Need Advice..recovering anorexic struggling with caloric intake..

Just eat the foods you like?

dense calories like peanut butter or cheese, avocado, Fatty meat cuts

Seconding talking to your treatment team.

My daughter has a disorder that causes her physical pain whenever she eats food - she eats to live right now, too, and struggles with getting enough food in. I can share what we do for her. You're just looking for the tips and tricks and things, to help get more food in, yes? :-)

First, we make up some snacks ahead of time, so she really doesn't have to stop what she's doing in order to eat. That helps make it seem less of a chore, you know?

We set up alarms for times for her to eat, and she just pauses, grabs a bag or tupperware with a snack, and can go back to what she was doing while eating, if possible.

She also saves up entertainment with movies, TV, or books and only does them when she's eating something. If she can't work on something while she eats, she'll watch or read one of these instead. This has worked well, because she can eat something but she doesn't have to think about it as much; she can be distracted while she does it.

I think that last is what has made a big difference. If you are eating to live, it always feels like there's just no reward for it, yes? Not a tangible one, as far as our brains are concerned, anyway. So eating while doing nothing else is a pain in the butt chore. We decided to view it the same way we viewed any other chore - find ways to make it more enjoyable, to distract you while you do it, or to make it go faster so it doesn't seem like such a chore. Sometimes, that's doing it with other people, but that hasn't worked as well for us.


Re: calories and food - that one is challenging for my daughter too, and one thing that has helped is to make sure and add something a bit higher in calories to the daily snacks - nuts are good for this, or nut butters, avocado, or meats. Grains, too. Beans a bit, but not quite as much. She takes vitamins when she's at this point, personally. And then when she is consistently getting more calories, a good amount, she tries to increase the volume of the food, so she can get more nutrients, fiber, and so on, too.


hope that might be of use?

Wishing you good luck, hon.

Anorexia is such poorly understood disorder. Any disordered thinking around food needs to be examined more deeply in society. People assume it's just about food or weight. I have the opposite-I see food and I get this mass rush of fear that someone might beat me to it, so I would hide it and hoard to eat all myself. I would snap at people touching my food. Like wtf?! It's anxiety and control issues. I'm working on trying to find a level of balance in my life. It's hard but I'm not looking too long term. Each day is a new chance to try something again or different.

We hear that we need to work on relationship with food but I'm curious what are the techniques, and practical tips that therapists say to help guide this development? It doesn't sound that easy.

Curious, do you have a garden or grow anything on your own (veggies, herbs)? Here they have "plant therapy" although I think it's called something else. People can volunteer to help grow veggies, work in greenhouse, etc. I wonder if something like that might help with connection with food at all or maybe that's totally off the mark.