#now i take a half dose bc i’m small and it’s enough medicine for me (also i don’t wanna upset my stomach)

[mars-ipan]

idk how much sleep i’m getting tonight

[myrecovery18]

A year in Recovery

After a year in recovery from restricting there are things that I noticed I did before that I no longer or rarely do or that I’m able to eat now. Plus a little tips on what helped me recovery and stick with it. 

TW: MENTIONS OF RESTRICTING, ANAMIA, BIRTHCONTROL,  RECOVERY, TO THE BONE, TRAINING, LEARNING TO LOVE YOURSELF, SELF RECOVERY TIPS, & LITTLE HEALTH RANT IN THE MIDDLE.

I’m aware I can’t count calories anymore because I mentally will go under 1,500 calories without fail. 

When I use to eat I use to watch an edit of “To the Bone” religiously, I only watch it now when I want to. I don’t want to watch it when I eat. 

I use to sit in class and save food recipes or pictures of food to a Pinterest board instead of paying attention because I got bored and was thinking about food

I use to workout for an hour and a half in the morning and would get pissed if I couldn’t. I quit working out for a year until I was able to and injured my knee only to restart this year because working out is the one thing I know that helps relieve stress. Instead of focusing on working out as a form of losing weight, I focus on it now as a hobby, if I don’t do it one day that’s fine. I don’t get upset at myself. That took awhile to build that mentality especially coming from a 10 yr athletic background with a physical sport that required you to train 3 hours a day like volleyball. 

I used to eat and feel panicked about being watched by others; rarely do I think about that now. I can’t give you advice on how to stop that mentality.

I avoided eating Garlic bread for six years, it was apart of my fear foods. I nearly cried when I ate it for the first time this year and didn’t feel an ounce of anxiety. It still scares me the idea of eating it, but physically eating it doesn’t bring me anxiety. 

There are days where I eat one meal and I don’t blame myself, but I do let others know that I forgot to eat because my hungry cues didn’t signal that I was in fact hungry and needed to feed myself. 

While in recovery, I’ve come to realize that when I miss a meal, my body will pick up either the next day or two days later and tell me it’s hungry. I don’t force myself to eat if I’m not hunger. 

I use to cook myself every meal so I knew what was going into it or I monitored what my family was putting into the food. I don’t do that now or I use to make my own plate and make it smaller than I needed it to be. I allow for them to cook my food and plate it if they want to. 

I use to have bad mood swings; I rarely do. 

I use to drink coffee because I knew it is a natural laxative for me when I was having a bad day; I don’t drink it anymore for that reason. I drink it because I like the taste and enjoy coffee. The upset stomach is a negative now.  

Being told to lose weight by doctors or family members or that I was getting bigger would trigger me but now I don’t bother to acknowledge it since I know most doctors don’t acknowledge the pills I’ve been on caused the weight gain. The only doctor I’ve accepted the weight loss advice was my neurologist because I went through all the test and they came back normal, so I know I suffer from migraines naturally.

Birth Control Pills: I’m not a fan of them and refuse to be placed back on them despite the other ladies I go to pushing it on me to regulate my abnormal bleeding I recently had. Despite the fact I told her it was caused by the other Gyno’s failure to notice that it counteracts with my migraine medicines and caused the bleeding to extend by putting me on the birthcontrol pill I didn’t want (Side Note: I have iron deficiency anemia that no one can really fix because my panels come back with a weird combination so due to the gynos mistake it kicked in and I had to take my iron pills because I was getting exhausted too fast because of my blood loss which made me have more headaches. I do not take them daily because my previous doctors said I had too much iron in my system but I have a hard time storing it which is why every doctor I see can’t really fix it or diagnose it again because my panels read either too high, normal or low, so cheers to that.) I know this because my recent period lasted 7 days and was normal flow similar to how they use to be before I got on before control. I say this because your doctors won’t listen to you and will prescribe you a medicine regardless of your wishes. I decided not to take it and even now I’m losing the weight I gained slowly. 

