Wow, I had to read the "Inner experience in bulimia nervosa" several times!

"However, more striking than that is our observation that the inner experience of all 24 (of the 24 bulimic women whose experience we have explored) is characterized by fragmented multiplicity."

I thought everyone experienced this?

There have been times that I have been purging, started thinking about the consequences and at the same time wondering if my eyeliner is waterproof.

I just attributed the fragmented multiplicity to anxiety.

I tell my therapist, i'm anxious, it's hard to focus and concentrate, but I i've never mentioned this.

GREAT article on refeeding. I knew that suicidal tendencies were a known hazard of anorexia, but I had no idea that they were also a potential side-effect of refeeding. This explains a lot, and helps me put things in perspective.

Sometimes (a majority of the time, really) it truly feels like recovery might kills me. Anorexia never did. Recovery then feels like the true enemy. I have had (am having) severe mental side effects from refeeding and gaining weight and am struggling in ways I never did in the past while engaging in my ed, or in ways I did struggle with but never to this extreme extent.

I am grown and on my own- so it has to be ME that forces me to stick with it in spite of all of these horrible, painful side-effects- not my parents! It is so, so difficult to ride this out. But this article seems to imply that riding it out, will, in the end, offer relief + health- all the ed offers is relief, but not health. It'd be good to come out on top.

I'm confused - so all anorexic patients go hypermwtabolic?

Dear HM, you are describing so well what I saw in my daughter! It is really really hard to do what you are doing. I'm sending a big hug from me as a mom who watched this all painfully happen to the one I love the most in the entire world!!! I hope you write it on your heart that you only want to do this one time! My daughter stuck it out because we made her but now she never wants to go through that valley of darkness again-the whole thing-you will get a new perspective on the lens of malnutrition and refeeding when you are through this, please trust me that it will be worth it and trust yourself and keep going even if it seems to be taking way too long to get to the reward.

Neverloseheart

No, not all patients with AN experience hypermetabolism. I don't think anyone really knows who will and who won't. It's probably more common in younger children with AN, especially since they're still going through puberty, etc. It doesn't seem to correlate with how sick you were, how much weight you lost, etc.

Thanks for your encouraging words, anon- it's been more than 2 decades with my ed, and now over a year trying to recover- seems like an awfully long time- I'm trying to stick it out- if recovery is truly feasible, then it would be foolish to waste this whole year I've already put into it by falling all the way back to the beginning- but if recovery is not possible for me, then it seems that what I'm doing now is wasting my time- b/c it makes me pretty miserable and takes time and energy away from my children. But I hear my own mom in your words- I know she wants recovery for me too- so I'm not giving up yet.