Not surprisingly, weight was one of the major things I've had to come to terms with during my recovery. The difference between my high and low weight is about 70lbs. When I entered treatment at my low, I was put on a restoration meal plan until I gained to 96% of my "ideal body weight" (or a BMI of 20). Although I was "happy" about this (or as happy as I could be at the time), I came to realize in my recovery that my body is actually most healthy, and at its true "ideal" body weight with a BMI of about 23 (which is 107% of my "IBW"). When I am eating healthily, normally, and intuitively, my body maintains this BMI. If I ever slipped back into symptoms, my body fell into a 21 and below range, but would find its way back to 23 when I normalized my eating patterns. It took awhile to figure this out because I hated that, for my body, I was most healthy with an "upper range" BMI. However, being recovered for 2 years now, I have accepted this fact. I choose to eat nourishing foods, enough of them, and listen to my body. I haven't weighed myself in years so I do not know exactly where I am, but I have also discovered along my recovery journey that I am allergic to gluten. When I omitted this from my diet I dropped 5-7lbs within 2 weeks, which indicated that it was effecting thyroid function, digestion, water retention, etc. And now, I couldn't feel better, health-wise. It was a long hard road out of my eating disorder, and I am so grateful to have overcome that cycle. In the end, every one's body is different so it adjusts and recovers in its own way.
Oh, also for this reason, I think the BMI system is ridiculous and should not be the only means of calculating someone's ideal weight, especially when being treated for an ED. There are so many other factors that determine someone's ideal body weight other than just their height.
Most people at my treatment center on weight restoration were assessed using what their normal body weights before their ED. BMI was only used as a guessing point when someone clearly needed weight restoration but they'd been underweight so long they had no info to go off of. Then again I would say that was common, too. My therapist tells me many people end up gaining after treatment eating normally too, as their set point was higher than they had anticipated. And yeah IA completely on BMI...
What if you don't know what your normal weight before your ED would be? I started restricting at 14, and I don't think that's a weight any grown woman would have (I'm almost 27 now)...though I weigh the same or less now.
That was actually pretty common. In some cases, if they had the info, they used percentiles from childhood (before the ED was present). So if you were commonly in a higher or lower percentile as a child that might indicate what your optimal weight as an adult. For me it was kind of a moot point because I wasn't on weight restoration anyway but from my childhood weights I was always at or above the 50th percentile which is about what I am now...
If they had no info on childhood percentiles and the ED had started early, then that's where the minimum adult BMI for normal weight would come in. But it's really hard to predict what exactly would be right...i mean we had a woman in her forties with a high weight at 15.
This is the system that the Renfrew Center used while I was there (and I'm pretty sure they still do). They basically calculated 5lbs for every inch (of my height) which determined my "ideal." Then they calculated my BMI and "ideal weight" percentages from that figure.
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If they had no info on childhood percentiles and the ED had started early, then that's where the minimum adult BMI for normal weight would come in. But it's really hard to predict what exactly would be right...i mean we had a woman in her forties with a high weight at 15.
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