Minnie Maud

Minnie Maud Recovery

Minnie Maud is an eating disorder recovery method developed by Gwyneth Olwyn. It has since been rebranded as the Homeodynamic Recovery Method. The website with all of the pertinent information can be found here. What follows is my own analysis of the method and a brief overview of my successes with it.

MinnieMaud Guidelines are the guidelines for recovery from restrictive eating disorders such as anorexia, binging/purging, bulimia, orthorexia and any EDNOS involving food restriction that I followed in recovery. The “Minnie” refers to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the “Maud” refers to the anorexia family based treatment program, the Maudsley protocol.

The guideline’s food amounts are what energy-balanced, non-eating-disordered people normally eat to maintain their health and weight. Meaning your minimum intake guidelines are what you can expect to eat during AND after recovery. However, you can expect to eat far more than minimum intake during the energy-restoration part recovery. (AKA extreme hunger).

The way to successfully follow the MinnieMaud program is to:

Eat the minimum intake every single day. It is a minimum intake and you are both encouraged and expected to eat more. Never restrict food intake. Your minimum intake is between 2500-3500 depending on your age, height, and gender and can be found on her website.
No weighing yourself or measuring yourself. This is the easiest way to relapse, so just avoid it completely. While I was gaining weight, I covered mirrors, threw away my scales, and bought loose flowing dresses that would fit me even when I was bloated or heavier. All of these things were crucial to me being okay with the weight gain and getting through the hardest part.
No exercise. At all.

The MinnieMaud guidelines believe that restrictive eating disorders are neurobiological conditions. The condition can be either active or in remission, but it is never completely cured. Part of remission is addressing the anxiety and guilt you associate with food head on with a therapist to avoid repeating inappropriate response behaviors to eating such as over exercising or restricting food.

So, the three steps to recovery are:

Weight restoration – to your SET POINT.
Repairing and reversing physical and metabolic damage.
Developing new non-restrictive neural patterns in response to usual anxiety triggers.

These steps can all be achieved through following the program.

I discovered Minnie Maud over a year before I finally committed to it. The one predicament about this method is that you have to want recovery for yourself in order to successfully go through with it. When I found the program, it was still available on the original Youreatopia site. I haunted the site and forums for months as I unsuccessfully attempted to recover through quasi recovery. When I finally found a therapist who supported Minnie Maud and I committed at the beginning of 2015. My whole world began to change and by the end of that year I was finally in remission.

Clearly MinnieMaud worked for me. I still consider myself in remission to this day. After I started eating the minimums within a few weeks extreme hunger hit me and for the next month and a half to two months I was eating between 5000-10000 calories a day, sometimes more. It was like I had a hunger deep inside me that could never be satisfied. Then that eventually calmed down and I kept eating to the minimums. I love the concept of a minimum intake because it completely flipped the script from what I had been implementing for years. Instead of being afraid of going over a certain number, I now had absolutely no limit! It is a freeing feeling. I felt the healing relationship to food. I felt the physical transformation. I felt the eating disorder disappear into the furthest, darkest corner of my brain.

Left: Jan 2015, just deciding to do MM. Sad, thin, empty, confused, miserable. Right: Sep 2015, VERY happily enjoying my summer 9 months into MM and 4 dress sizes bigger. Happy, social, free.

If you are considering this method of recovery I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you are still not sold, do the research on it yourself. That’s what I did and it was more than enough to convince me. People can say what they want about Minnie Maud but they cannot argue with a success story like mine and the many others out there. The best way to fight food restriction is with food. Food is medicine, it keeps us alive, and none of us are born with issues about it. MinnieMaud finally allowed me to remember what it was like to have a normal relationship with food and my body, it taught me so much about being a kinder compassionate human both to myself and to others. It allowed me to find myself again after years of hiding being an eating disorder and for that I am eternally grateful.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was a study done by Ancel Keys in the late 1940s to study the effects of famine on war torn countries in Europe post World War Two. Besides fulfilling its intended purpose – the study also ended up shedding the first light on how dieting and food restriction effects the human body.

Here is an overview of how the experiment worked:

The subjects were all men. First, they were studied under a 12-week control period in which they were fed a standard diet of 3200 calories. During this time their psychological and physiological states were measured in order to determine each subject’s baseline condition. At this phase each man was at their natural weight, which they all maintained on the control diet they were fed.

