Question:

I`m 31 years old and have been on diets most of my life – in fact, for the past 20 years… Unhealthy fad diets and all kinds of meal replacements. I`ve been on healthy programmes too, but almost always get desperate and then resort to starvation diets. All this abuse has finally caught up with me though, and now I desperately seek a way to fix my body.

In the past two years, I`ve gone from 78kg down to 58kg by starvation. Guess you could classify me as a typical EDNOS (eating disorders not otherwise specified)- I excercised and became completely malnourished and eventually my body almost gave in. I couldn`t keep it up, so tried eating healthily again…upon which the weight just piled on endlessly of course. I rebounded back to 74kg, and despite my best efforts to eat “normally” and still exercise, I am now stuck at 82kg. I just want to CRY and the idea of starving again so I can just get the weight off again, seems so tempting…

Yet I WANT to be healthy, and I accepted the fact that the rebounding after the starvation is all part of the healing process. But I`m feeling so lost and so desperate, I want to fix my body and stop gaining, I want to lose weight again in a slow, healthy manner and get to a sustainable normal weight. Unfortunately, it seems that I just can`t reverse the effects of starvation, that I upset the balance in my own body to such an extent that it will never ever be normal again… I`ve googled my problem but cannot seem to find the answer – perhaps the damage I have done to my body is simply irreversable… PLEASE HELP ME!

Answer:

This question has been forwarded by Healthy Weight Center:

In addition to the Healthy Weight Center offering input, your realization has some truth in it. The body is genetically programmed to defend weight gain, a fact of evolution, more than current need for thinness to conform to individual or social demand. The body can get fooled only so much by radical weight loss, then it will regroup and program to defend weight gain trying to save your life. It doesn’t care if you are living in 2010 or year 210, it wants you to be alive and will do all it can to save you.

Moving to a clear meal plan that allows for three contained meals a day plus 2 snacks, perhaps developed with a good nutritionist, and with NEEDED movement that helps build your metabolic fire and keep it burning well, will develop trust over time in your body. Then if it needs to let go of unneeded fat, only if it experiences that it is getting all foods by the hour it needs, will it allow itself to “borrow a cup of lipid” and let go of unnecessary fat.

For more information:

Go to the Eating Disorders health topic.