running up that hill

post title in honour of J, who I am excited to see soon when I get back to uni :D

I realised this morning that by the end of this week, a month will have gone past during which I've only binge/purged once. a bizarre realisation for someone who even carried on finding a way to do it while in hospital and heavily supervised. also felt like a HUGE milestone for me because it's well below the cut-off point to be medically diagnosed with bulimia. of course doctors are slightly insane and it isn't actually possible to 'technically' suffer from anorexia and bulimia simultaneously, but I've always thought that rather than the more misleading and nebulous idea of 'purging anorexia' would describe my illness well. so, I am slowly erasing all 'signs' that I have an eating disorder. next step is the weight criteria, I'm sure :D

anyway my second thought was that I should blog about it, and I realised that I hardly ever talk about how I've been able to stop the bulimic behaviour. partially I think, because when like me you lost a lot of weight and retained most of the old fears associated with restrictive anorexia, the initial recovery process is very similar. I found that when I started keeping down food, it felt like I was right back in the mindset of my teenage years. also, everything seemed to fall in place at once. I always understood this on a logical level - I knew that even when I was restrictive I was terribly afraid of bingeing, partially because I was so starved that I knew my body would have taken over and had me eating everything and anything in an instant if it wasn't for the paralysing fear of weight gain. when that 'fear' was taken away bulimia quite literally took over my life and I realised that the idea of being able to eat absolutely anything and lose weight was really not the holy grail I'd imagined. but I digress. I'm trying to narrate how I managed this past month so that I never fall into the old logical fallacies again. when I was maintaining a low weight, I didn't even think that I WANTED to stop bingeing & purging. it was totally alien to me - why would you want to? wouldn't anyone do this if they knew how? but now...while eating what I NEED, aka enough to gain weight on a consistent basis...it seems like a fading nightmare. why did I do that to myself? the obvious answer is my refusal to give my body what it needed. I didn't understand this for years. I would say it, but secretly believe that eating 1500, 1600 calories or similar was 'enough'. and I'd wonder why I could still have struggled when I was in hospital, and in the past at higher weights. the answer now is obvious - I resented 'having' to keep down a full meal plan and gain weight, and there were very limited behaviours I could get away with which would somehow alleviate the stress. it's quite illuminating now to see how much I tried to run away from what I needed to do, because it terrified me. I'm writing this partially to remind myself, but also cause I know that lots of people with eating disorders are terrified of bingeing, having been there myself even when I'd never done it...I hope explaining my story helps a little to prove that both the fear and the reality of overeating really do decrease a) as you eat what you need, regularly, and get closer to a healthy weight if you need to and b) as you ACCEPT your body's needs and give yourself permission to eat rather than resenting it. obviously there are still emotional triggers, but if you are restricting or in a restrictive mindset where you want to be restricting, they are amplified about a million times. of course I don't believe I will be 'cured' by weight restoration, but I think the fact that I am practising point number 2 every day will be a big help for the triggers that are more related to emotions or attitude to food :) in a way I suppose it's been helpful for me that I need to gain so I can ease myself into 'justifying' eating something that I just crave or am hungry for rather than having a restrictive mindset. I'm sure that will get harder as my weight goes up but I'm prepared to conquer it :D

besides pondering stuff like this I've actually been rather busy for the last few days :) I went out with my housemate on Monday to do some last minute pre-uni shopping, and I was in London again with Jemima and Katie yesterday. Katie's birthday + my first UK blogger meet-up = a very fun day :D we obviously went to Wholefoods and raided the salad bar, then wandered around Camden/Oxford Street/Regent Street all afternoon. luckily I think we are all the talkative type and couldn't stop jabbering about pretty much everything. it was really funny to share irritated memories of IP with Jemima...we have been in the same unit (and are NEVER going back, lol). It's really nice to spend time with people who are going through similar things to you sometimes, especially when they are so brilliant :D. I will be very sad not to be very close by to Katie for the first time in ages when I move!

other activities have included setting up my new laptop (YAY!)



and eating lots of Marshmallow Fluff obtained from Selfridges Food Hall (double yay!)



I think I'm finally getting on top of my to-do list before Sunday. car insurance - check. module choices - check. I put 'the history of the book (medieval)' right at the bottom of my preference list ;) I hate medieval history with a passion. packing - not checked yet. but I'm getting there!