I'm so sorry. I wish I could say it goes away or gets completely better. Maybe for some people it does. Not for me though. I'm 40, and I've had this thing since I was 19. I've mostly recovered but for the thoughts, but an emergency ulcer surgery in February which caused me rapid weight loss really woke up the ED thoughts.

I compare myself to other women all the time. Still. I had to quit going to eating disorder support groups because I'd make everything a sort of competition with those there and would be jealous of anyone thinner than I was or fighting to avoid hospitalization. It was not a good place for me to be.

I'm sorry about your issues with your sister. I'm not sure of your age or your living situation. Do you live with her and see her daily or not so often?

I don't think anyone who hasn't had an eating disorder can ever understand it, so I have to ignore any "helpful" advice on that front.

Luckily, I don't have a person in my life similar to your sister making me jealous about weight. I do have 2 sisters, but one is overweight, and the other is normal weight. I'm a loner too; I don't have any girl friends except my best friend from college, and she now lives in Connecticut while I'm in Texas. She didn't want to confront me about the ED in college even though it was so obvious, especially when we'd take pictures. I'm showing my age here; those were the 1990s, nearly all the pictures were print. I stumbled across some cleaning my office the a couple weeks ago, finally had to stuff the loose ones in a box and put the albums on the shelf without looking. That was a bad day.

The worst thing was a big part of me was jealous of how thin I was in those pictures...I was so bad, I should have been hospitalized (but wasn't because my parents didn't have insurance and couldn't afford it) and used "tricks of the trade" to weigh in at the psychologist just at the point where she couldn't immediately get me hospitalized.

Stay strong and keep from the mindset that you need to relapse. It is SO hard to come back from an eating disorder. You can read my lists of diagnoses below (though when my ED was bad it was full-blown anorexia, not ED-NOS). Out of all those psych issues, the hardest one to overcome was the anorexia. And not by a little bit. By far. It is the hardest thing I have done in my life, harder than giving birth, harder than being a mom to a child with sensory issues, much harder than bipolar or panic disorder or even the perforated ulcer surgery I had in February (not related to the ED, just NSAID use and a bacterial infection), but that surgery & recovery was so painful (I didn't even know people could feel that much pain and the morphine might as well have been nothing), it is easily one of my life's worst experiences ever.

Overcoming an ED is a huge accomplishment. You should be proud of yourself because it IS a big deal, even if it's not something you can go around bragging about. Which kind of seems unfair because this has to be one of the hardest challenges life can throw at a person.