Just another binging newbie..

I have NO idea if weight gain is necessary for you. I don’t know if ‘warming foods’ can regulate your body’s hormones. I suspect that in order for you to really recover and move on to live a life that isnt restrained by food neuroticism, you are going to need to gain weight. But maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. What I do know is necessary is for you to let go of the outcome in terms of a number of pounds, up or down. If you are looking for certainties (what MUST I do in order to recover and put this behind me?) then there is your number one certainty. Cling to that, and not to a physical outcome or goal.

Aiming for ‘balance’ is fine for the masses Cassidy, but really that advice is not intended for you no more than someone with a peanut allergy should take a balanced approach to their peanut intake. (Besides, in our current environment ‘balance’ is often code word for diet/exercise; even weight watchers, which is unequivocally a starvation diet, likes the word balanced.) You’ve got a restrictive eating disorder. Its quite likely that the pendulum will need to swing back in the other direction. You’re not likely to ever be ‘normal’ again and that’s okay if ‘normal’ means being on a diet sometimes and other times not (Which is what most of my ‘normal’ friends experience), or if it means you are an asshole (sorry) about eating ‘clean’ foods. Your new, improved normal should be, after some time and a concerted effort at total acceptance, a striving for living fully and enjoying life, with the numerical expression of your body’s gravitational force upon the earth retaining its proper place in your life (ie no relevance to anything whatsoever).

If you like numbers, find something else to count. Count $, be a financial analyst or something. I went through a period where I channeled my obsessiveness into the local animal shelter where I worked for a while. I found out that their inventory system was a mess and I took to organizing it-making sure every animal was entered, in its proper place, with an identifying photo. I took this on as an extra-curricular project. These days I manage project budgets as an engineer. These tasks put my counting brain to a beneficial use. I don’t count my calories anymore. I can’t tell you I don’t think about them because I burned calorie contents into my head with a poisonous fire for many years, but I no longer keep a tally. Its possible. You also need to ditch the scale if you havent done so already. But that goes without saying if you are on board with what I said at the start of this reply. I’ll say it again: you cannot treat your body like a spreadsheet or a system to be analyzed and optimized.