Spoiler: tw: details of starvation, abuse related to it and graphic descriptions of effects therein Yeah. My muscles were almost completely burned up and my body was desperately stockpiling fat from the limited and not very nutritious food I was able to hide. I couldn't make a full fist, I'm still recovering the muscles mass I lost in my legs. I couldn't walk more than maybe 50 meters without my cane when I got here. I probably would have died before I started losing any serious weight. Some of my fingernails are ridged I believe forever now, all of my body fluids were very acidic at the time, my hair was getting weak and starting to fall out, I was bloating, my body was cramping and I was at several points passing blood when I used the bathroom. But I didn't believe it at first when I was told I was starving, because wouldn't I be losing weight?? And my mother was insisting that I needed to eat less than I was to lose weight. If it wasn't for friends buying me pizza regularly I would have just died and not known what was wrong. But my number on the scale went up, so clearly I was just eating too much, right?
If you "like living", you SHOULD be worried if you're drinking that much. Not being worried about a thing doesn't mean it's not going to damage you!
I'm pretty sure that I said I don't like living. I get treated like shit because I'm an unsocialized freak and despite my best efforts, I get blamed for not picking up on how to act from everyone else.
Spoiler: additional starvation details Yeah the body clings to calories hard when it's getting restricted. the additional thing is, when your body is technically getting some calories but not much in the way of vitamins/minerals/etc, it still cannibalizes itself for those. You can get amino acids from protein. you can't get them from fat/carbs and your body needs amino acids and sugars. The brain especially needs sugar or keton bodies to keep going and your body WILL priorize your brain hard in situations like that. The metabolic pathways that can be used to make keton bodies or sugars from non-protein bits are limited and result, iirc, in a net loss of protein of about 20g/day just to keep your brain going, no matter how much non-carb calories you supply your brain with, it literally cannot run on them
Spoiler: reply to above, starvation cw continues Thanks for that information, if I'm following right that makes a lot of sense - until I started eating again, and getting decent amounts of proteins, I was having terrible trouble with my memory. I was avoiding sugars, and what little I did manage to eat was carb heavy or breakfast drinks I'd hidden away. It's only recently that my day to day memory has recovered to the point where I can remember the events of a previous day, whereas before I moved I was losing that ability almost completely unless I got prompted. That's really interesting to know, and I wonder if it's at all linked.
That's why an actually balanced diet is also important? Vegetarians need to make sure they're getting plant-based proteins, but many people can get it easily if they include enough whole eggs or a reasonable amount of meat. That's why 1200 is generally considered a lower limit because it's generally hard to get everything you need unless you eat that much.
Spoiler: Cont'd That's... Still really weird, though. The brain alone, as long as it maintains consciousness, would take in about twice as many calories as your daily average. That many calories isn't even really survivable for "several months", because it's not that far off from eating nothing which kills you in a month or two (regardless of weight! The organs get eaten much faster than the fat). Is it supposed to be the bad-days-only average, or...?
Spoiler: deets, all the cw i averaged one to two solid actual meals a week. i documented a lot of it when i was last on the forum, in my threads that had to be hidden. i saved what money i could for the move, spent the rest feeding myself when i could, and when i had nothing left friends sent me pizza money, grocery money that i used to buy a fuckton of breakfast drinks that i could hide. i know we did the math, @Beldaran helped me with it at the time. i was, a wreck. like, majorly a wreck. mum was actively trying to poison me on the few occasions she provided food, i wasn't allowed fridge space. from everything i've read, it sounds like the small breakfast drinks and the weekly takeout kept me coasting just high enough that i didn't completely shut down but it just extended it, i was getting mini seizure like things at one stage, along with vicious cramps, and had to force myself to eat salty things even though i super didn't want too. i don't rec this! it was awful!
