Recovery - planning, thinking, eating food again! ARGH!

I am just embarking on my recovery from anorexia (5ft2 and 96lbs). So I know I need to gain weight, but this is secondary to regaining my health. Reading through the comments this ED Recovery forums, I am so comforted to read that even with 3000 calories per day, a large proportion of the readership are not gaining weight. This is consoling, and enlightening – I’m eating about 700 calories per day now, and am terrified of weight gain, but now I’m beginning to challenge the verity of this notion. How could I gain on 700 calories? Of course, it’s much more than my previous 240 calories per day, but I already feel much better in myself (despite my anorexic voice beckoning me back to those paltry numbers…) This is so difficult. People recommend different foods, but if I slipped out of line I’d feel I’d completely lost control of myself. For example, Tori recommended peanut butter – how the hell could I ever eat peanut butter? For one, I’d risk enjoying it too much and not being able to stop eating it. I’d just feel like I was permitted to eat whatever I fancied – I can’t get into those habits! I swear that’s how people get fully fledged bulimia. But saying that I am craving to make progress and just be HEALTHY again. God, I couldn’t care for the terms ‘thin’ or ‘fat’, I want to be healthy and that’s that. There is no such thing as a happy anorexic, and I know that losing weight is not satisfying really – not in the long term. I need to trust that eating more, even if it’s just a little bit more, won’t make me expand into a huge elephantine creature. How could it? I’m a human, I am burning calories just sitting here – if I want to get weight I’ll need to at the very least replace the calories I burn, if not adding many more besides. How do people just ‘eat more’? Do people plan thinks very rigidly in advance – e.g. write up a big list of foods permitted, amounts, and times to eat them – in order to full a certain number of calories? Help me guys! XXXXX

PS - my eating disorder was very much 6 days of restriction, and 1 day binge/purge (7000 calories, seriously) - I was still losing weight on this, but now my former 'binge/purge' day approaches, I am wondering HOW to get through it? I have arranged to stay away from home (hence the binge/purge environment), but I don't know whether I should really really restrict on this day, or aim for a 'NORMAL' calorie intake, like 1500? Any ideas? It's pretty distressing to think about changing this behaviour, since the 'Binge' is pretty much what would get me through the week in the throes of my darkest anorexia..... but yeah, I need advice. I don't want to feel like my life is denied ENTIRELY of 'treats' (since I only eat 3 foods a day - soup, yogurt, cornflakes)... I want to break this habit, but want to make it realistic for recovery purposes! THANKSXXX

My goodness, darling. Maybe if you had more variety in your diet, you would enjoy it more! I think you should try for 1500 a day, or at least 1000 to start off with, because eating 700 is not going to help you. You actually won't gain significantly. I'd say just stop counting calories for like, one day, and see how you like it. With me, I have to force myself not to count or I start to restrict and I had to gain weight, so I couldn't allow that. And I've gone from 103 lb to 115 (at 5'7"). It's hard, but just tell yourself that you are BEAUTIFUL and you deserve to feel that way.