to-dance-beneath-the-diamond-sky:
Friendly reminder that 1200 calories is the recommended amount for a 5 year old
this hit me.
another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.
why did I go so long convinced that going over 500 in a day was the end of the world?
Another friendly reminder that the United States used 1,000 calorie diets as torture for political prisoners and justified it using the diet industry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.
Wow. This really hit me hard.
EAT
Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.
Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.
Tag: tw: anorexia nervosa
My advisor, a 70-year-old man, saw me at our department colloquium yesterday for the first time in a while (I’ve mostly been at home working, he’s been traveling, etc.) and asked me how I was. I said fine, mostly, just stressed out and busy. He asked me if I had lost weight, gesturing to his face to indicate that that was how he had noticed. (I was wearing a sweater over a button-up shirt, so it would have been hard to tell any other way.) I said yes, and asked if I looked unhealthy. He said no, he thought I looked good, and then said “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
This made me really uncomfortable, not so much because he’s an old man and I’m a young woman (though that makes it weird, too) as because I was anorexic in college, and I weigh about as little now as when the eating disorder was at its worst. (I’m not losing weight on purpose this time; I’ve been losing my appetite due to dissertation and job market stress.) He made a joke about something that’s really sensitive for me, and basically told me that I look good (better? unclear) when I’m at an abnormally low weight.
I probably shouldn’t say anything to him, because that would just make things weirder. Just gotta bitch about it on Tumblr, I guess.
I ate a donut at 12:30 and have been feeling nauseous for the past 3 and a half hours. This is where my body is at these days. No wonder my pants are falling down.
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.
Loki is the Philosopher King 