running up that hill

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I was bored and needed a project after the essays were over, and I have to say following trends rocks, I LOVE wordpress!
xx

blogging makes me nervous.
blanket statement to start a post, I know. but my relationship with this whole 'online world' is confusing at best. did anyone watch the most recent episode of House, season six? I'll only summarise cause it's the season out in America and I watched it online. but basically the patient is a famous blogger, and she insists on posting about her treatment and asking her readers for advice on decisions which are crucial to her life and her relationship with her husband. she apparently has her 'eyes on the number of views' all the time and can't make these decisions on her own without the comments of her readers. it was seriously a bit close to home! don't get me wrong, I love blogging. and this isn't a precursor to me saying I'm going to stop. but there's something slightly odd and artificial about putting such personal details of your life out there for the world to see. for a whole community of people to read and judge. see, there are plenty of bloggers who I feel like I know, and I always appreciate your comments and thoughts, and reading your blogs. but it's the totally public nature of blogging that gets to me. not knowing who is reading, what they are thinking. let's be honest, people use blogs, especially ones surrounding eating disorder recovery, for a crazy variety of reasons. each time I post I find myself wondering - am I triggering people? are people using this to find some kind of hope/knowledge that change is possible? to some degree the latter is good. but it fees like totally baring my soul to a random audience. I want to be honest and post things, say like I did yesterday, about my lowest and scariest points...but I wonder if anyone ever reads things like that just to trigger themselves, or goes away thinking 'well I wasn't that ill, everything must be fine'. or equally reads the story of the changes I've gone through and pins their hope on people like me, which is better...but nerve wracking! equally I know that when I was ill I would look at people who were absolutely doing 110% in recovery and think they were probably absolutely off their rocker! which is totally understandable but makes me anxious...hence my worries about comparisons and 'does everyone think I 'challenge' myself TOO much'! I kind of feel like this is my own very personal private journey, and sometimes I want to say things, just to get them off my chest, but end up feeling exposed having them in such a public sphere. how does anyone else deal with this? does blogging give you the shivers sometimes? do you think the payoff is worth it? do you post about absolutely everything going on for you?

so after that ramble, I am going to continue as normal, for now! I think I like writing my random streams of consciousness too much! the past couple of days were hard but I managed to wake up this morning feeling loads better, so crossed fingers for it continuing. I find myself preoccupied by anticipation and impatience about reaching a healthy weight. sounds premature, I know! but for some reason I simultaneously have that thing going on where you feel like the second 'half' (well something like half, probs a bit more actually) of the weight I half to gain is so much 'less' somehow than the first, as though I'm 'nearly there' so to speak...and also the awareness that it is actually going to take quite awhile! I am not good with waiting for things, especially things I'm anxious about...it's just like ARGH get it over with! now I'm gaining at a good rate, probably at the top end of what's 'safe/manageable' as an outpatient, so I can't actually speed it up any more than that...guess I am just going to have to be patient and sit with it! for some reason I feel 'ready' and for once in my life confident that I will actually achieve this, but there's a nervous anxiety saying 'get it over with before you burn out and panic'! plus my impatient nature makes me want to be making noticeable changes all the time, and I feel like, well, eating comes naturally now, I can't think of anything or any situation I wouldn't cope with, but I know that this is all just a bonus and theoretical until I'm at a healthy weight. so it's like, 2/3 months waiting for that to happen and my life to properly start? ARGH. obviously I know the solution here. SLOW DOWN, CALM DOWN! easier said than done though ;)

hence the need for some calming music :)
(I really like my parent's stuff. how embarrassing.)

Summer, Highland Falls

I'm going to the Metro Centre with Hannah today. fun times :D very excited. clearly I will come back having spent too much, but hopefully with a big smile on my face which will make it worthwhile!

something interesting has occurred to me over the past week.
first I noticed myself feeling slightly odd while having breakfast one day...realising that I hadn't 'planned' what to have the night before, just rolled out of bed and decided then and there. a few weeks ago I would clearly have had to ensure the availability of breakfast foods, in case of disaster or famine &etc, so this was quite exciting. then I kept having a sense of 'still?' 'again?' while I was eating. not in a 'oh my gosh I'm eating again already!' way, although that is still quite novel, but because a lot of the time the day to day stuff has become routine, unless there's something particular going on. it gave me quite an unsettling feeling actually! the weird realisation that yes, this is what normal people do, this is what I will continue to do for the rest of my life...eat breakfast, eat lunch, eat dinner. and in between, live. strange concept.

I don't know if anyone else has experienced this but below a certain weight I've always seemed to become pretty detached from reality. not only in the sense of utterly distorted beliefs, but almost a tangible 'absence' from the real world in all senses. nothing seeming real, everything through a kind of mist, floating by as though I'm not really part of the world. the only 'real' and significant things were all connected with my eating disorder, and as time went on, like some kind of bizarre drug, there needed to be more pain, more damage inflicted, more drama, so that I would feel it. I was numb to almost everything else. I almost wonder if that's why I was able to throw myself so headlong into totally self destructive behaviour. I was very much out of control when I was ill and it was intense in all senses...not just to the extent that I could explain it by the distortions of the illness. I'd do things that now terrify me, but in my own little shut off world nothing seemed real and it didn't seem to matter. a specific memory strikes me - in early 09 before I went inpatient I met with my psychiatrist and he told me, after talking to the medical assessment unit at the hospital, that I could avoid going into general if I took a lot of care over the weekend (they got an emergency admit to the EDU for early the next week) in order to 'keep myself alive'. of course, I proceeded to persuade my parents to drive me into town so I could 'go shopping' aka spend my afternoons binge/purging at all the fast food places I could find. of course to some extent this is explicable by the nature of the disorder - even if I wanted to stop perhaps I couldn't have. but I don't remember having any concept of the strangeness of this. of how people must have looked at me, totally emaciated, sitting in McDonalds eating a super size meal (or two). of how having dodged the potassium IV they considered sending me in for, playing games with my heart when my ECG already looked like shite was an incredibly stupid thing to do. I was not on the planet. I'm not entirely sure I believed in the reality of anything except food and how to not digest it. magical thinking? perhaps. I've been susceptible to the belief that nothing will ever cause me serious damage before, and I wonder if it is because I literally seem to zone off into a different world where nothing is real when I'm ill.