calorie counting literally contributes nothing to your physical health except add something to obsess over and maladaptively lean on and ruin your mental health with. The only sensible way to improve your bodily health via dietary adjustments is to make sustained and lasting lifestyle changes, like picking up a sport, and aiming for a vegetable/fruit heavy day to day diet, make sure you hit 3 full meals/five smaller ones a day if possible, and try to eat fish at least once a week and meat (if possible, there's metabolic quirks making this part impossible) no more than twice, adjustments up to the individual and their nutritionist's advice. You want a varied, and mineral/vitamin heavy mealplan to the best of your ability and you want to hit five portions of fruit/plant a day (a portion being about a handful of any given thing/a full glass of freshly pressed juice/smoothie) And you obviously want to (SLOWLY) cut out things negatively impacting your health. For me that's pork, for example. For you it's alcohol, I'd wager.
Spoiler: reply, additional details Yes! Your body will use food-proteins before body-proteins, but it still wants to feed your brain carbs if possible in any fashion - which is part of why I am so very skeptical of unsupervised keto diets, if people don't hang on the proteins, they can really fuck themselves over - but the brain absolutely suffers under starvation. It's not fed enough, keto bodies aren't ideal to begin with, and a lot of nerve tissue is actually fatty tissue. The sheathes around the long nerve fibers that allow signals to travel are wrapped in myelin which is very fatty. Cutting down on fatty acids means you body cannot properly maintain those anymore, either! It sounds like you were coasting by on just enough macronutrient input to no die on the spot but it def hurt the brain. Another issue is that certain B vitamins are also super important for brain function, and if you were living on breakfast drinks and pizza - which is def better than living on nothing! - you might have gotten critically short on that vitamins too Brain cells run on sugar, they need fatty acids and vitamins to maintain themselves, and in the absence of dietary sugar, your body breaks down it's own protein to fuel the brain. I'm very happy that you're recovering!!
@Greallan - nobody here is telling you that you shouldn't lose weight or change your lifestyle. I'm deeply sorry that you feel so awful that drinking so much has become your coping mechanism. I believe the emotional reaction to the situation you were in is very much out of proportion and indicative of something that is wrong elsewhere, but I'm sorry you're suffering. People have tried to help you with your communication issues - are you willing to listen and take it on board? I have explained that using shock-value tactics is not conducive to successful, actual debate. It's not conducive to making friends, either. There is a difference between effective writing to discuss complex issues and propaganda, which is what shock-value writing relies on. If you want to have a reasoned discussion with people and be listened too and considered beyond the surface level you present to us, you have to meet us halfway. Engaging with shock-value writing is painful for a lot of people. It is often an emotionally abusive thing, even if that isn't the intent behind it. You can have the best intentions in the world, but trying to use punchy language to guilt people or shame them, which is what the language you have been using has been doing, is not going to endear you to anyone or achieve anything other than making folks feel bad. I understand the urge to binge you're feeling. After some of the things you've said in this thread, I felt it too, because your words hurt me. You do not like being hurt. Nobody else likes being hurt. That's a common ground that we can work from. If you'll try not to hurt other people, most people are good and will extend the same courtesy to you. I know adjusting your style of communication is hard, and you might feel like it's stupid or not as effective because the responses you get out of people won't be as strong, but it will be healthier for you if you take the comments about how to communicate your views more clearly on board. If you stop causing splash damage and lashing out at people, there's a chance you can find friends here! But if you don't try, people aren't going to want to engage with you. I saw from your posts in that other forum that when you apologize for things, you often position yourself as the person who has been hurt and needing to appease the people angry at you. I understand why, if you feel like the victim it hurts to apologize to the people you perceive as having hurt you. In this case, for the most part, people are angry because you have hurt them. Their anger might hurt you, but they have the right to be angry because you have caused them tangible harm. While you being angry at being hurt by their words makes sense, it doesn't make their anger unreasonable or wrong. But you're still a person, and deserve a chance to get better and try to make amends - you might not be able to fix things with people you've caused harm too in the past, but you can try to fix that by doing better for any future people you talk too c: I think if you want to keep engaging with this thread, it might be a good idea to apologize to everyone that has been hurt by your words so far. Acknowledging that the math isn't always correct was a good start! I am happy to help you workshop a good apology if you like, and then the thread might be able to continue in a productive way that's helpful to you and doesn't cause harm to other people.
