I’m going to write about something I have avoided to blog about for over six months. If you don’t want to read I understand, because God knows I scroll as soon as someone mentions the word weightloss. This isn’t about ‘life style changes’ (I hate that fucking expression) and counting calories, though. It’s about being so depressed that “if I eat that food today I’ll have nothing cooked tomorrow and cooking is too hard” makes perfect sense.

I’m ashamed of it. I try to blame it on new meds. I try to say I eat pretty well. Here’s a secret: I don’t. Some weeks I live entirely on sandwiches or chips or apples. Other weeks I cook maybe once, and eat that stuff for that whole week. Sometimes I go over to my parents house on weekends, just so that someone will cook for me and I won’t have to use all my spoons to make a simple meal. They always send me home with leftovers. Sometimes they last for days.

This is not me losing weight on purpose. This is me living extremely unhealthily. This is me losing 32 kilos (and counting) by eating chips instead of vegetables, and toast instead of fruit. This is me feeling that I’m doing good if I cook more than once in a week.

People have started asking me if I eat, what I weigh, if I’ve lost weight. Not in a good way. In that way they had, back in high school, when I had an eating disorder and a mystery illness and was too weak to sit up by the dinner table and had to suck on sugar cubes just keep from collapsing in class.

I used to weigh 100 kilos and run and eat perfectly healthily. I used to rant and rage about idiot people in my blog on fat acceptance and health at every size. My last run was in May 2012. My last post in that blog was in August 2012.

Technically speaking, I’m of a ‘normal’ weight now. On the upper half of normal even, if we speak BMI. BMI is utter bullshit, though, BMI is the least thing you should look at for health. It doesn’t count muscles vs fat ratio, it doesn’t care if parts of that fat is because you have an awesome rack (I don’t, by the way), it doesn’t do any of those things. It was construed in an attempt to figure out the ‘average man’, ranging from the average length of his arm to the age he would get married. BMI is arbitrary. But should someone ask, this is what being of ‘normal weight’, of the elusive 22 on that stupid scale, feels like. I’d rather be able to have dinner without having to lie down afterwards because eating sitting up takes all my strength, but hey.

I’m trying to decide if writing this is oversharing. If I’m right back where I started, if what I’m writing now is no different than the way too personal stuff that’s in all those posts I just set to private in an attempt to start over. Maybe I am. But this, my friends, is where I’ve been the last six months. Knowing that it’s unhealthy, that it isn’t good for me, that I’m letting down my HAES-friends, and everyone who reads that other blog of mine. Turning this over and over in my head, staring at the screen, trying not to write about it because I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. To think I’m losing weight on purpose.

The worst part is probably that a small part of me, the one with the eating disorder, the one that thinks it’s an accomplishment to look like this, likes being below 70. I do my best to silence her, because it’s nothing but proof that eating disorders are forever, that the thoughts are forever burned into your brain, but sometimes it’s hard. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Fuck her, though. Fuck her, fuck the depression, fuck the anxiety and the doctor who says my bloodwork is fine and I’m healthy and shouldn’t feel this way. This is where I try. Try and fail, probably, but trying all the same. Today I fought the “but I’ll have to cook tomorrow if I eat it now” voice. I had both lunch and dinner. I did the dishes. I read a book. I went for a ridiculously short walk. Last week the streak of making things right lasted two days. Let’s make it three this week, shall we?

And please, please, please don’t see this as me advocating, condoning or otherwise saying yay to unhealthy weightloss or any weightloss whatsoever. I don’t. Dieting is evil. Most (healthy) ways to lose weight aren’t successful. Those that are, will probably not stick around. I still believe all those things. And maybe one day I’ll eat like I used to, and go for runs, and blog about how fucked up these skinny ideals are. Maybe I’ll be fat again, then. (Fat is a neutral word, people. I put no emphasis, positive or negative, on it.) Who the hell knows.

I’m going to hit ‘publish’ now. I hope I won’t regret it later.