I have been looking through a lot of the threads on here and learning a lot, and thought I would share my somewhat extreme experiences of how you can mess with your metabolism.

I'll start with when I totally ruined my metabolism by becoming anorexic. Obviously it is a long story - but this isn't the ED recovery group, and all I will say here is that gradually I had to eat less and less to maintain my very unhealthy weight. However, being a tall girl (5'9") with a naturally fast metabolism, I never actually ate much less than 1000 calories. (It makes me crazy to see people on the forums talking about the 1200 diet now....)

Anyway, eventually I managed to get a little bit better and decided to escape my past by getting a job on a sailboat. There were 12 of us full time crew on board and I ate the same meals as the rest of them, all the while working a hard physical job. I would guess I ate around 2000 - 2,500 calories a day. Yes, a lot of food, but a lot of activity too.

What happened to my body shocked me. I went from around 120lbs to 155lbs in three months. WHAT??!!! I had no idea what was happening to me. I was scared and appalled. However, despite my out of control weight gain, I had energy for the first time in years, and I could not go back to the hell of anorexia, even though I was miserable about the weight gain.

Since then I have realised that my body was reacting to the refeeding after an extended period of starvation. I had messed my metabolism up to the extent that when I ate properly again, my body held on to every bit of nutrition for all it was worth, and I piled on the pounds.

Since then I have worked on finally becoming healthy again. It has not been easy to restore my metabolism to how it was before the whole anorexia mess - but now I think I am there. Now I eat over 2000 calories pretty much every day, and I have shed the extra pounds, slowly but surely, going from 155lbs to 140lbs - a healthy and happy weight for me. Finally I can eat a healthy amount of food and not be scared that I will gain weight. There is no way I could ever face going back to a low calorie diet - the thought of it actually terrifies me. The lack of energy, depression, lethargy.... it is just not worth it.