Body image

Having a poor body image from a young age contributed to my eating disorders. Not in the stereotypical stare in the mirror “I must be skinny way” often depicted, but in the deep seated beliefs I formed which told me “this body you have will not give you a happy life as it is”. Growing up I never imagined the body I had could get me a partner, a job, or friends. I felt that it wasn’t good enough, but that if I changed it, I’d feel better, become less shy, more bubbly, & all of the other parts of life would become available to me. I would have given all my money to someone who could change my body. I would have & did take dangerous pills to quell my appetite. I would have slept through months of my life & lost them forever if it meant I could have woken up having not eaten in this time, and therefore shrunk myself.

Image credit: Instagram @jennifer_rollin

What interests me about the way I thought as a child is that there was some evidence around me that people of all shapes and sizes were doing things like getting jobs, marrying, having babies & even smiling. What did I think of these people? Did I even consider these people? I think I presumed they must have either had a lucky break, or been secretly miserable, just like the people with ashamed faces in the “before” photos of the dieting magazines had. The dialogue around fat activism, body acceptance & body positivity will surely help dispel the myths around this, & books such as “Happy Fat” by Sofie Hagen are refreshing to see.

Image credit Instagram @sofiehagendk

Had I never seen or heard a single diet culture friendly story or image that sold me self hatred, I’d not have wasted so much time on the path I did. Whilst we aren’t going to combat every diet culture promoting image, story & conversational chat, we can show young people that there’s another way to think about their being as more than a body. We can share with them that people are profiting from selling products & that this is why they lie to them. We can show them that we all deserve to be fed and to be loved. We can remove talks of being “good” or “bad” for a food choice. We can NOT praise or scold others for what they eat or how they look. We can encourage them to listen to & trust their one unique body.

Image credit: Instagram @ownitbabe

Laila vs. Food part 2

part 1 of this story was written in November 2016. It describes how my eating disorder began, and the beginnings of the thoughts I had when I “officially” started recovery in November 2016. I say officially, as this is when I had help from an eating disorder specialist. I had made attempts to fix this on my own many times over the years prior to this.

Whilst the story below provides a great snapshot into the mindset of someone desperate to escape binge eating and bulimia, and the unfortunate and misguided quest for slimness and improved self worth that took me there, it says little of life since then. Life since “recovery”.

To me recovery is a bit like happiness. It’s a journey not a destination. You’re never at that destination of “happy”, just as you’re not ever at the destination of “recovered” (I know some people say they fully are recovered which is fabulous and I’m not saying this isn’t true for them, or in fact possible for anyone, including myself). For me so far recovery has been an ongoing journey. I’ll be honest I hated reading statements like that before. I thought what’s the point if you’re not even ever fully recovered? But the point is – you get to actually live your life. The more recovered you feel, the more of your life you get to live.

Some things helped me to make leaps in progress faster than any others had in the past (unintentionally seem to have made a 12 step list). These were:

1. I examined how dieting had ever served me, and eventually agreed not to diet anymore. I accepted that you cannot recover from an eating disorder and diet. I began to eat 3 meals a day and 2 snacks, eating every 2-4 hours. This helped me to feel less intense binge urges, and generally be less obsessed by food.

2. I learnt that it wasn’t my fault. A chart I was given early on in recovery, similar to the below, was a huge help to me in understanding binge urges and how the starve and vomit cycle made them impossible to fight. I finally accepted that I wasn’t a bad person. I wasn’t weak.

3. I checked in with someone with my food diary each week for 6 months, and then monthly for 6 more after that. In my case this was a psychologist at the eating disorder service.

4. I realised how much of my self worth I had attached to my weight and shape, and how little it really mattered in relation to my value to the world.

5. I broke down the rules I had about food and over time tried new things and tried making no foods off limit.

6. I reignited what I knew and described in my last post when I commented on the hypocrisy of people praising weight loss yet telling an anorexic they mustn’t get carried away. I got angry about all of this again. I informed myself about diet culture.

I read “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf again. I knew that dieting and this sad pursuit to change myself did nothing positive for my life. I used this anger to fuel my desire to never diet again, and to use my brain for more useful things.

7. When I binged I tried hard to use mindfulness techniques as well as other self care activities to try and stop the compensatory behaviours.

8. I tried hard to return to regular eating after a binge. I examined the fear I felt from doing this and tried to accept that binges cause weight gain, and skipping meal causes binges, so skipping meals wouldn’t help take back any weight gain anyway it would just make things worse.

