IF, Binge Eating, Calories, Yo-Yo dieting. Aghh!

Hello fellow MFPs!
I hope you are all staying motivated and feeling on track, in control, and reaching your goals bit by bit and I wish you all the very best

I have just been so inspired by all the honesty that I have read in these forums posts that I thought this time around (I have been a member for ages but used to use if to for private tracking only) that I would share my story as well in case it is interesting to anyone or can help anyone who is going through/has gone through the same thing – I would also loooove any feedback from people who have made it out the other end of what I’m going through!

I don’t really know when my relationship with food and exercise became so disordered, most of my immediate family members are overweight and I think one day I just realised I was headed in the same direction. I had recently started dancing (I was about 11 or 12) and became obsessed with body image and weight. This progressed rapidly for many years until I reached 47kgs (about 103 pounds) at my tall height of 175cm (5”9). I was ill and unhappy but I would not say I was anorexic and I was not bulimic. I was an obsessive calorie counter.

I eventually begun to heal, I put on weight until I was at about 52kg and actually felt good about that, then got to 55kg and somehow beat the voice in my head that said I was too fat.
I thought I had beaten it – although I was still logging my food mostly every day – I would allow myself treats and then add it up to the following few days and try to incorporate that into my net calories to “undo” the extra food after I went over my daily limit.
This started to escalate as I had been so restrictive for so long and before long I was binging and then trying desperately to make up for it over days or even sometimes weeks when the binges went into the thousands of calories. Before long I was 58-60kg and I finally cared and felt depressed about my weight. My boyfriend insisted I looked great but I was miserable. I started obsessively running 6-10km every morning and decreased my calorie intake as much as I could. It worked, after a few months I was 55kg again. Then something clicked in my head, the weeks of deprivation turned on me and binging started again.

I am now at my highest ever weight of about 64.5kg and trying to get my eating back under control, not to be 47kg (NEVER again) or even to necessarily be the 55kg where I was most comfortable, but just to treat my body well. Being underweight isn’t healthy but stuffing your face then crying for days isn’t either. I know that I am not actually overweight, with a BMI of maybe 21 or so – but I have been lean and active my whole life and feel like a piece of me is gone. I feel that without structure and discipline I can rapidly and easily gain weight to the point where I am overweight and just feel like giving up at times – but I fight these urges because it is so much easier to take action now and prevent that happening. I have been trying IF (16:8 – where you eat for 8 hours of the day and fast the other 16) and even though some may think it’s a bad idea for people with an ED history, I love it. I feel more in control and can portion my calories out the way I want, not how my partner or family wants to eat.

I still am struggling with binging and still have the somewhat dysfunctional way of handling these binges by trying to compensate the binge over a few weeks – e.g. writing down what I ate and trying to log them bit by bit till I have crossed them all out.
I am just wondering if anyone has a similar history to me and what they did to overcome it? I never want my weight to determine my happiness again but I do want to feel fit, lean and beautiful. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want both.

Sidenote: I am currently seeing a therapist for the first time in my life to source the root of the binges and hoping this will help me.
Thanks so much everyone, reading about your struggles, successes and journeys has really helped me on days where I feel like quitting!
Big love xx Em