how far I still had to go, but to take it day by day. My doctors had also told me that the more I ate, the more my body would start to trust me again, and I would actually become hungrier. My hunger cues would return, but I wasn't yet at the point where I could only rely on my hunger cues. Sometimes I would have to eat when I wasn't hungry, trusting that my body needed the fuel to repair and rebuild the damage that had been done.
My doctors never told me about extreme hunger.
That would be something I would learn first-hand, on my own, with no one to explain what was happening to me.
The first time I heard my stomach growl outside of the hospital, I cried.
I was scared of my hunger cues. I was scared to feel hungry, after becoming comfortable with feeling empty for so long.
My stomach growled almost immediately after my mom and I had finished breakfast.
She had plated my food for me, as we were at our hotel breakfast buffet, and she knew full well if I was left to decide for myself, the choice of what I should have to eat would paralyze me with anxiety.
She had plated my meal like the doctors had instructed her: a carb, a fat, and a protein, what they say every meal should look like. Plus, I needed a little extra in order to ensure I would gain during the week.
I was having problems with feeling overly full, because I was just starting to eat normally without my feeding tube, so eating a full meal and everything on my plate was extremely uncomfortable and unsettling for me.
It felt like so. much. food.
But, it wasn't.
This was how people ate breakfast everyday.
But coming out of such a prolonged period of restriction, I had to work up to being able to eat normal meals again.
In my lowest periods of restriction, I would sometimes eat as low as under 600 calories a day, and not replenish calories burned from my workout.
My doctors wouldn't give me the number of calories I was expected to eat for fear that it would scare me. Instead they told me I would be able to eyeball it and know if a component was missing, I should add it to my plate for a more complete meal.
Almost immediately when I started eating full meals again and had access to food that wasn't hospital food, my hunger was ravenous.
I still thought about food all of the time, I worried about what I was expected to eat next and when, and I thought about the foods I was afraid to eat, and those I called my "uncompromisables" the food I wouldn't even dare challenge myself to, it was just a no.
I started waking up in the middle of the night hungry.
At the time, having heard nothing about extreme hunger, I was really worried that after severe restriction, my body might swing to the other extreme and start bingeing. For me, this didn't seem too illogical, considering some of these foods have been "banned" from my diet for almost five years! Now I was expected to eat it, encouraged even!
But, I would wake up in the middle of the night anywhere from midnight to 2 a.m. hungry, but with a very specific craving. For the most part, I always wanted peanut butter sandwiches.
I could wake up in the middle of the night, have a sandwich, go rest my head on the pillow, and I'd be hungry again!
I would look at my stomach as if to scorn it, "you just had one!" I whispered.
In the beginning of my recovery I would pace back and forth next to my bed, maybe go get some water, and hope the feeling would pass.
I would not become overweight, I thought. I couldn't believe this was happening to me.
After being unable to fall back asleep for an hour, I would have one, even two more sandwiches until I felt satisfied enough to go to sleep.
In the morning I would wake up starving!
I couldn't wait to go down to breakfast.
I felt like my body was betraying my mind.
These were foods I had been scared of just three weeks prior, and now my body could demand five peanut butter sandwiches in one sitting.
Mealtime still gave me immense anxiety, I was still scared to eat, but now my body had the hunger cues. It was asking to be fed, and I seemingly had no option but to give in.
Extreme hunger can provoke more anxiety for the person experiencing it, because a lot of doctors and therapists, even friends I have encountered didn't understand or had never heard the term before!
At the time I had thought they had never heard the term, because maybe I had made it up or something of the sort, but, they had most likely never heard of it because they themselves haven't experienced an eating disorder or had known someone who had.
I've had people tell me that I was binging, that I was compulsively eating, sleep eating, etc. This had really upset me, because I had vocalized that this had been such a big fear of mine. But the way that I ruled out binging or compulsive eating, and all that, is because with binging, you feel as if you have no control over the amount of food you are taking in and it is a short period of time. I always tried to be very mindful, especially when extreme hunger was particularly rampant. I would ask myself 'what is it that I feel like I need/want right now?' 'how would this nourish me?'
For example, during my period of extreme hunger, which lasted probably three-four months, I mainly wanted peanut butter sandwiches. During my periods of restriction, I had completely eliminated fats from my diet, and rarely, if ever consumed bread.
As my doctor explained, fat is necessary for cell growth and for energy, and our brain is made up of fat. So, it only made sense that I was craving what my body needed for repair, having been without fats for so so long.
I had read up a lot about extreme hunger, and I tried my best to explain to my family what it was and what I was experiencing. My family was really supportive, I think they were just so happy to see me eating properly again. I told my mom, mainly, too, because sometimes, as much as I tried to embrace and accept what was happening, it was exhausting.
She would encourage me to try eating more calorie-dense foods, so I wouldn't feel the need to take in a high volume, which scared me- the sheer quantity. However, it didn't seem to help. Sometimes after a day the scale would read a larger number, or my hunger cues just wouldn't rest, I would feel emotionally and physically exhausted, and need someone to talk me through.
I didn't share with everyone what I was experiencing, because as I mentioned, a lot of people who have never experienced eating disorders are not familiar with it. I felt embarrassed by the quantity of food I had to eat, but I knew it was essential for my recovery. My organs were showing signs of shutting down, and had begun to feed off of themselves I had been restricting for so long, so my body desperately craved these nutrients and in large quantities!
During this time, I mainly surrounded myself with my family and made my primary focus my recovery and getting to the weight I needed to be at.
I'm not trying to say that the process is easy- it most certainly is not. But, I put into practice some tips that made it a little bit easier for me.
- If you have been in a period of restriction for a long period of time, accept that extreme hunger is extremely possible for your body. Try to ask yourself what it is your body needs, or what it is you might want to nourish yourself [trying to throw away any previous food rules you might have followed].
- Understand that if you had lost a significant amount of weight, it will come back. This is not a bad thing and do not be scared of this. You are not gaining weight, necessarily. This is your body trying to get back to its natural, healthy state, where you can function best.
- Keeping that in mind, if your doctors/therapist, etc. needs to weigh you- don't look! Cover your eyes, step on the scale backwards, and don't be afraid to let them know not to talk numbers. You. are. not. a number. And there is no number goal in recovery. The numbers are for the doctors to worry about, not you. They will let you know when you're in a healthy range and if you start to slip below that.
- A big thing for me during recovery was having restricted for so long, and loving shopping like I do, I had bought a lot of clothes that were not my normal size. When I started getting healthy again, these clothes no longer fit. Like I said above, know that this was never your size. This was never the healthy size you were intended to be. If knowing these clothes no longer fit will upset you, don't try them on, simply toss them into a donate pile, and don't give them a second thought.
- Explain to a few people close to you what it is you're going through so they'll be better able to understand and to help you when you hit rough patches.
- Do not compare what you're eating to what the people around you are eating. You are in recovery. Your body requires more than someone whose body has not experienced damage.
- Understand that the period of extreme hunger will not last forever, that it is temporary while your body rebuilds may help to reduce the anxiety you feel. It does not last forever. Your hunger cues will go back to normal.
