What I don't understand though from a science point of view is how is it possible to not lose any weight or to gain weight when you are in a caloric deficit?
The thing is, if you're gaining, you're not in a deficit. You may be consuming a pitifully small and dangerously inadequate amount of food, but your body is burning even less than that in an attempt to survive. I kept thinking the answer to that was to eat even less, but the answer was to eat more and let my body feel safe to burn more. At the height of my restriction, I would gain on typical "diet" calorie recommendations. Now, after years of adequate fuel, I need 2-3 times that to keep from losing. So, it was about eating enough to let my metabolism and hormones recover. Then I began to gradually lose on significantly more food. Your natural weight is where you settle when you eat without restriction. For me that was quite a bit higher than when I was anorexic, but also quite a bit lower than the initial recovery weight I feared I'd be stuck at forever.
Totally agree with Skwigg that the "magic" seems to happen after a long time at maintenance. When I had hypothalamic amenorrhea I was forced to eat a maintenance and chill on the exercise front to get my fertility back and "heal my metabolism". It definitely took at least 2 years for me to be "healed". And during that time I was a higher weight than I was comfortable with, but which really wasn't high at all. I'm 5'4" and those two years of recovery I fluctuated between 130 and 140lbs. Not at all huge, but higher weights than I felt comfortable with. But then the "magic" happened and, like Skwigg, I found myself able to eat more than I ever had or could during those years of restriction. And a word of caution, you can mess everything up again. I have after each one of my pregnancies and it's taken me at least a year to fix the (physical) issues again. The mental side is just as hard.
I'm currently on your old journal in my reposting adventures, so you'll probably see some really familiar posts. :-)
I just read this one but wasn't sure where to put it. The part about time passing. How long did you do the adequate fueling, higher weight range, and eating above maintenance? For me, it was about 18 months to two years of being at a higher weight and not restricting my food before my body and metabolism came around.
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I too can relate to the "gaining weight, not ok, can't lose, nothing works, clearly broken" stage of recovery. I gained 40 pounds coming out of my most disordered eating. There was nothing happy or intuitive about it. It was blind panic, and all my attempts to regain control only seemed to make things worse. Instead of there being a clear dietary fix to it that I hadn't found yet, it seemed to be mostly a matter of time passing, time in a higher weight range, time with adequate food intake. When my body was no longer in crisis mode, it started letting go of weight again, small adjustments worked again, but drastic measures continued to blow up in my face. I kept thinking, surely it will work this time, but no low-cal, restrictive, clean, cleanse, challenge thing ever worked for long. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to make my weight go up right now, any one of those would be the fastest way there. They all trip my survival mechanisms, slow digestion, decrease body temperature, increase food obsession, and reduce spontaneous movement.
Ha I remember this. This was my question.... It's funny, I am still struggling with this same concept. I haven't updated my journal for a while because I just feel like I'm going over old ground but I still feel like this is all well and good but doesn't apply to me! Like my body is too broken.... Still struggling with TRUSTING my hunger, how to feed myself, acceptance of where my body weight may naturally lie. And still gaining/not losing on what I feel is a pretty modest amount of food. Thing is, I did the adequate fueling/eating probably above maintenance but it doesn't seem to have made any difference to healing my metabolism. It's frustrating beyond words. That's why I was asking about reverse dieting the other day.