9. I examined why gaining weight would even be so bad. In the end as my binges decreased I lost a little weight, but it wasn’t the number on the scales that was important, it was how I felt and how I looked more alive.

10. I began to have a lot more brain space for other things.

11. I got more open about my struggles. I got closer to those around me.

12. I began to treat my body as a tool. I looked into body acceptance, and from there moved towards loving my body. Not every day and not all the time, but it was hard to finish the London Marathon and not be thankful to my little legs for getting me through a challenge that was nothing to do with appearance.

2 years after ending the eating disorder specialist appointments I opened my @bulimiafree, my Instagram account, having been inspired by a podcast I listened to between Sofie Hagen and Megan Crabbie (@bodiposipanda on Instagram).

6 months since I did that, and I’m still learning. I’m living and loving my life more than I ever did. I go out for meals, I don’t think about food and calories all the time, I’m loved and love. I have the best connections with people around me. I progressed and shon at work in a way I never did before, and have a new job where I might just do the same or more.

But the eating disorder hasn’t fully gone away. I can’t honestly say to anyone it’s all the past and I’m fully recovered. I find lots of things trigger the binge urges. But I learn more and more what they are. I still carry some guilt, shame and secrecy around eating, which in itself can fuel binges. If I’m honest, I still am afraid of the idea of gaining weight. But I don’t feel these thoughts consume me in the way that they previously did.

As life has its ups and downs, so has my recovery. When things are bad, I try to have this awareness that it has been and will be better. That all is not lost. The colourful squares of my Instagram page remind me of this. I tell myself to scroll through, to look at my honest thoughts detailed in pretty fonts and captions, documenting my successes as well as my struggles.

The one thing that I haven’t mentioned that was fundamental to my progress is self belief. If you want to recover, please try to find that glimmer of hope. The voice inside that knows you deserve to live a more full life, & that knows you’re worth more than what your eating disorder has reduced you to thinking you are. You are not your eating disorder. It’s just something you’ve had to deal with.

Feed your self belief a teeny little bit each day. Read content that enhances your self esteem. Document the recovery wins you achieve, they are amazing and if anyone knows how hard they are, it’s you.

Write a short story? I’ll just eat the apple.

“Your homework this week is to take an apple each home with you. Look at it for a minute and then write. Then take a bite out of the apple and describe it, without using the word apple”, said the class teacher, handing out long packs of rosey apples across the classroom. I was in a class about writing short stories, in body at least. My mind had drifted off about half an hour into the two hour session. They all looked so eager, pens poised in anticipation of the next top tip, half lit smiles on faces. Either they had amazing poker faces or they were really taking this all in. “Maybe I don’t want to write after all, cos I don’t talk like these people, and I can’t listen to this man and woman talk at me for any longer,” I thought as I realised the room we were in reminded me of a dreaded work meeting – another occasion where people talk at me, and I’m gone within minutes, thinking about anything and everything other than what they’re saying. I guess it’s a handy thing to do in situations like long runs, where the drift off helps to pass the time. I guess sometimes we all feel we don’t belong, but this occasion reminded me of feelings I had at school. I felt like a kid again in that writing class, I was fidgety and wriggly, as if I waiting for my mum to collect me when the bell goes in half an hour, feeling like I was forced to be in the room. It was kind of funny when a red apple, a symbol of school and teachers came out. I started to ask myself why I signed up for a class like this, who was I kidding? I’m no writer. But perhaps it was the format. Does anyone like to be spoken at? It actually makes me slightly angry with the person talking at me, but then guilty as I know that’s not very nice!

I left the class, looked into my bag and decided to take a chomp out of the apple, at that point deciding I might not go back to the remaining 3 classes, but that I do like apples.

Why can’t people stand the rain?

A poem I wrote a long time ago (2012 I think) and remembered on this rainy Sunday!

Why do people hate the rain?

It talks and whispers of their pain?

The leaves quiver as the droplets trickle,

A metaphor of the uneasiness within,

It shows us something real

living in a society where we no longer feel,

Float along with the masses

Admire stangers with zeal

Wonder through the rain that you so hate and despise;

Uplifting emotions and a breath of new life,

Does the damp and cold offend or is it the reminder it provides?

That I am a flesh, and substance governed by –

Something out of my reach, beyond my comprehension,

Questioning my surroundings I ask the rain why.

Examine it’s form, perplexed pondering my biased interpretation

The essence of life it falls around me,

Humans running and shielding from life

only to enter an unnatural building where they watch the strangers on an unnatural device,

ensuring all traces of the rain are gone.

It saddens me.