My migraine medicine: Is used for both migraines (my neurologist wanted to boost it to the highest dose which I didn’t agree with since I already have the muscle tingles that happen all day and are annoying and could get kidney stones and I know I don’t drink enough water to stop that from happening; so I stuck to the dose I’m on. Again sometimes your doctors can be wrong. GO with what you’re comfortable with) and weight loss. The weight I’m losing could be contributed to that or the fact I stopped my BC pills, I’m unsure which or the fact I’m working again. 

So what helped me recover? 

 For one, I had a support system that kept me accountable in the form of my boyfriend who knew I struggled with eating. Including one of my highschool friend who kept track of if I eat in highschool when we were at lunch together, when my boyfriend couldn’t be there. Once I got into college, it became my own responsibility to hold myself accountable for eating and sometimes that didn’t happen because I become hyper-focus on one thing (still do) and fail to remember to eat. My boyfriend still checked in whenever he could to make sure I did eat whenever he choose to 

I changed my mentality. I no longer look for a diet to do. If I eat what society sees as unhealthy or healthy that doesn’t concern me. I’m going to eat what helps my body because I know what helps it. I know personally if my body doesn’t get enough nutrition I’ll suffer a headache and will get tired later on that day. You have to know your body and that starts with your mental. Some days will be bad and that just comes with recovery.

Eating the foods you like. I’m lucky enough to be on a college campus that allows us to be back in person during a pandemic and is serving us food. By them do this, I don’t often eat in my dorm room so I can save my food or don’t eat out or order in as often. Last semester when I lived in my own apartment, I ordered food a lot and I wasn’t ashamed by it. It just took a lot of my money. My college thankfully has the healthier options available for students who can’t eat meats or doesn’t prefer it. If I don’t eat in my cafetria on campus, I’ll go to our schools tea room if it’s open to grab something to eat if I don’t like anything they have, unless I ultimately have no time left I’ll eat in my room. 

I choose to eat whatever. Some days I’ll eat more vegetarian than meat or vegan that vegetarian or I’ll eat more meat if I want it. However, I do know that there’s days I’ll crave pizza. I don’t hold back and I’ll go get a pizza and it’ll last me three or two meals depending on how hungry I am or if I get Chinese food, that’s two meals. I learned to stop holding myself holding myself back from my cravings. If I want something, I’ll eat it.

One of the last things that helped me was watching over people go through recovery the same time I was choosing to. These people have already recovery so they don’t have many videos up anymore from that time in their lives so I can’t tag their channels here and probably won’t ever. But they helped me get through and see that I wasn’t alone. That it was okay to feel the things I was feeling. 

Lastly, I learned to start to love myself. I haven’t fully done it yet. But I don’t hate myself either. It’s taking time to realize that I deserve better in life. That despite what I look like, even if it’s at my heaviest or at my lowest I won’t care what people think of me as long as I love how I look. Now that’s been a struggle to work with and I’m only a few months into that mentality, but it feels good. I spent majority of my life avoiding mirrors and avoiding taking pictures with my family to the point I don’t have many pictures of myself from the times I grew up to now. Or I hardly understand some days how I look because I don’t look in the mirror. But I slowly starting to. I can tell in pictures on days where I do love myself and have confidence that I’m happier. I also learned to understand my worth and know that I shouldn’t feel miserable in a friendship. 

There’s small things you can do to recover now. It’s not an over night thing. There’s days where recovery will see pointless or if you’re even doing it right or if you’re just faking it for the shits and giggles, but you’re doing a good thing. Ultimately, recovery is about you. It’s not for anyone else. Not for your family, or your friends or your boyfriends or your pets. It’s for you and you alone. Because it only effects you physically and mentally and emotionally. You’re the one who has to deal with it 24/7 and has to actively choose to heal and keep healing every single day. It’s not going to be easy. I only listed a few things I’ve been through that was singular for me and important to me to voice, there were more things I did. I wish you all the best whether you choose recovery now, tomorrow, or in the future. Please stay safe.  

[autisticshuichi]

teef are gone!!

Alright now that I’m not dozing on and off and I’m feeling pretty okay, here’s some small stories of the Wisdom Tooth Removal(tm). I’ll put it under a cut to save space and for people who might have triggers.

