Gucci loafers on, summer dresses at the ready and unsurprisingly here I am sitting feeling overwhelmed and too warm. Week two of lifestyle change and I definitely feel better but somehow despite what everyone says, turkey rashers and sweet potato along with daily exercise resulting in you being a few pound lighter, doesn’t fully fix you. In fact believe it or not your world doesn’t suddenly transform into a blissful paradise of self-acceptance.

Yes you feel better in yourself, but then it comes to trying on summer clothes and get ready because this is where the shit hits the fan. The only way I can describe the feeling is like when you’re sick. Day three or four of your sickness, you’re into your course of anti-biotics and you’re feeling a lot better relative to how crap you were feeling on day one. You get your appetite back. Making the assumption you’re back to full health you try and recommence your daily routine. This wipes you out. WHY? Because you were feeling so low that even a glimpse of back to health fools you into thinking your back to yourself. This is how I feel. Yes I feel better in myself and yes I’m beginning to notices changes in my body but it’s at this point where I get a bit too excited and begin to try on summer clothes only to realise my perception of myself hasn’t fully changed despite all the workouts I’ve been doing. The way I feel and think about myself is just as low as ever.

The trying on commences, I begin with bikinis, bad choice. Having picked up a few bikinis as they just came in to shops obviously, going with the logic in my head I bought at least two sizes down assuming and fully believing that I would be, what I perceived to be bikini body ready by the time it actually came to wearing them. Another mistake I made before commencing this dress up session was putting the heating on and ultimately forgetting to turn the heating off. My bedroom is in the attic, heat rises; you do the maths. It was unbearable. Buttons on a dress getting more and more soul destroyingly hard to button up, hands getting clammier and my body temperature rising rapidly. Suddenly I think maybe it isn’t my weight maybe I’ll always hate my reflection whether I’m skinny or not. This thought detonated any last ounce of a summer ‘vibe’ and my mood headed south quickly. Like many of these dress up sessions I had a feeling It would end abruptly with flooding emotions of self-spite, Gucci loafers on or not.

This moment perhaps should be the catalyst to saving myself before it’s too late. Suddenly the excitement of looking forward to sunny beaches in skimpy bikinis is over. And here I find myself in my room in an oversized hoody and pyjama bottoms writing this. I’m left unfulfilled, unmotivated and pissed off. Pissed off at my body, pissed off at my mind and TOO f***ing warm.

 

Now what do I?

This revelation of needing help isn’t the first infact its one of many. None have materialised and judging on the past this one will end like all the others. Is fear why we don’t ask for help? Fear of what friends might think, how acquaintances might look at you or is it fear of finally admitting to yourself that life isn’t going to be good unless you try to get better. That these ‘bad days’ are going to and have become every day. This here could be the problem. The motivation to change. The fear of actually having to do something about it. Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.

As I sit here I can feel the bloating of dinner and consciously I always feel that feeling. It is something that I’ve ingrained into my mind as being the worst feeling that there is. Conditioned myself into thinking that it was wrong, it meant that I had failed. That hole in my stomach, the emptiness;  that was my success. Constantly striving to feel this way, balance and perspective have become vocabulary that no longer exist. Whether it was five years ago in third year when my ‘weight loss journey’ began at 15 or whether it is now at 20 years old, three years into bulimia recovery, I still have those moments of relapse where the fear of letting go of control and missing that old way of coping is at the forefront of my mind. Maybe that’s the fear, will I ever become ready to conquer it and let go of that control indefinitely.  The fear of running with a vision of acceptance and building it into the life that I have constructed in my mind about how my future should look. Hopefully this moment is finally the one that will bring about progress because the future is soon to become the present and nothing will have changed.