The droplets fall from the eyes that viewed the droplets outside. nature?

Reality?

Or dread in the knowledge it is mere construction.

If I no longer accept this physical feeling as the cold, the damp, the wind,

will I find a new certainty within?

My mind spins as I fail to answer. To recategorise the cries of the sky as they fall onto my skin.

I want this to last forever,

I deserve to suffer an eternity of not knowing why this sensation is something we so dread.

For if I know not the true meaning of why I do things,

am I not already dead?

You May Remember Me From Blog Posts Such As…

A year on from writing the first post on this blog I scrolled through my past posts giggling at some and holding myself back from deleting others. What’s funny is, the posts that I want to delete are not the ones where I out my secrets. They are the rambling confused ones like A Path Not Travelled, Don’t Scald Me, Love Me and The Bigger Picture And The Messy Scribbles (wow that really felt like a Troy McClure moment!), where I know I’m not really fully saying what I want to. They were a reflection of a very confused me, blaming myself for something that wasn’t working. At times I was trying to get a message to another person, in this most indirect form, whilst simultaneously convincing myself that I needed to find something to fix in me to make a failing situation work. As much as they are not my favourite posts, they will stay because they are part of a journey that this blog set out to document.

My favourites on the other hand, are happy posts about drama class vs. usual Friday nights (That Friday feeling) finding a grey hair (Mr Grey) , and being a nosey neighbour (Monday Night Viewing) – the funny little stories that pop up in the wonders of day to day life. Even a day sitting in a hospital ward brought me an interesting story to share (A Morning in Bay 6). I’m also quite proud of my ability to express a deeply held secret in a few posts that I decided to make (My Biggest Shark, The 1st Appointment, The Last Appointment and The Happy World Of Haribo?)

In the year since I started this blog I’ve lost two very close friends, appreciated the friends and family I have more, left a job that felt pointless to me, gained a job that I’ve been told I’m doing pretty well in, ended my appointments for my eating issues, moved back home, and been on three holidays, to name a few. My last birthday was the most civilised I’ve had in years and didn’t involve getting drunk and forgetting half of the conversations, but made me really appreciate who I had around me and cherish the words they shared and time they gave. I suppose a lot can happen in a year, and I hope I’ll still be blogging in the next one to document a little more of what goes on. Happy New Blog Year!

Give the book a chance

As I impatiently turned the pages I realised why I may have been bought the book entitled “The things you can only see when you slow down”. I had begun to read its early pages while on a train journey simultaneously listening to Spotify, rushing to meet a friend, and thinking about a phone call I had to take that could come at any moment. I began to read the words about how we see ourselves as originating from a part in body and not as part of the world outside, when I paused the book for a Wale song that I wanted to give more of my focus to whilst I swivelled around in my train seat to allow the hooded passenger beside me to vacate. Upgrading myself to the window seat and placing the book back in my bag it occurred to me that in that moment alone my attention was scattered, shared but not given to the book, the song, nor the moment. I had also felt impatient with the numerous empty pages and illustrations at the start of the book and wanted to get to the point and now wonder if it was a clever little trick to place lots of extra pages before the books start, to get people to do as the title says and slow down.

This isn’t the only book I’m reading. I have a book with a good 500 pages waiting for me, having only flitted through the first 20 wondering how long I have to read for until I get into it. This reminds me of a tube journey in which I did pay attention, and began to watch the lady opposite me (in an entirely non creepy way) who was reading a traditional real paper book. Her facial expression exuded suspense and wonderment at the pages she was turning. Her tightly coiled strawberry blonde hair interrupted her face, but she didn’t waste a moment to move the overspilling strands from her eyes. Her focus remained on the ink and paper. The large wedge that sat in her little left hand showed me that she was towards the end of the book she held. I imagined that she might end up at the end of the tube line far from her home with how into her text she looked, but somehow it felt like even then the read would have been worth it. A few mucky looking seats down another commuter sat, this time with a small wedge in her left hand – she was at the start of her chosen read. She had a pensive, inquisitive look. She looked as though she had stepped out of the day job although was still dressed the part in her checked black and white dress, and into the world of the book. Her chipped nails with remnants of blue varnish held the book firmly and her calm eyes rarely looked up between pages or tube stops. She didn’t know what that world had to offer yet but she was willing to make the effort to find out.

I thought about the rules I held for new things:

1. Series: I give a new series one episode to impress me. I figure that they should have put a lot of work into their pilot and if they didn’t then they aren’t very good. The pilot is about ideas not about money in my books, and you get an essence of the ideas in that first episode, as well as for whether the acting is believable.