The next phase was the starvation period. For the following 24 weeks all of the men’s diets were cut by approximately half to 1570 calories per day. It was during this phase that the behavior of the subjects began to change drastically. They all began presenting symptoms that we commonly associate with chronic dieters or anorexia sufferers today. Some of the symptoms observed included:

A decrease in strength and energy
Apathy towards everything except for food
A sudden and intense interest in food displayed through reading cookbooks for fun and to stare at the pictures
They took advantage of being allowed to chew gum by chewing packs and packs of it per day, and they guzzled coffee and water to stave off feelings of hunger
They became irritable around meal times
Many men became depressed
They lost weight (obviously)
Their heart rates decreased
They felt dizzy
They felt lethargic
They were constantly cold
Almost all subjects experienced body dysmorphic disorder and were unable to recognize how much weight they had actually lost

The next phase of the experiment was the recovery period. The men were split into four subgroups and each group ate a different caloric intake to recover from the symptoms of starvation. The first group ate 1970 calories, the second 2370 calories, the third 2770 calories, and final the fourth ate 3170 calories. Even with the increase in calories all of the men were still left feeling hungry or starving. These increased intakes were not helping and specifically the men in the lowest group were not feeling better AT ALL. In light of this discovery Ancel Keys decided to add 800 calories to each groups intake. Eventually he observed that the only factor helping these men recover was providing them way more food than he initially thought would be necessary. He concluded that a person needs at least 4000 calories a day to recover and rebuild their strength.

After the recovery period was over the men were free to eat whatever they pleased, but Keys continued to observe a small handful of them. He observed that most subjects continued to eat thousands and thousands of calories a day (12,000+ in some cases) for many months. Many subjects reported to have an unending, insatiable, hunger months after the experiment ended. As the subjects allowed themselves to re-feed through eating to their extreme hunger, their metabolisms began to heal, their strength returned, and many of the symptoms of starvation began to vanish. Although to the layman it may appear that these men were massively “overeating” it became extremely evident that their bodies requires this seemingly inordinate amount of food to fully heal all of the damage.

On average the men regained their weight back to what it had been previously plus 10%. You may identify this as an overshoot. With unlimited food and unrestricted eating eventually their weight plateaued and about nine months later all of them were back to the weight they had been at the very beginning of the experiment. This is one of the first documented and analyzed cases of a body’s “set point.” Despite the original fear that all of this unrestrained eating would cause infinite and exponential weight gain, that proved to not be true. This experiment demonstrated that over eating and starvation induced hunger only presented as long as a body was below its set point.

And that was the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. It’s fascinating because just a cursory analysis of the study demonstrates how insanely harmful caloric restriction is on the human body. As you may note, all of the symptoms that the men experience in the starvation phase are eerily similar the symptoms felt by eating disorder sufferers and chronic dieters. Sadly, most people who struggle with a disordered relationship to food today are often eating even less than the subjects of this study were. A typical dietary recommendation for people seeking to lose weight is often a caloric total lower than the 1,580 calories the study subjects ate. It is important to recognize that these “dietary guidelines” are dangerously low, unsustainable, and unrealistic amounts that should not be practiced.

Furthermore if you are stuck trying to recover from yo-yo dieting, binging and purging, restrictive eating, or any other disordered relationship to food this study gives you an excellent blue print for how to recover. This was the science that I read when I decided to go all in on recovery using the Minnie Maud method. This science validates that method of recovery (and now so does my own lived experience with it).

Please feel free to watch my video below for a synopses of the information above along with an outline of my own experience and my results from using this method to recover from anorexia.

Relationships in Eating Disorders and Recovery

Happy Valentines Day to all of you! I hope you have a wonderful day celebrating all of the love in your life. Love between family, friends, pets, and romantic partners! Being in a romantic relationship while suffering or recovering from an eating disorder is not an easy task. Often it is difficult for a partner to handle the stresses of the disorder by watching their loved one hurt themselves emotionally or physically. I’ve been with people through every stage of my journey and here is what I’ve learned.

When I got sick I was dating my now ex-boyfriend. Our relationship was long distance and he was with me when I developed anorexia, suffered from it, and made my first few attempts at recovery. Overall, he handled it pretty well and was very supportive but over time the stress and seemingly unending pain started to wear him down and after dating for almost three years he left me. (Whatever, I’m too good for him so it’s cool). From that experience I learned the following tips:

It’s okay to tell your partner what is going on with you and keep them included, but don’t turn them into your personal therapist. Don’t put absolutely every burden you are dealing with onto them (remember a lot of these thoughts are not your own, but originate from the disorder). A person may love you but everyone has their limits and one person cannot be responsible for handling all of your problems.
Allow them to cope however they need to. Everyone handles stressful and difficult situations differently and there is nothing wrong with that.
Don’t blame them for trying to help. Even if the help is unwarranted or not actually helpful. If you feel your partner trying to help you, be an effective communicator about what would be the best way for them to do that.
Make sure your partner can handle the stress of loving someone with a mental disorder. Sometimes people just can’t, and you cannot put your entire reasons for happiness into your faith in another being. You need to be okay relying on yourself and paid professionals.

