Hello world,

Sometimes, I like to treat this blog as an online diary. Most of the time, I come here to put my poetry and prose, but every now and then, I need a place to reflect on my personal journey in a way that is relaxed, stream of consciousness, and plain. 

So, that being said— over the past few months, I began to post pieces that delved into the realm of body image issues and disordered eating. It’s possible that these pieces gave a concerning view of my situation (perhaps warranted). But often times, when I dive into dark themes — particularly those in the realm of psychopathology expressed through poetry — it is like taking a magnifying glass to a portion of my psyche. 

I think this can be a form of “shadow work”. Instead of outright ignoring the unsavory, chaotic portions of oneself — never listening to it, never allowing it expression — I give it the mic. I give a part of myself that is usually in the background the spotlight. The mistake is in reading the piece & thinking it is always in the spotlight, thinking it is always in the foreground of my mind, thinking it always has control.

I think it’s actually the opposite. Rather, by giving it control for a time, I think we make it easier to maintain control. For the record, I don’t like the word “control,” as I believe that communicates the wrong idea; rather, it is about finding harmony with the darkness — not fearing your personal underworld, but braving it. 

I digress. I wanted to speak plainly about the real experiences that led me to want to write these pieces. 

In early September of 2025 — about 5 months ago now? — I decided I wanted to lose some weight. I have long been very physically active, but this man likes his food. I was a bit overweight, but worked out a lot; however, ultimately, I realized I was shooting myself in the foot by doing all of the exercise, but eating it all back late at night. Hippeas (chickpea chips) were going to be the death of me.

Now, here’s the thing: the last time I embarked on a serious weight loss initiative, I did it in an incredibly unhealthy way. I was 17 and had just gotten prescribed ADHD medication that made it very, very easy to not eat. So I would work out like a horse, sometimes not eat for several days, sometimes eating just 1,000 calories in one day while swimming thousands of yards or running 8 miles and lifting incredibly hard. And I felt fucking awesome because I was on legal crack (just kidding).

I got very thin. I looked strong and at my “athletic peak”, but anyone who truly knew me could look at pictures from that time and see in my eyes that I wasn’t really there. 

Now this is a story for another time, but at that time of my life, I also had a spiritual awakening. Full stop. Full-on upheaval, catharsis, personal transformation, and more than a healthy dose of delusion. This spiritual awakening existed in a gray area where it couldn’t be called exclusively good or exclusively bad — there was a lot of both. There were very destructive patterns of behavior that also existed alongside genuine, profound insight. It would be a mistake to classify the spiritual awakening as exclusively positive or negative, as one or the other. 

Eventually, the spiritual awakening led me to a place where my values and priorities were shifting. I began to find myself much less drawn to weight loss and maintaining a “shredded” physique for superficial reasons. I embarked on a journey of self-love… and then found myself gaining weight. After a few years, I was 50 pounds heavier from my lightest in high school. I think 25 of those lbs were healthy weight gain; the other 25 were unneeded.

Later, I would be diagnosed with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. If I “stopped caring” about my weight or how I looked for cosmetic reasons, I now had to for my health. Thus began a shift: I began to run again, lift again, and cleaned up my diet, cutting out red meat and eating more fruits and vegetables.

Within one year, I reversed my fatty liver. My physique improved, though I still carried some extra weight. This was a little over a year ago. 

So, I continued as normal, running and lifting, but still having lots of late-night snacks that kept me from getting to a potentially healthier weight. 

So, that brings me to this past September. I decided I’d try to lose weight again, realizing I was self-sabotaging with my late-night binges. I also thought I’d look a little nicer and maybe fare better romantically if I toned up a bit. I had the insight to honor this as a reality of dating without falling into self-loathing or insecurity; I loved myself and loved my body, and could maintain that while also recognizing that I could lose some weight for cosmetic reasons— almost like the way we choose to brush our teeth, or get a haircut, or take care of our skin. It usually isn’t some deep sense of self-loathing, but rather is simple self-care, even when predominantly cosmetic. 

Now, that being said, I was not foolish enough to think that the “old me” didn’t still exist somewhere in my psyche. No— I could feel that old compulsion, could see it in hibernation, could recognize I risked waking that beast if I treaded its territories of weight loss, calorie counting, and following the scale. 