2. Movies – they get 20 minutes for similar reasons to above.

3. Books: for books I give them 30-50 pages. This one isn’t so well thought out. I simply lose interest and get bored of reading unless it becomes worth my while very early on (currently I’m hoping I haven’t lugged a 500 page book half way around the world that falls in that category).

4. Dates: I don’t have a rule on this one per se, but my tolerance is pretty low. If it feels like the situation could be even potentially disappointing or risky – I abort promptly early on in the dating process.

In doing the above am I missing out on the series that picks up after episode one? The movie that came with a great message that you’ll only experience towards the end? The book that eventually gives that sense of wonderment that train lady one felt, and that train lady two was willing to hang in for? The date that flourishes into something worthwhile when given the chance to?

Sitting on my plane ride sharing the space with awkwardly angled sleeping passengers, I realise I’m doing it again. I’m writing this and I’m watching a movie, wrapped up in my rather flimsy airplane blanket. And I’ll probably say that this movie was rubbish, having never given it a fair shot. Planes are a rare occasion where I can watch a film with less distractions, and it’s likely no coincidence that I enjoy the movies I watch on the plane more than those I watch at home. Perhaps I’ll give life more pages and try not to run away from things I begin so easily.

Dubai, Lions & Showers

What is it about “getting away” that enables us to better jump back into ourselves? Why do people travel to the other side of the planet to find themselves? Is this what is really necessary to clear our minds? Like many, Some of my best thoughts pop up whilst in the shower. A rare place where we can’t tap away on our smart phones (well maybe with the iPhone 15 we will be able to). So then it’s not really the getting away that makes for a clearer headspace is it? It’s the getting present. Letting the mind sit still, which isn’t something your average busy Londoner (or Surrey-er) does.

The last time I came to Dubai, I filled my time with socialising and fun, and for all the gaps in between I was on my phone or getting a bit of sleep. I had some dark thoughts in between all of this fun, but I pushed them away with not a glimmer of acknowledgement. On my plane ride home, the distractions were gone. I sat on a ‘not quite hard not quite soft’ aeroplane chair, and knew the movies on the flickering little screen in front of me were not going to be powerful enough to steer me away from the thoughts this time. So much like in the shower, I had to let my thoughts surface and acknowledge them. When I did this I could recognise and admit the pain I was feeling, and further I could actually do something about it. I wrote down all the recurring negative thoughts I had about myself – which instantly made it feel like they had tiptoed out of my headspace and into the room next door. I wrote down counter arguments to all of the thoughts, so “I hate myself” became “I am the only version of me that there is and there’s actually tons of awesome things about me, so even if I did hate parts of myself, I definitely don’t hate all of myself.” “Everyone hates me” became “this isn’t true as lots of people show and tell me that they love me”. I still have the list.

This moment of acknowledgment, then self compassion was followed with a warm accepting stillness. I sat with what felt like only the whirring of the plane, for all the other passengers felt absent. I felt a comfort in that sound, the continuity of it echoed my now slower paced breaths. I felt reconnected with myself, almost above the strong feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred that had been rife, aware of their damaging and uncalled for presence. And then came the ah-hah moment. The moment that I knew things in my life were going to change. The details weren’t clear to me yet, at first I thought maybe I would move to Dubai, but what I did know is things had to change.

In the weeks that followed I quit my job. I started this blog. I rented out my flat. I quit drinking for a while too. My realisation here then, is that no matter how uncomfortable it can be – sitting with your thoughts and feelings, and looking them in their worrisome eyes is the only way to move forwards. You can then move on from them, and they’ll move on from you. Everything is fluid and changing. To try to suppress or control your thoughts and emotions is akin to putting an angry lion in a tiny cage in an attempt to contain his anger: he will only grow more angry, his roar more intense.

I wonder what world we will be in if we never have that time to just be still with our minds. It’s easier and more fun to watch something, message on the phone, read social media pages or whatever it might be. I’m glad my flight yesterday had no WiFi, for I know I wouldn’t have again used the time for stillness and reflection. I’m back in Dubai again, reminiscing on that significant plane ride home, but also wondering- what would have happened had I had a friend, or WiFi with me on that flight? What if I had never had that all important stop time? What if we all miss out on ah-hah moments, nourishing realisations and self soothing purely because we are too busy to listen to our own minds? We didn’t evolve with so many fun, intelligently designed attention thieves. Our minds must be overwhelmed by it all… So On that note, I’m off to meditate, and see what this moment of stillness brings.