Old Myspace Entries

I just wanted to copy these across. This is from the 2nd January this year.

I can't take credit for this as it was written by the lovely Rache but it struck a chord with me, currently being some 3 stones above my preferred weight.

Being overweight can feel like one of the saddest of life's problems because it's the one you can't hide. If you're overweight then you can't stop everyone looking at you and wondering why you're the way you are. Is she depressed? Is she lazy? Is she unmotivated? Doesn't she have a sex life? Doesn't she care? Isn't her health suffering? Is she just a slob? Everyone else can keep life's difficulties under their hat, but if you're overweight it's there for the world to see.

Standing in a queue you can't tell a wife beater from a burnt out trader on cocaine from a potential mass murderer or a child abuser. But an overweight woman who has gained a few stone through a few years of bad eating habits as her problem clearly on display. And it makes her a easy target.

It makes me so sad to have my fears confirmed: that a lot of thin people do think I'm a lesser person for being overweight. I'm lucky in that my self esteem does not revolve around how I look but I'd be lying if I said it never crossed my mind. It doesn't help to hear all of this though; and it certainly doesn't make me want to do anything about it. It just makes me want to eat.

And this one is from the 10th April. I read Beyond Chocolate in full on the 26th March.

I'm not on my no food diet anymore.I woke up on Day Three, and the thought of not being able to breastfeed Leo anymore just about killed me.
So I'm still fat.
It's not cool to be fat, and I don't think it's cool to care about it either but I do. I hate it. I hate that everywhere I go, everyone I see can look at me and see that I have a problem.
I'm working on it.
But for now I'm sad.

In a way it's sad to read. Sad to see how much my size was overshadowing everything else in my life. Nothing mattered much apart from the fact that I was (am) fat. But it is also good to read. Good to see how far I have come, good to see that I am building a life now, away from that awful obsession (both with my size and with my food).

It can be easy to forget how far you have come sometimes. When you find yourself, six months later still without that perfect relationship with food and size that you can't help imagining at first, it's easy to beat yourself up for taking to long, still being this size, still relying on food.

I am reading Beyond a Shadow of Diet at the moment, which is actually aimed at therapists treating clients, but the authors wrote in one chapter that if all we had to do was be told what to do, then we wouldn't have a problem in the first place. It reminded me that it's ok to find this hard sometimes, it's ok to be frustrated with myself, but that it's ok to be where I am. I'm still trying, that's what counts.