Make a new ending

Hi all!

Just wanted to drop in super quickly this Autumnal Friday morning (urgh, dark mornings already) as I'm up early to get out for a quick walk and to get on with packing for the move tomorrow.

There's something about moving that gives a feeling of a fresh start (especially in September!).

I found this quote and it felt so applicable to me right now. All my eating issues have happened, and I have wasted quite a lot of my life as a result of that and the self-esteem issues that we all have. Sometimes it feels like my life will always be defined by these things. However whatever mistakes we've made in the past don't have to be mistakes that we keep on making.

So decide who you want to be, and realise that that CAN be your new ending.

Have a great Friday and an even better weekend lovelies!

What would your ending be?

E xxx

We are mountains

Sometimes (actually, far more regularly than just “sometimes”) my therapist says something that makes me go “woah, YES”. She puts things into a way that I have never comprehended. For that second, life all fits together and I feel STRONG. I can overcome my problems.

There are two related things she’s said recently. The first was that thought patterns and behaviours are just habits, and habits can be changed. The second was that thoughts to us are what weather are to mountains (go with me on this one!).

She’s totally right!

How many of us think changing a bad habit is achievable? Most of us, right? Sure, it’s going to be hard, a long process, and a bit of a pain, but it’s possible! If our eating behaviours are just habits, then we can change these in exactly the same way. For some reason I’d never thought of all of my problems as habits. I saw them as cemented to me and my being, refusing to be moved without completely changing myself. That's so far from the truth.

Her second point about us being mountains and our thoughts being the weather started off with a visualisation exercise. I was told to visualise a mountain, strong, unmovable, rooted to the ground. The mountain stands there no matter what the weather throws at it: it's defiant and strong. I then was told to bring the mountain inside of myself, to feel rooted to the ground to see the weather changing around me, just like the thoughts that come and pass over us. Sometimes they’re dark like clouds; sometimes they beat us up like the wind; and sometimes they bring us happiness and warm our souls like the sun. But they always pass and throughout we are the strong, rooted person.

We have to remember that our brains are not static. We learn, we forget, we can change ourselves. We can learn not to think badly about ourselves, we can learn not to mess around with our eating, we can learn to have a good relationship with food. These are all good habits that we can learn and we will also unlearn our bad habits. If we were not capable of this we’d all still be wearing nappies, we'd never would say please and thank you, and we'd never would look before crossing the road.

And whilst we work to try and change our habits, we need to remember that thoughts are only a minor part of us. Our thoughts are fleeting and can go as quickly as they come. Yes they can be painful and cause us damage, but they can equally be uplifting and make us feel thankful to be alive. We have the control as to how much our thoughts affect us:  we can draw our awareness to them and simply watch as they pass on. We do not have to try and bury our thoughts, or dwell on them, or let them dictate our emotion.

We are mountains, and we are strong and unbreakable.

September goals

How is it September already?!

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I was dreading September. The dark mornings, lack of sunshine, cooler weather, the pressures of every one being back at work after the holidays.

However I've actually really liked the fresh feeling of a new start that September brings. And whilst the Christmas chocolates in the supermarkets are a step too far at this point (seriously Tesco?!), I'm excited for the baggy jumpers, cosy coats, coffee shop dates after work when it's dark, beautiful amber trees...all the lovely things Autumn and Winter bring.

I wanted to set some goals for September. Normally I feel the pressure to do everything all in one go: I'm an all or nothing kind of person. And I used to thrive on that approach (hello successful disordered eating history), but not anymore. Now I'm constantly riddled by the feeling of failure. So let's make some smaller, bite size, achievable goals.