I have been with my current partner for a little over 2 years and we are as happy as can be. I’m writing this as I stare at the beautiful flowers he had sent to my office. I am lucky to be recovered and to rarely ever flirt with a relapse, but nonetheless I now have the tools to be able to handle our relationship in a more mature way.

Happy valentines day everybody! Hold your person close, they love you (even if your person is your mom or your cat).

Quasi-Recovery

Quasi-recovery is a point in recovery where weight has been restored, but your body and mind have not been fully healed. It is a halfway point to real recovery. While you may be at a “healthy” weight, you may not be at the right weight for your body. You might be in quasi-recovery if you are still fixated on calories and are still restricting (even if your restricting to higher amounts like 2000-2500 a day), if you’re exercising for the purposes of maintaining your weight, if you have not given into extreme hunger or mental hunger, if you still have a fear of gaining weight, or if the ED voices have not stopped.

DC5F2300-D471-46C8-979B-DCD96637AB0B — Top picture – Summer 2014, Deeply in quasi recovery, exercising to maintain my weight, counting and restricting calories, still feeling trapped by food Bottom picture – Summer 2017 in full recovery for almost 2 years, little to no exercise, unlimited calories, free of all eating disorder behavior/thoughts

I was stuck in quasi-recovery for over a year. I was convinced I was recovered because I had gained a few pounds, could eat more calories, and wasn’t starving myself anymore. But the truth is I was just as sick as ever, still obsessed with numbers and worried about maintaining my weight. The obsessive thoughts hadn’t stopped and that was because I had not truly let myself recover. The most dangerous thing about being in this state is that it is very very easy to relapse because you are on the edge of letting yourself truly recover, and falling back into old habits. I relapsed several times during my quasi-recovery. When you’re here your body still hasn’t found its homeostasis that it can happily maintain because the truth is, when you’re in quasi recovery your metabolism hasn’t healed. Even though you’re eating more, you’re still restricting your body from what it needs to find it’s set point which is why you will gain weight on lower numbers. The only way to stop this is to truly recover.

To truly recover means to give into the mental hunger, to stop restricting any calories by eating at least 3500 a day, to stop working out, and to let your body gain more weight than you may be initially comfortable with. As you know if you are familiar with me, my blog, or my youtube channel I recovered this way using the minniemaud method. The information that this approach derived its methodology from was the Minnesota starvation experiment. This experiment was the only in-depth study on calorie restriction’s effects and how re-feeding works. Following the logic of minniemaud is what allowed me to finally decide to truly recover and it is through my own personal experience and the experience of many other girls I met through my journey that I can confidently say it is the only way you will ever truly free yourself because if you are stuck in quasi, you are not truly free.

Will you gain weight in real recovery? Yes.
Will you overshoot your set point? You might.
Will you experience extreme hunger? Definitely, although how intense and for how long depends on how intensely and for how long you were restricting yourself.
Will you finally be set free of the control numbers and food has over your life? Yes.
Will you claim your life, soul, and energy back? 100%
Will your body eventually naturally settle at its set point? Absolutely.

Quasi recovery is a dangerous place to be. If you are there then it is time to take your life back and take the dive into a full and honest recovery now. The longer you stay in quasi, the longer and harder a real recovery will be.

To Exercise Or Not To Exercise?

That is the question… Should you exercise in recovery? The short answer is no.

For those recovering from disordered relationships to their bodies and food, exercise is a bad idea. Exercise burns calories and the goal of eating disorder recovery is weight restoration, so doing any exercise to slow or impede this process goes directly against any recovery efforts. Another goal of recovery is to regain or discover a healthier mentality about your body and food. Trying to burn calories in this process can keep you stuck in a mindset that isn’t beneficial. It is true that there is more to exercising than just burning calories such as becoming stronger with weight training or more centered with yoga, however those benefits will still be there and can be reaped AFTER recovery has been achieved and maintained.