I decided to honor this side of myself— not by pretending it didn’t exist, but by being willing to observe it and be present with it. It didn’t make sense to forever swear off weight loss because I did it unhealthy once; rather, I knew it meant I needed to be cautious and self-monitor as much as I could.

I can confidently say that was a load of fucking shit.

Just kidding. Kinda.

If “doing it healthy” was like avoiding those pathological waters, and losing myself yet again was like drowning, then I think I put my feet in, then dunked my head in for a bit, got water in my nose, started choking, then got the fuck out because it sucked.

I started low and slow, wanting to do it gently and healthily. I downloaded MyFitnessPal, a calorie counting app that I had long been familiar with. It was what I used the first time when I was younger. I set my desired rate of weight loss to 0.5 lbs per week — the slowest and steadiest setting — and set my activity level to “Active,” which allows for some extra calories to be consumed based on your daily energy expenditure. On top of that, I would enter calories burned from my exercise. 

You honestly would not have thought I was “on a cut” or trying to lose weight based on my food intake. Being young and active has its benefits. Yet, lo and behold, the scale gradually started dipping. Still, it was an adjustment at first — my body definitely protested a little — but I eventually got comfortable.

Eventually, I decided to up it to 1 lb lost/week. I had something come up in my personal life that made me a feel a bit insecure — namely, a friend mentioning that an ex had a boyfriend. I thought I was long over this ex, and even long knew she was in a relationship (which actually made it easier to move on upon hearing), but for some reason, that night, it hit me hard. I went home and upped the weight loss rate to 1 lb per week, desperately wanting to lose weight and either find someone new, or “shove it in her face” that I look better now. That’s the raw, honest truth, and one I contemplated not including in this post— but I just don’t think my blog should be a place where I hide from uncomfortable truths. 

Ultimately, it really wasn’t that dramatic of a move, because 1 lb/week is well-within the range of what’s considered a healthy rate of weight loss. It’s not like I started starving myself. Yet.

So, I kept chugging along, logging my calories and tracking my weight loss. Eventually, after a couple of months, I noticed that I was losing weight at a rate much faster than MyFitnessPal had anticipated. Though I was aiming for 1 lb lost per week, I was steadily dropping at a rate of 2 lbs/week, which is considered the upper limit of what’s healthy. I didn’t think much of it and was simply… ok with it. Like, cool— I’m losing weight effectively. Great.

I slowly, however, began to experience some symptoms of energy deficiency that you can expect in a cut. Some of these are ok to experience in light doses and need to be accepted as a natural part of some weight loss initiatives — namely, some libido decline, some energy decline/loss of explosiveness in the gym, et cetera. From previously having a roaring libido that demanded release every night (lol), I found myself naturally not craving anything like that for periods of a couple days. This was a marked shift for me specifically, a clear shift from what had long been normal for my body. I lost some drive in the gym, and sometimes found my motivation to complete my school coursework dwindling, more wanting to “just get through” the assignment or a lecture rather than being deeply invested in excelling or absorbing the subject matter at hand. 

Then, in early November, I made a poor choice. 

Even though I was already losing weight at a rate of 2 lbs per week while aiming for one, I decided to change my setting in the app to aim for 2 lbs/week. In other words: I decided to restrict my calories more, even though I was already losing weight at the upper limit of what’s considered healthy. I simply didn’t think that the app could be that wrong, nor did I really think about the real-world scale data. I simply thought that I was aiming for what was healthy within the app — period. Because the app called it a healthy rate of weight loss, I decided I was safe, not considering the app could be drastically wrong.

I failed to recognize these apps are estimates. They’re starting guidelines to help you find what numbers work in practice for your body. I valued the formula and the theory more than I valued my real-world results. I later found out my real TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) was around 3500-4000 calories per day, whereas the app (and even AI) estimated it to be 2500.

Oh, one more thing: I lowered my activity level from “Active” to “Lightly Active,” because I thought, if I’m entering my exercise already, why do I need the app to add my activity level for me? ChatGPT advised I do this (AI is never wrong, right?), so I cut calories even more. 