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3 health and fitness goals:

• Get my foot healed and pick back up the running. I'm totally feeling the desire to train for a half marathon again, but let's not get ahead of myself. My injury's put me out of action for some time, so I doubt I'll even be able to run a 5k!
• Eat my 5 a day. I know it's a simple one, but it's something I'm failing miserably at the moment. I've taken eating more as an excuse to eat a lot of crap, which has probably been necessary to get everything I've restricted in the past out in the open, but I'm feeling awful. Give me nutrients!
• Wean myself off the gluten. My dietitian recommended that I get tested for coeliac's on the off chance it had caused my anaemia and B12 deficiency. Unfortunately for that I've had to eat bread for the last few weeks to make sure the antibodies, if I do have coeliac's, are in my blood system. And doing this has given me brain fog, stomach ache, and general feelings of blah. I've got my blood test tomorrow, then just need to wait for the results, but not long til I can ease up on the gluten intake! The problem is that toast is one of my favourite foods, so it's going to be a battle of brain over heart to stop eating as much of it.

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3 life goals:

• Move into the new flat! Me and my boyfriend are moving in together next weekend and I am beyond excited. I'm excited for getting to see him all the time (when I'm not away with work at least), excited for living somewhere we can really make feel like home, and excited for not living in a shoebox. What I'm not excited for is lugging all of our stuff up 3 flights of stairs.
• Walks along the river. We'll be living closer to the Thames in the new flat, and I want to use this an excuse for some after-work and weekend walks as the leaves turn.
• Do daily mindfulness. My therapist got me doing a mountain visualisation (I'll talk about it in a future post) and it is seriously helping me out during tough times. I need to keep practising this daily to make sure the thought patterns involved stick.

What are your goals for September?

E xxx

Unhealthy voices, anxiety and womanhood

Last Thursday's therapy session was so good.

I don't know what exactly it was, but I came out feeling that maybe this was going to work out okay.

We talked about heaps of stuff. Unhealthy voices, anxiety, womanhood.

We started off with my food diary and discussing a couple of things that had cropped up. One was how long I spend choosing food in the supermarket, wandering round and round as I weigh up what combinations will give me the correct calories, best mix carbs, protein and fat etc.

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We talked about how there was the time when I worked hard to pick up a larger lunch, only to then automatically scale down my dinner to fit in under my desired calories. She mentioned it sounded like there were 2 voices in my head: one a "healthy" voice, and the other unhealthy.

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She asked me what I thought the unhealthy voice's agenda was. It clearly wasn't for me to be healthy, or happy. And it was also there when I binge, so it can't want me to be skinny. I couldn't answer the agenda question, nor do I think she was expecting me to be able to. What shocked me most was the fact that I would never have classified that voice as unhealthy. To me it represents the bit of me that will get me to the weight I want to be, the bit that represents control. Although actually the voice is out of my control, and is instead controlling me.

We moved on to another aspect that had popped up in my food diary: anxiety. As I've mentioned I often wake up anxious, both in the morning and at numerous points during the night.

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I know I'll either have had dreams about eating or work, but don't seem to really understand what's making me anxious and therefore I can't try and rationalise it. It's like there's a record stuck on repeat in my subconscious, but I don't know what the record is or how to stop it. I also have panic attacks occasionally. I know my anxiety is worse when I'm eating more, but I can't be sure whether the eating is causing the anxiety, or the anxiety is causing me to eat.

I've always been an anxious person. As a child I used to get scared about going into a supermarket close to closing time in case we got locked in. I also went through a stage where I would barely talk to my parents because I was worried I would say something that they wouldn't like (this is nothing to do with anything they ever did - my parents are amazing!). I don't like meeting up with people because I'm not sure what people will think of me. And as the therapist mentioned, a lot of my anxiety seemed to be linked to me not thinking I would be good enough, or that I'd upset someone else. It was a result of what I perceived other people's reactions to be.


Finally, we talked about what it means to be a woman. I'd mentioned how I'd once been jealous of someone's figure in the background of a picture. When I looked closer I realised that that person was about 14 years old. Not cool. I also talked about how for a long time after I'd regained my periods that I saw them as a failure. And also how sometimes I just don't feel like an adult - how did I end up having managed to get a job, self-fund myself, move myself all the way to London, hire removal vans, find flats, organise bills and insurance and all this adult malarky?

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I don't know whether they're all related, or even if they're linked to my eating, but it's always worth looking in to. As my therapist said, I'm a woman, and I should want a woman's body. And shouldn't we all?! Shouldn't we want the curves and shapeliness that comes with being a female. Most female models are still teenagers - why should we want bodies that represent someone who's adolescent and still growing?