In my recovery, I went through a few phases of “quasi-recovery” before I fully committed to a robust recovery plan which you can read about in this post. In my “quasi-recovery” state I continued to exercise. I was exercising less than when I was sick but the mentality behind my exercise was still dangerous. I was still counting calories and aiming for a deficit. I was still trying to stall the weight gain. I was using exercise as a crutch to keep me from truly letting my body heal and find its set point. When I finally made the very difficult and complicated decision to truly recover and eat without any restrictions I made the equally difficult decision to stop exercising completely as well.

At first it was challenging, I found myself doing pushups and squats absentmindedly in my bedroom to compensate for the guilt I felt not working out. Eventually I stopped even that and truly let my body rest for the first time in a long time. As the weight came back on and my body changed, my mindset began to change too. I slowly but surely learned that exercise was just a way I was punishing my body for what I ate. I learned to love myself and enjoy all of the things that recovery brought back into my life. I needed that time of complete rest to truly understand how exercise was not good for my recovery.

It wasn’t until I was fully weight restored to my set point and mentally recovered for an entire year that I began to wonder about exercising again. This time however, I noticed a very important difference in my mindset. I didn’t want to punish myself, burn off all of my fat, or create any kind of deficit. I wanted to move my body with love and celebrate what it could do. I began doing yoga again. I have been doing yoga for a few months now and not once have I felt “too fat” or “not good enough.” Not once has weight loss been my ultimate goal. I can feel myself getting stronger and more flexible and I look at myself in the mirror as a powerful warrior who has won the battle.

However, despite all of my progress I can never forget that I have a history with eating disorders. As great and body positive and happy as the workouts make me now, I know that there is always a chance the anorexic voice can creep back in. If I ever feel like I need to shed the weight, if I ever force myself to a class I really don’t want to do just out of guilt, and if I ever start to abuse exercise again I know I need to completely stop.

Exercise can be wonderful if done safely and as a celebration of movement and strength, but for those attempting to recover from an eating disorder none of those benefits are pertinent. The key to recovery is to eat without restriction, stop all exercise, and learn to be okay with yourself without making any changes to who you naturally are.

Namaste

How I Recovered

I want to start off by saying that I am not a dietician, psychologist, or doctor of any sort. If you are experiencing serious medical concerns, please go see a doctor as soon as possible and if you are having any abnormal, anxious, depressed, or suicidal thoughts or feel like you need a trained ear to help support you please seek counseling from a professional.

For me, recovery from my eating disorder took a long time and happened in several phases. Boiling the whole process down to a series of easy-to-follow steps just isn’t realistic because this disease is complicated and different for everyone who is affected by it. This is my recovery story and though it may not be exactly the “right” method, it is the one that set me free.

TRIGGER WARNING – There are descriptions of restrictive eating in here.

The day I googled “symptoms of anorexia” I felt my stomach sink as my eyes scanned the pages identifying with all the evidence I saw. After a lot of crying and googling for more answers, I was finally ready to accept that I might have a problem. However, I sat on that knowledge without doing anything about it for a long time. I told my boyfriend and my parents and they were supportive and not surprised but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I made an appointment with a therapist, I did some more online research, but mostly I just ignored the truth for as long as I could.

I saw therapists and went to doctors but the most impactful discovery for my recovery was online communities. It all started with my Tumblr recovery page. I discovered other girls who were recovering from anorexia and what that process looked like for them. I spent hours and hours reading posts from recovering girls and the articles they found interesting. The first step of course, was to increase my intake. It happened slowly over the course of a few months. I increased to 1200 a day then 1300 than 1500 and so on until I settled on 1700 a day for many months. I stopped all workouts that weren’t yoga. I made a list of all the food that scared me and I vowed to try and eat everything on the list at least once. I started photographing my meals and posting about my days on my tumblr. I was in this state, which I refer to as “quasi-recovery” for over a year. I went through several periods of relapse where I would return to my old ED behaviors before returning to quasi. I was still an unhealthy low weight, but I wasn’t losing anymore I was maintaining. At least I was eating I thought… sure, I was still cold all the time, afraid of certain foods, isolating myself, losing my hair, not menstruating, feeling depressed and suicidal, I sprained my ankle in my sleep because my bones were so weak, and sitting down still hurt because all my bones stuck out of my body… but for some reason I still felt like I was “recovered”. Just because I wasn’t eating only 500 calories a day and the fog in my head was dissipating I thought the battle was won. The problem was that numbers still ruled my life and I was not happy. I was not recovered.

