The Dangers Of Negative Energy Balance

Over the past week or so my anxiety has risen, my mood dropped, life has felt more overwhelming than it has for a long time and I have felt more physically and mentally exhausted.

Doing battle with the illness in each moment has been much more of an uphill struggle and I had become filled with terror that the illness was regaining an upper hand.

The 2 months before this I had committed to a high recovery intake and been consistently achieving intake levels most would consider far above the recovery minimums often cited.

My activity levels were also low.

For a few weeks I was sailing through recovery with relative ease compared to before I raised my intake as high as I did.
My anxiety when eating so much more was significantly less, as were other eating disorder compulsions, my weight was rising and I had started to feel that life was opening more up than it has in years.

Therefore I was confused by this sudden change in mood and anxiety since last week.

Reflecting back on the past 1-2 weeks though, I realised that inadvertently, my intake had dropped very slightly.
I have also been under added stress from external factors lately and stress also puts added energy needs on the body.

So as my eating disorder related anxiety peaked again this afternoon, I reflected on all of this and concluded that the likely cause is that I have managed to flip my body and brain back into a significant enough degree of negative energy to cause the eating disorder to become stronger, resulting in greater distress.

We know that eating disorders thrive when our body is in any amount of energy deficit and if the balance of energy slides even a tiny degree too far to the negative side of the scale, the illness starts to roar!

I had thought, considering I was still eating a good amount of food last week, even if it was a fraction less than I have become used to in the weeks before, I had enough of a buffer to protect against the negative energy risk.
I am thinking now though that this is not the case.

It seems that my body is in need of a shit ton of food every day to keep the #EDBollocks from increasing in volume in my brain.

So, I need to scramble back on the extreme eating recovery horse and shut the bugger up again!