I weighed myself for the first time in a while and was alarmed to see that my weight had dipped below 90 (I’m 5′1″). I knew I’d been losing weight due to job market and dissertation stress, and my appetite has been really bad recently, but I didn’t realize it was that bad… My home scale might not be entirely accurate, but if it is, my weight is as low now as it got when I was actually deliberately anorexic. Taking birth control masks some of the symptoms (amenorrhea, nonexistent libido), but this is still probably not good.

I’m really not doing it on purpose this time. I either don’t feel hungry before I start feeling lightheaded from lack of food, or I feel hungry but everything sounds disgusting, or I’m too tired/lazy to make myself food, or I can’t finish what I’ve started eating, or hunger quickly turns into nausea. I do still have some bad habits leftover from the anorexic days, including checking calorie counts and recoiling from ones that look high, and just ignoring inconvenient hunger until it goes away on its own. I really gotta stop doing that. So I’m eating an entire 550-calorie tray of Trader Joe’s mac & cheese that’s supposedly 2 servings. Fuck it, it’s one.