Extreme Hunger While Being Weight Restored

Rest assured, extreme hunger did end and in fact, honoring it and going into overshoot was a key part of me achieving full recovery after a long battle with anorexia, orthorexia, and exercise bulimia. It was scary as hell, and that’s why I’m sharing this post with you today. You'll learn:

• Why you have extreme hunger without being underweight
• How to know if you're truly weight restored
• The difference between "weight restored" and "health restored"
• The role of energy deficit and energy debt in eating disorder recovery
• Why you should aim to overshoot your pre-eating disorder weight

How Do You Know When You're Weight Restored in ED Recovery?

To understand anything related to extreme hunger while being weight restored, we must first define the term "weight restored." The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "restore" as to bring back to or put back into a former or original state. According to this definition, "weight restored" thus means that the former or original weight has been achieved.

When it comes to eating disorder recovery, restoring weight (i.e. returning to the weight prior to your eating disorder) is often not enough. Aside from the fact that the disorder often starts at a younger age and your weight as a child should be nowhere near your weight as an adult (in most cases), there are countless other factors that are overlooked when it comes to defining an individual's "target weight."

First of all, there is absolutely NO WAY for any doctor or health professional to determine what weight is healthy and optimal for your unique body. If you or your doctor are using BMI as a metric to deem yourself weight restored, please read my post The Truth About BMI, as it reveals how shockingly inaccurate this "health" metric truly is. Furthermore, the human body is one of the most complex biological systems that even the most advanced researchers and scientists cannot fully understand. So, how on Earth can we expect a single doctor, or even worse – a simple math formula – to define what that system is supposed to look like?

Now that we've gotten the basics out of the way and understand that weight gives no accurate representation of health, let's dive a little deeper into why returning to your pre-eating disorder weight is often not enough.

Weight Restored vs. Health Restored in Eating Disorder Recovery

Say, you are someone who developed an eating disorder later in life and you maintained weight X for decades before losing weight and spiraling into an eating disorder. If you were to return to weight X in recovery, that would mean you're weight restored, right?

Not quite. Technically, if you were looking at the dictionary term of the word "restored," sure – but as you just learned, weight is no measure of health, especially when you’re looking at the impact that an eating disorder has on your body as a whole. Your "weight" may be restored, but what about everything you cannot see? Your bones, your organs, your hormones, your thoughts...if you're still experiencing mental or physical extreme hunger, there are clearly parts of your body that are *not* restored!

That being said, worrying that "weight restored" should equal an absence of mental or physical extreme hunger is absolutely ridiculous, because the two are completely unrelated. As I write in my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger and explain in my course Extremely Hungry to Completely Satisfied, I prefer the term "health restored" instead. Why? Because focusing on overall health rather than a single number encompasses a holistic perspective of recovery rather than a surface-level one. So, if you cannot "solve" extreme hunger by reaching a certain weight, how do you overcome extreme hunger? That's where the terms energy deficit and energy debt come in.

Energy Deficit and Energy Debt in Anorexia Recovery

Energy deficit refers to a state where the body is not receiving enough energy (calories) to meet its metabolic requirements. Because the body is highly adaptive and will do whatever it can to optimize survival, energy deficit causes the body to slow down or even cease bodily processes. This adaptation is what causes the common symptoms of restrictive eating disorders, including a slow heart rate, fatigue, hair loss, brittle nails, and a lack of menses in people who get periods.

Energy debt is the result of prolonged energy deficit. Because every action in the body requires fuel, the body starts to utilize its own tissues and organs while in energy debt. Energy debt is very similar to financial debt in the sense that it will eventually need to be paid back. To give an example...

Imagine, a pandemic hits and you unexpectedly lose your job. You have no idea how long this will last, so you continue your day-to-day activities in the hopes that the world will open up again and you will get your job back. Then months start to pass, and you realize you have to be a lot more cautious with spending. Because you still have to pay your monthly rent, your taxes, and your electric bills, non-essential costs must be cut. You must economize, just like your body does when it shuts or slows down bodily systems. Your heart rate slows, your metabolism adapts, and you will likely lose your period if you have a female physiology.