The beginning of my salvation came upon the discovery of youreatopia.com and the Minnie Maud method of recovery. In summary, it is a system of recovering in which the person eats at least 3,000 calories (some cases it is 2,500, and some it is 3,500, but for me, it was 3,000) and stays as sedentary as possible. This is all in an effort to restore one’s metabolism, while simultaneously expanding from the mental restriction of anorexia. The 3,000 calories required is the minimum, however, if one’s hunger is not satisfied at 3,000, then they are encouraged to eat until satisfied. In fact, many people who recover this way experience what is called extreme hunger and can eat upwards of 10,000 calories a day. Minnie Maud is named after the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which is an fascinating study of starvation on the human body. I was spellbound by the study, and I encourage you to read through it too to discover the negative impact of calorie restriction. Minnie Maud is controversial because the woman behind it all doesn’t have any known credentials but many girls follow her advice with success regardless. I had known about Minnie Maud for months but never truly considered it as the right option for myself. In truth, it scared me. I think my eating disorder knew that doing this would work, so it constantly told me it was the wrong thing to do. I haunted the online forums but never truly committed. Then one day after almost 2 years of quasi-recovery, I just did it. I ate the minimums and didn’t move all day. It felt horrible, I hated myself, but also a little tiny part of me felt a little freer. I started following the guidelines every day.

The extreme hunger was very real. At the worst of it I was eating over 5,000 calories a day and I had the feeling of food being stuck in the back of my throat constantly. I worried incessantly that I was becoming a binge eater but I just kept going because I didn’t know what else to do and I wanted this to work. With the freedoms the minimums gave me I was finally able to eat foods I had avoided for years, pasta, cheese, ice cream, candy, avocados, bread, and so much more. I finally was able to stop counting calories like a maniac. One exciting day that I will never forget is the day that I was able to delete MyFitnessPal from my phone. The app had been controlling me like a mindless zombie for years and all of a sudden poof! I didn’t need it! I still had a lot of negative thoughts, the first few months on Minnie Maud were not all roses and sunshine. I had to cover all my mirrors and hide my scale. I was truly gaining weight for the first time in years and that made me more nervous than anything else. However, a big component of the Minnie Maud system is the theory of a “set point.” That you can keep eating the minimums for the rest of your life and eventually the weight gain will taper and each body will hover around the weight that is right for it. I was skeptical, but I had read success stories and knew girls who had recovered and I used the anecdotal evidence to keep myself going.

fearfood — Pictures from my tumblr of me challenging myself to “fear foods”

Two months in to Minnie Maud my ex-boyfriend of almost three years broke up with me. It was so devastating for me at the time. He had been there from the beginning and had always been supportive. The problem was he bore the brunt of most of the negative thoughts. I depended on him for emotional support and it just got to be too much for him (tangent: let’s not blame that breakup on me though, he was a cheating asshole who left me for someone else and couldn’t own up to it like a man.) I thought that it would be the worst thing for my recovery, but in truth after grieving for a month I started making more progress than I ever had before. I didn’t have him as an emotional crutch and I finally had to just depend on myself to push through. The bulk of my recovery happened in the five months after he left me. Mid way through that same year I looked at myself in the mirror and knew the battle was truly over. The last hump of recovery was the hardest. In my final month of recovery I was still counting calories and weighing myself. I was eating tons of food – to the point of stomach pain every day. My body and brain were begging me to eat. and eat. and eat. I was uncomfortable, but I didn’t stop. I never stopped. I felt large, and insecure, it was not easy. Then one day without me even noticing, it was easy. One day – I didn’t count my calories. I didn’t step on the scale. I didn’t think about food unless I was eating it. My body felt fantastic. I felt fantastic, and I knew I was healed. I don’t think about numbers, I don’t care about food, and every day I love my ever expanding beautiful soul.

In the end, I gained 40 pounds back. I experienced painful swelling, bloating, and stretch marks but I pushed forward anyway. I ended up at a weight that I could truly love myself at without hurting myself. The best part of recovery was feeling my personality return and grow into something more exciting than it had ever been before. I did stop gaining weight eventually despite not changing my eating habits. I was the same weight I had been before I became anorexic because set point is real. I haven’t obsessively counted calories in almost a year but I have to imagine I’m still eating near the minimums every day and my weight has stayed stable give or take a pound or two since the initial weight gain. I don’t usually weigh myself, I can just tell by my clothes. I felt truly recovered from the thoughts and the actions about 7 months into Minnie Maud. Today, I eat and eat and eat – not because I think I have to but because I live in an amazing city with delicious food. I eat because I work in an industry that feeds me decadent delicious free meals. I eat because it is an important way that I connect with the people I love. I eat because food is delicious. I eat because we need food to live. I eat because I remember what it’s like not to and I will never go back to that life again. I am recovered.

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