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It’s been almost a week since I began recovering from my starvation and so far, so good. I have more energy during my gym visits and even getting around town.I was interviewed by national press. And my social life is slowly rekindling.
On Saturday I held a barbecue – celebrating my birthday a month and a half late, and finally getting to hang out with friends while breaking bread. My good friend Jim brought some delicious steaks but, while the host of a barbecue is usually the one who does the cooking, my priorities haven’t shifted all the way ‘back to normal’ and I overlooked that. Even though I’m eating again, I just don’t think about food much.
Well, that and the 3 glasses of wine I had over the course of 5 hours had me pretty looped.
So guests were tossing patties and smokies onto the barbie, then forgetting about them. There was a lot of burned meat that day, which meant most people ended up eating chips or veggies. As barbecues go it was pretty lame, but the company was nice. And my good friend Jim brought over some cold smoked, spiced steaks that were amazing.
The author back up to 186 lbs.
My body no longer needs to burn through water at an alarming rate to metabolize fat and tissue to keep me alive. Just as my metabolism is still in ‘starvation mode’ even though I’m eating, it remembers this recent high demand for water, and as such stores a lot of it ‘just in case’ I go back into ketosis and it needs liquid to metabolize fat yet again. So in 6 days I’ve gained 10 lbs.
This is the ‘echo’ weight gain seen by many who go from eating almost nothing to eating again, and by those who switch from low-carb diets to regular eating. Some people panic, thinking they’re really packing on the pounds.
Think of it this way though: to gain a pound of body fat requires eating about 3,500 Calories. For me to gain 10 lbs in 6 days would require eating 35,000 Calories, or about 70 KFC Double Downs. Not counting the extras I’d have to eat to compensate from all the throwing up I’d be doing from the attempt to eat that much that fast.
“Body weight”, wrote Kristie Leong M.D. “can vary by as much as five pounds from day to day based on fluid and salt intake and the amount of food still being processed by the digestive system … particularly if you ate foods high in sodium and haven’t had a recent bowel movement.
“Even if you overindulged a bit, it’s unlikely you’ll experience a significant increase in true body weight overnight. Real weight gain is a more gradual process.”
Rather than freak out about this extra water weight, I’m fairly ambivalent about it. Even though I’d only dropped to 177 lbs, one of my friends wrote about me saying “…he looks like a ghost of the man he was. His face looks hollow and gaunt, like so much of his life has gone out of him. there’s no energy there to keep the light going behind his eyes.” Not very flattering, but it puts things into perspective. Regaining 10 lbs back, even water weight, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Still, the day after the barbecue I was sitting at home, alone, watching a movie (Moon – which deals with a man slowly going insane from social isolation. What a crazy random happenstance!) when it occurred to me that I’d only eaten about 300 calories that day.
Was it bad planning? Was it a subconscious rebellion against this 10 lb weight gain? Was it just because not eating has become a habit? I don’t know. To remedy the situation I had some green beans, turkey, a bun, and a bit of chocolate.
Forcing yourself to eat is almost as difficult as forcing yourself to not eat.
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5 Comments
“Even though I’m eating again, I just don’t think much about food.”
Really? Because that’s all you just wrote about. I know I know, the point of the blog…
As I have an eating disorder myself this has been interesting for me to read. I see some people are upset because they think you’re downplaying the seriousness of eating disorders, trying to say they’re just a “diet gone too far.” Many of these people are the same people working so hard to have EDs recognized as “serious brain disorders” and not just some phase a girl goes through because she wants to be skinny like Nicole Richie. Valid point, but I think the psychological manifestations of starvation you experienced (depression, social isolation, preoccupation with food, etc.) should be evidence in their favor– that even a person with no history of an eating disorder such as yourself can and will experience these things when deprived of food. Hello Keyes starvation study! “These people” are the very people who say EDs can be cured simply by eating (“therapy is useless until you are weight restored,” they say) because the symptoms of the ED are merely a symptom of the brain being starved. Dare say there were any social or cultural factors that played into the development of the ED and they will never shut up about how this is NOT ABOUT THE MODELS!! Apparently admitting that you could at all be influenced by someone on tv is cheapening the disorder. I’ll admit I like to think I’m above all that but I to say I’m not at all affected by the constant talk of who weighs what on the cover of every magazine I see, well that would be inaccurate. Whether I want it to affect me or not, it does. This is not the same as saying, “I have an eating disorder because I want to look like . If that was true many more people would have eating disorders.
I am interested to see how you “recover” from all of this. I wonder if your self image will forever be tainted from this experience. Will you ever look at yourself, or your food, in the same way?
Also, if you are interested in reading more about “these people” I spoke of above, perhaps you want to check out this blog– http://eatingwithyouranorexic.blogspot.com/. The blogger is kind of the leader of the crazy black and white thinking about EDs and effective treatment (“EDs are serious illnesses caused/cured only by food but mention the media/bad parenting and I’ll kill you”). And hey, she gave you a (not so nice) shout out!
Her reaction is something I noticed specifically from one segment of the anorexia/bulimia crowd. Because they have a specific disorder brought on by a specific experience, they think EVERYTHING called an eating disorder must meet that definition or it doesn’t count. Obesity? Nope. Comfort eating? Forget it.
The weird thing is on one forum they were saying “eating disorders aren’t caused by dieting, no matter how extreme!” then, in the same paragraph, “you’re a guy – you can never understand what it’s like to have people constantly telling you you’re 20 lbs. overweight”.
Setting aside the data that shows men are under just as much pressure to look good as women are these days, there’s still the dichotomy. If no eating disorders start with a desire to lose weight, what would it matter if people told someone she needed to drop 20 lbs or not? Either she had the mental imbalance that caused the ED, as some claim is the sole cause, or there were environmental factors including dieting which lead to a mental desire to keep going beyond the original goal and into unhealthy territory.
Even as someone who started starvation with a finite timeline and knowing what I was doing and why, I experienced disappointment when I didn’t continually lose weight throughout the process. I looked gross, I felt worse, but I still wanted that control.
I checked out the comments on the blog you linked to, and saw something I see on every blog and forum criticizing this project. The phrase “I haven’t read his site, but…”
…and yet how would they respond if someone wrote “I haven’t read about anorexia, but…”
ah, rereading that comment I realize it is a bit everywhere. Maybe my brain is just… starved. Bottom line is, I wish we could all just agree that eating disorders are a result of numerous factors that are individual for everyone. They are not simply a result of too much exposure to thin celebrities or bad parents nor are they purely biological “brain disorders” (still waiting for this one to be explained/for my brain transplant to be approved, ha) that can be cured with food alone.
oh, I wrote that last comment before I saw your response, but yes, exactly. People are so quick to shoot down any explanation that does not match their personal experience or what they want to believe things are all about.
Can I add my thoughts here. I think that D’arcy is going to be changed forever by doing this ‘project’. As someone who recovered from anorexia, although I don’t have it anymore I am still very aware of calories and what I’m eating. When all you do is think about food and how many calories it contains every single day it becomes imprinted on your mind.
Slice of bread? 100
Banana? 150
Apple? 80
Bowl of Pasta? 300
Bottle of Bud? 180
You can never forget it. The trick is to try and not look at backs of packets, to eat when your stomach says eat and to rebalance blood sugars when its low. I went through a big gorge session in recovery – and water weight was a massive issue. I’ll be interested to see how D’arcy does…