It was with almost morbid fascination that I watched my body enter what felt like a state of slowly dying. Everything began to slow down. I began to feel like a husk. Embarrassingly I will admit that I romanticized in my own mind the experience of going hungry— something about beauty being pain (what a load of shit), or something about the ways in which disordered eating patterns or mental illnesses in general can be viewed from a romantic lens. (Again, lots of uncomfortable truths in this post, like a self-exposé.)

I officially was no longer doing it healthy. I will also embarrassingly admit that on top of the two ways in which I cut my calorie intake — adjusting my weight loss goal and activity level in MyFitnessPal — I would also intentionally eat under the allowed calories if I felt like I could. Additionally, looking back, I realized I was never entering calories burned from weight lifting (substantial), yet another piece of math to add up to the horrifying reality that I was yet again starving myself while working myself to the bone.

What do I say? Some of this was genuinely accidental, like the ways I was misled to adjusted my settings in the app, thinking it was supposed to be healthy. Some of it was negligence, like not adding my lifting calories burned, or taking into account my actual rate of weight loss. Some of it was downright wrong and stupid, like intentionally eating under my already-peanut-ration of calories.

Those symptoms I mentioned before predictably spiked. For the first time in my life, I went weeks with 0 libido. 0 sexual desire. The thought of sex actually sounded gross (I’ve been refeeding myself for the past month and it sounds awesome again, thank you very much). I didn’t have the energy for basic tasks, housework felt impossible. My cats felt more like nuisances and burdens that I had no energy to care for (I did, but sadly could not muster up the energy to be truly affectionate with them beyond tending to their basic needs). I stopped responding to texts. I had no energy to go out and dance. 

This one hurts my heart— I largely stopped writing. My creative bone vanished. I was just trying to survive— I couldn’t think on a higher level, I didn’t have the energy or care to think about life in poetic terms. 

I stopped playing piano, stopped singing, stopped programming. I lost strength in the gym. I was getting close to a real injury — it hurt like a bitch to run.

All in all, I didn’t feel like I was living.

So, so quickly, I found myself in the same territory I used to be in. I’m glad to say I at least noticed what was happening. My body eventually forced myself to stop, and I listened. When it began to demand I eat — overriding all willpower — I did it without guilt. It was pretty glorious, to be honest — food tastes… so fucking good after that kind of deprivation (terrible, I know). 

But to adequately explain to you just what it felt like to experience my systems coming back online before? It was like a rebirth. I noticed the small things: oh, it doesn’t feel miserable to walk around the house. Oh, music sounds really good. Oh, I am feeling a natural impulse to play the piano — when was the last time that happened? Oh, I’m getting inspired and need to take my phone out to write this down before I forget — wait, when was the last time I felt so strongly about an idea? Oh my god, what have I been doing to myself? Oh my god, why did I do that to myself? Then, the waves of emotions, like mourning the past few months of my life, like feeling immense guilt for what I did to my body, like needing to make amends with a friend. Then admonishing myself for my foolishness, calling myself a dumbass— because I was.

Then, I noticed myself wanting to spend hours on a programming project I was immensely excited about again. Then, I noticed myself wanting to speak to my friends and seeing their texts/calls not as a burden, but as a privilege. Someone cares about me enough to reach out? I’m lucky!

Then, I felt like “me” again.

Still, I’m hit with waves of emotion reflecting on it all.

Oh yeah, that. I didn’t feel.

My emotions… went offline. I felt so damn numb. I almost didn’t notice it was gone until it came back, until I noticed myself crying at movies again, being moved by books, thinking to myself, “When was the last time I felt this?”

I’m a little bit disappointed to say that the weight loss initiative went exactly where I didn’t want it to go. Still, I’m relentlessly hopeful that, if I ever need to try something like that again, I can do it smarter.

Ultimately, I’m reclaiming my relationship with food as something that fuels health and life. I’m honoring that fitness isn’t everything I am. I’m honoring that my life is so much more than my appearance, that I value my health, joy, creativity, ambition, all these things that feed my soul, way too much to ever let them go again, especially to something so empty and pointless.

So, yeah. That’s that. I half-accidentally starved myself, and it sucked.

I’m eating food right now, and it’s damn good.

I feel damn good.