For a while, you can sustain this. Eventually, the point will come when the low estrogen levels due to hypothalamic amenorrhea start to cause bone loss, and the slow heart rate leaves you at risk for cardiac failure. In the example of finances, you will have to start using your credit card and start to build up credit card debt. The longer you have insufficient income, the deeper and deeper you will fall into debt, and the more money you will have to pay off in the long run.

Finally, there is a vaccine for the virus that caused your job loss in the first place and you get offered a new opportunity. You jump at it and you have income again AKA you start eating again. The amount of money that's coming in is just enough to stop using your credit card, but that doesn't mean you're not still elbow-deep in debt. For however long you were in energy deficit, you have to make up for with food. Not only do you have to continue paying your day-to-day expenses (such as fueling your body to support bodily functions such as breathing and digesting), but you now have years and years of credit card debt to pay off. So what do you do? You start saving. Now isn't yet the time to buy luxury items (i.e. repair bodily processes that are non-essential to life), as that would be silly considering all this money you still have to pay back to the bank.

After months of saving, you start to feel more relaxed around food, and you no longer feel like you are living pay-check to pay-check. Yet, you still have to be careful with expenses and you need to save more money than you are spending in order to pay off the build-up of debt. In recovery terms, this means eating more than you are spending. In order for your body to trust you again, you must prove that there is an energy surplus, which is why you should aim to overshoot your pre-eating disorder weight.

Why You Have Extreme Hunger AFTER Gaining Weight

Personally, one of the most confusing parts of extreme hunger was that I didn't experience it until after I had gained a significant amount of weight in my anorexia recovery. My weight was "within the normal BMI range" and I was even told by my doctor that I should now focus on maintaining my weight. Surely, my body was broken if I kept gaining weight now!? 

If you are not underweight and are experiencing extreme hunger, I promise there is nothing wrong with you. The very fact that you are experiencing extreme hunger while being weight restored makes complete biological sense, and is in fact a super healthy sign! Let me explain...

Just as in the financial example, where someone will only start buying luxury items again when they can trust there are enough savings in the bank, your body will only send out hunger signals when it trusts there is a reason to.

When you are in chronic energy deficit, the body believes you are in a famine environment. Thus, your body will not "waste" its precious reserves on sending out hunger signals if it believes these will not be responded to. When you start to eat adequately and gain weight, however, your body learns that it is in fact not at all in a famine environment! It’s finally safe to send out hunger cues because your body now trusts that you will honor them.

The Danger of Suppressing Extreme Hunger in Anorexia Recovery

Unfortunately, it is often during this time that people in recovery try to suppress physical hunger or distract themselves from mental hunger, falling into common diet culture traps that you’re “just bored” and you should “just drink some water.” DO NOT GIVE IN TO THESE TRAPS! Ignoring your extreme hunger is incredibly confusing to your poor body that believed there was food around because now, your body is once again convinced that there is a famine. And just like anyone would do in a famine, you start obsessing over all the food that you hope to one day eat when the famine ends.

In order for your body to fully trust you again, and ultimately fully recover from your eating disorder, it is critical that you respond to all of your hunger – physical, mental, and all the other forms I explain in my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger. Now you may be asking yourself, WHAT IF I NEVER STOP EATING? That was a huge fear I had during my own period of extreme hunger. But what about asking yourself this instead: What if I'm enslaved to an eating disorder for the rest of my life? Trusting your body and its wisdom is the only way to fully recover and get your life back. Honoring extreme hunger is the only way to repair your body and mind so you can stop being obsessed with food.

The body does not act without reason. If you are constantly thinking about food and exercise, you are not at a healthy weight for your specific body, because a healthy weight is a weight at which you are not restricting yourself in any way. So, let's stop using the term "weight restored" to measure the validity of your extreme hunger, and instead, focus on fully restoring your health. If you want help on that journey, enroll in my course Extremely Hungry to Completely Satisfied!