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Our bodies are a product of evolution. As women we're designed for childbirth. We gain hips and breasts for this purpose. Every heard an old lady remark "oooh, she has excellent child-birthing hips"?! Well that's because they're meant to be a good thing! That's what we should be proud to have.

I love this quote from Marilyn Monroe!

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 So this week I have to do mindfulness a couple of times a day to try and help with the anxiety, and I also have to keep a journal of all the times I think about what someone might be thinking about me, or what I'm thinking of myself. This way we can start to understand all the negative messages that I've receiving/sending to myself.

I've found both pretty tough.

Mindfulness is just a skill I need to practise - just putting 5 minutes of your morning and afternoon aside to do it seems a challenge!

So far I've not wanted to write about my feelings. They've just been too hard, particularly over the weekend when I ate so much. But I'm going to persevere, as if it's hard it probably means it's affecting me in much deeper ways :)

Do you embrace your womanly curves?

E x

Meals and gratitude #15

Thank god my room has air con! Once again I'm staying in a different hotel, and it was such a relief to walk in to the stuffy room and turn round to find an a/c unit. I'm a November baby, I'm not designed for this crazy hot English weather we're having in the South!

I woke up this morning after a pretty rough night's sleep - probably a mix of the hot weather and bad dreams - but still pushed myself out for a run. I took it pretty easy and did more walking than I would usually like, however I didn't beat myself up about it too much though as I knew I was dehydrated, tired and fighting high pollen levels!

For breakfast I had some frozen banana (aaalmost as good as when I have time to blend it up in to soft serve!) topped with peanut butter ("da bomb"), flaxseed, nuts and coconut. Honestly so good!

 Attack of my flatmate's chili plants!

I also had a slice of my protein bread (the recipe was adapted from this one from Purely Twins - you can find my adaptations in today's Monday Motivation post. It's honestly so good. So full of goodness, packed with protein and it doesn't leave you with the same gross feeling that you get after eating standard supermarket bread. I don't know whether it's the wheat, sugar, or additives, but the supermarket stuff always makes me feel a bit meh afterwards (although during eating it I love it - toast is one of my favourite comfort foods!).

This morning I had really bad feelings of anxiety. I had some meetings I wasn't looking forward to but I was getting far too worked about them. It was making my stomach churn, so I used the mindfulness technique my therapist taught me, and drank some peppermint tea.

Lunch was a bit tricky as I had no fresh food left in the flat - I'd eaten it all up in preparation for being away for work this week. So I snacked on the rest of my protein bread, peanut butter, and tahini-dipper date.

At the train station I also picked up this fruit Yo Yo as an afternoon snack. I love the little fact cards you get in them! I know they're designed for kids, but it doesn't stop my excitement!

 As I'm staying in a hotel again this week it's unfortunately back to the supermarket food. I can find this challenging, and often spend a painful amount of time looking at the options, scrutinising over labels, trying to figure out the best choices. There weren't really any veggie options so in the end I plumped for a chicken salad and picked out the chicken...the efforts I go to for my vegetarianism (although I was actually pretty annoyed about having to put my money into something that promoted the killing of meat ). I also picked up some extra salad leaves to boost the veg aspect, and some cucumber sticks with tzatziki and yummy savoury seeds. The tzatziki wasn't perfectly unprocessed, but it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I made an effort today to have proper meals and eat more. I ended up eating the usual 1,000kcal plus what I burnt off on my run. And I'm fairly happy with the healthiness of what I ate. There was a bit too much fat (it made up 50% of my calories today...) but I feel nicely satisfied and without any sugar crash or stomach discomfort :)

Gratitude

- Working from home this morning - it's so much nicer than getting up and dragging myself on to a train down to the South Coast super early

- The fact that the temperature was a bit cooler this morning for my run

- The sunshine

- Air con in my room!

- Finding out Tina from Carrots 'n' Cake has finally popped and given birth to a healthy baby boy! Before reading blogs I never realised how close you can get to the people behind the blogs I read, and how much happiness you can feel for them. I'm so over the moon for Tina and her family :)

What made you grateful today?

E x