This post is a bummer, so if you want to avoid that you ought to turn back now, but I’m really hoping someone has experience and/or advice that can help with this.

Lately, I’ve been dealing with some serious depression + a bad relapse of my eating disorder, and have lost 15 pounds in just a couple months as a result. It’s been a serious struggle for me to eat enough to stay out of the hospital, much less enough to maintain my weight or gain more, and even if I spend all day trying to force myself to eat I’ve rarely been able to get down more than 1000 calories in a day. Worth noting is that my eating disorder, selective eating disorder, hasn’t got anything to do with body image and instead revolves around perceived problems with the food- its taste, texture, obsessive contamination fears about it, etc. To put it simply, the problem is that I haven’t got any energy to prepare food, and when someone else makes it for me I can still barely eat any of it because no matter what it is, it tastes like garbage and makes me feel unbearably nauseous to even look at it.

What do you do in a situation like this? I’ve spoken to multiple doctors but all they’ve done is prescribe appetite stimulants that don’t help enough and say that if it stays out of control like this for too long I’ll eventually need to be hospitalized.

I feel like if anyone would know how to force yourself to eat when it feels impossible, this would be the place to find them. I miss gaining weight and would prefer to return to doing so (both because I enjoy getting fatter and because right now it would help improve my deteriorating physical health), but at this point I’d settle for just stopping the weight loss before it reaches a point where I need emergency medical care.

If anyone has any advice I’d really appreciate it.

I originally got into this after nearly being hospitalized for being too underweight, which is an issue I’ve struggled with for most of my life due to an eating disorder. The idea of getting very fat is something I find sexy which is definitely a big part of why my ultimate goals are as big as they are (if it was exclusively for health reasons I’d only want to be about 170, which would still be nearly twice my lowest adult weight, but my actual long term goal is more around 250), but really a lot of the reason I want to gain a lot of weight is because it will give me some insulation against something like that happening again. If you’re 200 pounds and lose 25 pounds due to having an episode in which you’re unable to get anywhere near the amount of calories you need for a while because food just doesn’t seem edible, that’s still not good, but it’s much better than being 100 pounds and having that same thing happen. Of course, this also means that gaining has been difficult for me because I have trouble consistently eating enough to gain any weight, but I have managed to gain about 30 pounds over the few years since I started trying.

Thank you, I’ll try that out! I eat a lot of pasta, so I’ll try to really oil that up.

Unfortunately, it is prescription only in the US. In other countries it is available OTC, though, usually under various brand names. You might be able to order it from another country, but since mine is prescription I haven’t tried to do so.

If you’re very skinny right now, you may be able to get your doctor to prescribe it if you say you’re having trouble eating- I got mine after losing a lot of weight due to my eating disorder and my doctor continues prescribing it even now that my weight is in the normal range for my height (30 pounds heavier than when she first prescribed it). The good thing about getting it prescription is that sometimes your insurance covers it.

finickyfeedee:
It’s never made me sleepy, but sleepiness is a well known side effect that a lot of people experience when taking it, so there’s a good chance it might make you sleepy.

Skinny_gig:
How effective is it?
If there is a choice, to spend money on this or on the cream, which one to choose?[/quote]

If it’s down to either the cream or the cyproheptadine, go with the cream for sure. Cyproheptadine will increase your appetite dramatically, but no matter how big your appetite gets it won’t make you gain any weight if you haven’t got anything fattening to eat. As far as I know, there’s just about nothing you can eat that’s more fattening than cream.

I don’t wear my clothes visibly too small in public since I need to maintain a level of professionalism, but I love wearing jeans that are too tight so that I can feel my belly pushing out over them, but with a long enough shirt to cover it so no one can tell but me.

I’ve never been a chef, so sorry if this is a stupid question, but I’ve heard adding oils (such as olive oil, canola oil, etc) into foods and drinks adds a lot of calories without affecting the taste too much. But, I tried adding some olive oil (around a tablespoon) to my protein shake, and it would not mix, looked gross, tasted awful, and ruined my protein shake! How are people adding extra oil to foods and drinks without it being so noticeably disgusting?

It’s never made me sleepy, but sleepiness is a well known side effect that a lot of people experience when taking it, so there’s a good chance it might make you sleepy.

I lost about 10 pounds recently because I was busy and I don’t tend to eat much when I’m not making an active effort to do so, and a little over a week ago I decided I’d try to regain it (and hopefully more). I still don’t have that much time so unless I’m counting them wrong, which is possible, I’m only eating a surplus of about 300 calories per day on average, but I weighed myself today and was shocked to discover that I’ve already regained five pounds! Even if we assume that my gain started sooner than my active effort to gain started, that would still be 5 pounds in just a couple of weeks. I knew that regained weight usually comes on faster than new weight, but I had no idea it was this dramatic. When I was first starting to gain, it took me two or three weeks of 1000+ surplus calorie days to put on that much. This speedy gain came as quite a surprise and is very exciting. It’s real motivation to try a bit harder, too- if I can gain 5 pounds this fast on such a small surplus now, I would love to see what I can gain if I find a way to fit some real overeating into my schedule.

I’m looking forward to winter, last year I was able to gain around 30 pounds by drinking a lot of egg nog, which was my record gain and changed my natural “not trying to gain or lose” weight from 100 to 125. If I can get that set point to change again, I’ll be well on my way to getting chubby for real.

As far as I know all it does is increase appetite, but cyproheptadine has been very effective for me and doesn’t seem to leave any residual effects when I go a while without taking it.