That's absolutely fascinating, thank you for the information!! That's so helpful. I'm doing much better now, and while I'm sure there are some permanent effects that'll probably manifest when I'm older, for now I'm doing pretty well! And eating at least two meals a day means I have enough energy that I've been able to make some really positive lifestyle changes! Which I super wouldn't have managed without help and positive encouragement.
Greallan, you have multiple problems, but you will not be able to solve them until you get your alcohol use under control. Processing your trauma from the PPC, communicating with other people, weight loss: all of these are being impacted by your drinking. We cannot help you with this via the forum, expect possibly help you find a local detox clinic. If you need help doing this, please ask. Do not try to detox by yourself. (edit: added more paragraph spaces for easier reading)
Well yes, you are supposed to make sustainable changes. Calorie counting can be a tool to correct problems with portion control. It can also illustrate problems with density, for example how a Wendy's cheeseburger has about twice the calories of a McDonald's. At some point, many people can go months without pulling out the food-scale because they learned what a good portion looks like and which foods they should limit.. Calorie counting drove me a bit nutty because most of my recipes have 6 different ingredients and I never make them the same measurements twice. It was a matter of learning the shortcuts and which foods I didn't need to be exact on. A little bit of poking shows that many above-ground vegetables are below 100 calories a cup, so those and things like onions can be guesstimated. It's the meat, oils, cheese, starches, and dressings that should be measured. Obsession isn't good, but it's possible to count without being super-anal about it. Your dietary advice isn't quite right for me, other than vegetable-heavy and varied. I prefer a breakfast that clocks in around 300cals, maybe have milk in a pot of tea, then to eat a very small snack under 300 just before I start preparing dinner. After a serving of dinner, I could have a handful of chips or scoop of ice cream if I want. Literally all of my fat is because of the alcohol.
I think it's different for everyone. For my wife calorie counting is a symptom, for me it was extremely helpful. She has classic anorexia nervosa, I have food insecurity trauma. For me, seeing that I'd eaten enough in a day was helpful because my body was used to a feast/famine cycle since childhood where there was nothing for a while until suddenly ALL THE GROCERIES but I had to eat what I wanted fast or my three brothers ate everything. It was reassuring to see that I didn't have to eat myself sick when food was around.
Yeah, I've got atypical anorexia (in the "not nervosa" sense, not the "no weight loss" one), so I end up having to count calories the other way around to make sure I get at least okay nutrition. It can be helpful but it's really easy to stress over it.
but you also won’t get better if your solution to your problems involves emotional self-harm and maladaptive coping mechanisms then do weight loss in a healthy and scientifically proven effective way. your way does not work, full stop. if you want to lose weight, you need to make healthy lifestyle changes, particularly by stabilizing your physical lifestyle and getting some damn help for your godawful alcoholism and mental health. i feel, i find myself being very particular about making sure i get enough calories each day bc it is dangerous for me to lose any more weight
Thank you for the people chiming in with reminders that you can in fact calorie count to get to a minimum, i forget that every so often. But then numbers also make my brain scream in any direction so it'd probably not help lmao ... so like how do you actually get through a full day on 300 cals bc uh. That's very little and while I agree everyone is different, at least around here most science-based advice suggests that frontloading by having a big breakfast keeps you more energetic and able to sustain activity throughout the day? Also cutting out actual nutritional food in favor of drinking is a really really bad idea, for real. Please try to at least dial the drinking back, it's not good for oyu and even just apart from shooting your liver to shit, you're essentially setting yourself up for a lot of pain and suffering in case you ever need to go on any sort of medication long term, bc there's a ton of meds that can be very muhc necessary for survival AND quality of life depending on what you need to take them for, but play really nasty with alcohol.
