Well.
Turns out I have been eating under the lowest recommended calorie rate (1200 for women) for many, many years, for the majority of most days of the week. If I'd been doing this intentionally, I'd be an anorexic. Nobody in the medical field wants to believe that someone can do this accidentally and still be overweight and relatively healthy.
But I don't have a good relationship with my stomach. When I was a kid, I joked that I had a cast iron stomach because I could eat anything. Didn't realize that my definition of "anything" was pretty limited, actually, and didn't include spicy food at all. Well, I didn't like spicy food. Why would I eat it?
Here's the thing though. I didn't eat because I was hungry, or because food tasted good. I ate food that didn't taste bad to me (there's a big difference there!) and I ate because I had to. My mom insisted on it. But she wasn't making me eat just to eat; she insisted on it because "you have to have food to make your body go." In other words, if I wanted to do stuff, to go anywhere and do anything, I had to have food.
So I ate. Rather reluctantly and out of habit. And that's the autism at work. I didn't have a good relationship with food and taste and my stomach simply because I don't have a good grasp on any of my emotions and physical sensations. I often get them mixed up, and rarely, even now, know what I'm feeling.
If my stomach feels "bad" I have two options: one, I'm hungry, or two, I'm sick. I've developed a plan based on experimentation. I eat something, and if I feel worse, then I'm sick and shouldn't eat more; if I feel better, then I was hungry. You already see how this is a problem. Sometimes if you're very hungry, eating a little bit can make you feel worse as your stomach says, hey, just getting used to being empty down here, what'd you do that for?! And if you're sick, you're using more energy trying to get rid of the infection, so you actually need more food.
Now that I have an official eating disorder (binge disorder, not anorexia), I have to eat no matter what my stomach is telling me, or what I think it's telling me anyway.
It's working better this way, to be honest. Last week I had a horrible stressful day and I didn't want to eat anything. I wanted to throw the whole bedamned food plan out the window and just not eat, do what I wanted to do when it came to food and not what I should be doing.
After all, people have cheat days, right? People have fasting days? Some people even have it as part of their religion. Just one day won't hurt. And I felt so nauseous. I really, really, didn't want to eat.
But I did it anyway. Thank goodness for autistic routines. I've been doing this food "three times a day plus snacks" since January and it's been enough to trigger a routine. So it was honestly easier to eat what I'd brought to eat when I'd planned to eat it than fight the routine ... Even though I badly wanted to just skip the whole thing.
And by that evening, I felt much better and was glad I hadn't thrown over my recovery for one stressful day.
Because the autistic routines can be made to help you or you can be at their mercy, but if you're using one to help you and you break it, even for a moment, even for a day, you risk shutting the whole thing down. It's like part of my brain is a bratty child that if it can't have its routine, then I can't have that routine either. Ever again.
The biggest problem with therapists is they don't realize this. They don't understand what a powerful tool an autistic routine can be in recovery and they don't understand how incapable some of us are in understanding our feelings...even hunger. So they try to make us flexible in our eating choices (no, because to me, flexibility means "yes, I don't have to eat when I'm stressed, Whoo hoo!") and try to submerge the routines because for neurotypical people, "inflexible routines" rapidly become distressing to them.
Whereas to people like me, it's helpful, useful, and calming to have routines. I don't have to worry I'm going to make myself too skinny or too fat. I have my food routine and my calorie counting app to ensure that I'm eating enough even when stressed and not eating too much even when bored or happy.
I wish people who specialize in helping people with eating disorders could also sub-specialize in helping people who are autistic with eating disorders. Judging by the statistics I've come across in researching how to "make me better" (as far as the eating disorder goes), female autistic people have an awfully high incidence of eating disorders.
But I'm the in middle of it and even I keep discovering the interplay between the two. I just want someone to have discovered this already and put viable options out there, not just the stuff they tell neurotypical people to help them recover.
Humph. Also, I found out that resetting my metabolism is going to take probably a year at the least and I'm not even at the beginning yet ... You have to get back up to what your true maintenance calories are before you get to say "now I'm resetting my metabolism." So what, I'll have "recovered" by 2018? The end of that year?
And I think I will always have the "stress means don't eat" response ... Just like an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in many years, but still can't go into a bar.
But hey, good news on the food control front: I had the opportunity to binge on chocolate chip cookies, homemade, my worst binge food, on a Saturday which is my worst binge day, and I had two. Two that were planned and in my calorie allowance for the day.
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