(tw: needle mention, blood mention, very brief mention of eating disorder)

ok first off let me tell yall that when we got there i was thrown completely off-guard by lots of things. At my consultation I’d been told to come in an hour earlier to take some medicine to make me chill bc of my Needle Fear. There was no such thing, but they did offer to give me nitris gas which was nice. (gotta get that laughing gas high. lov the tingly.) Also my mom had to stay behind in the waiting room, which was a huge confidence blow to me because. What the fuck?? I need my mommy???? I am just a large child let me live.

Needless to say I was anxious as fuck walking back there. A nurse called me out on it lmao.

The first nurse there was really nice?? She was chill with my nervous babbling about the iv scaring me, she calmed me down the best she could, told me to keep my eyes on her and talked to me through it, etc.

She also let me hold her hand when the second nurse came in. Which was very sweet because a) i didn’t have my mom and b) holy shit i got to hold a cute girl’s hand.

Did I mention she complimented my nails because she did and I’ll shut up about her now but tl;dr sweet girl I love her

Strangely enough the iv itself wasn’t that bad??? I mean of course my brain hyped it up to be way worse than it was, but it was my first iv ever let me live. They used a numbing spray on my arm beforehand which stung a little, but like in a “cold as hell” way, and with that on I didn’t feel the needle at all.

ok but the nurse was making small talk to distract me and there was one point that was like “Do you have any siblings?” “Yeah, two older half brothers. Like, way older.” “Any younger siblings?” “............................nope none” like I straight up forgot the english language and the meaning of words for maybe 15 seconds there.

I’m gonna be perfectly honest, the time from like a couple minutes after getting the iv until walking from the car to my house is a complete blank. Which is strange because I expected to have a blank from before the surgery, not after it. According to my mom I didn’t do or say anything wild, I was kinda like a zombie being led around lmao.

I’ll admit there’s a lot of blood, but it doesn’t freak me out as much as I thought it was going to? It’s just kind of like “ah. there it is. that’s my blood.” more than “HOLY HECK B L E E D”.

Going on that vein, my mom and i messed up a lil at first in terms of the gauze. What you’re supposed to do is leave it in for an entire hour, since they’ve got tanic(?) acid on ‘em and that helps to form a clot. So it says in the lil pamphlet to keep it in for that long and only take them out if they’re Blood Central. We missed that part so the first couple of gauzes I stuck in there weren’t in there nearly as long as they needed to be. Now I’ve got one in and I’ve been biting down on it for 40 minutes so I’ve got 20 to go before things should be good?? If it’s still bleeding lots we’re gonna try it again with a tea bag because that has lots of tanic acid, but also oozing for the first 24 hours is normal so?? not sure how we’ll tell the difference, but we’ll figure it out lmao.

Strangely enough, the thing that freaked me out the most was the stitches. I first felt one after my short lil naps I think and I demanded my mom come over and look because it spooked me so bad, she did not look, but confirmed yeah that’s normal and they’ll dissolve don’t worry. Now my relationship with them is “hi i can feel you can you please move back to your side of the mouth now”, mostly.

Luckily, I haven’t been having much pain at all! The only time was before I took ibuprophen for the first time, and that was because I’d taken half a dose of he Big Med at first to see if it’d be enough. (I’m supposed to alternate between the two.) And it wasn’t all that bad, just some pain in my teeth that hurt a little worse when biting down on gauze. Overall I’m very surprised at the lack of pain, but definitely thankful!!

For those wondering, so far I’ve been living on a diet of applesauce and chocolate pudding, I kind of miss solid foods, which is ironic given how little I eat normally, but it’s probably more the principle of “I’m not allowed to eat this thing right now” versus “I could eat this thing if I wanted to but I choose not to”. Psychology is wild.

Also in case I never mentioned it before, I actually got lucky with my teeth placement! I only had two, and they were both on the left side of my mouth, so the right side is free for me to do stuff like eat without worry. It’s also nice that I’ve only had to deal with numbness on one side, even if it’s almost entirely gone now. (I’m assuming they used a local anesthetic during the surgery as well as general?)

Anyways, that’s all of what’s been going on for me today in regards of wisdom teeth. I might make another smaller post tomorrow since I’ll be eating warm foods instead of cold and using warm presses as opposed to cold ones. I’m totally up for questions and conversations about it though, so if you’ve got something to say just reblog with the comment or shoot me a message! uvu/