anyway. the point of all this? I've felt lately like I'm rejoining the real world. obviously not as a normal person, hey, I'm still quite crazy :D but I feel like a normal person with the added bonus of having anorexia, rather than just living inside the fucked up house of mirrors that is my eating disorder. 'normal' life seems to be filling up a bigger space in my head, and pushing out some of the other rubbish. this is good, I think.

also went to the GP today and got some affirmation that indeed the ED services CAN be pretty shocking, and also that 'it's incredible' how much better I am than at the start of the year :D which I have to say was quite opportune timing, cause my weight was up over 2lbs since I increased on Saturday and it was quite hard to deal with. but on the bright side, took me about two hours to get over it, and I'm sure it would have been more if I hadn't had someone encouraging at the appointment! also kinda helped to remind myself that that's only gonna make just under 4lbs in the last two weeks and that was kinda the point :P but yeah often I have an instinctual reaction to these things so getting through it fast is kind of a plus.

second exciting thing about today - final essay is IN! so after tomorrow's seminar, I'm free! until revision for exams that is but right now I am deliberately ignoring that fact. I can't wait for Easter, so many people to meet up with and things to do in London...it will definitely be an exciting one!

have been making some new meal creations out of stuff in the back of my cupboard to clear them out before Easter too...cookery skills are improving I think!



corn tortilla fried in olive oil, topped with refried beans & chicken.



weight gain version of ants on a log: bagel with cream cheese and raisin 'rebels' (chocolate, caramel and yogurt coatings). sounds odd, tastes amazing. what I want to know is how I came up with this idea...I really can't remember!



my egg poaching skills are improving...see how 'together' it is :D secret = using a deeper pan, you can get the whisk in further!



finally, my fry-up from this morning! I did this to celebrate handing my last essay in, and also cause I wanted to try having 'brunch' and structuring my meals around that (fairly easy, smaller breakfast, brunch at 11, loads of snacks through the afternoon). anyway loved this, although I did nearly set the fire alarm off again I think!

Arcade Fire ftw :D

btw, there are numbers in this post, proceed with care ;)

so many thanks to everyone who commented yesterday...so reassuring to know that my feelings weren't uncommon. I almost want to apologise for that post, but I won't seeing as it IS understandable given the whole, y'know, anorexia thing! however I did wake up this morning feeling about 10,000 times better and wondering why on earth I was being so illogical. when I'd sat down and thought about it a bit, it came down to this - the disordered part of me wanted me to eat the bare minimum I need to gain weight, and only increase it when I absolutely HAD to, like not having gained anything in weeks, without any regard for what's better for my mental and physical health. so obviously cue a bit of a tantrum in my brain when I refused to follow that advice. to be fair it can go and jump off a cliff cause that's not the way I'm going to do things at all. obviously then that feeling of 'eating more than you desperately NEED' led on to 'well you MUST be greedy cause you eat unhealthy food all the time and you don't HAVE to do that, you could just eat a tortilla pizza once a week and call it a challenge'. see now I'm really quite confused as to why I thought there was any logic at all to this :P it's ridiculous for anyone with anorexia, but amusingly so in my case, given that if it really was a case of me 'just wanting to eat more' and it was all about the food, surely going back to binge/purging tens of thousands of calories a day would be the more alluring idea as compared to adding a bit to an already high diet, which is basically more a matter of condensing/more dense foods. but obviously that's not going to happen ;)

anyway my conclusion is that I feel amazing today, loads more productive and full of energy, and no rubbish thoughts bothering me either. I used the trick of looking at my situation from a healthy person's perspective again, and it really helped to note that when I'm still significantly underweight, and am recovering from having had anorexia for seven years and been at very low weights, even if I do err on the side of eating more, it's NEVER going to be a bad thing for me physically provided that I feel physically comfortable eating that amount. and psychologically, given that I am eating in a very 'normal' healthy way, it can only be positive there too. more calories = more brainpower :) and more ability to challenge the old ideas I had about food. same applies for eating 'unhealthily' (I feel like I should stop using that term but don't know how else to put it!) given that every 'imperfect' thing I eat helps to beat down my distorted thoughts, and is good physically in moderation too given that I am in recovery. I love it when I realise things like this that seem so obvious after the fact but such a great victory to become aware of :)

on a further positive note, I went shopping today! I had been promising myself that I'd buy myself something when I got to 100lbs and today was the day! (sidenote - it's testament to how distorted my ideas about weight were that I feel self conscious typing that cause it seems 'so high' but I can see looking at myself that it's still very low for my height etc...weird!) anyway I looked around for a tshirt I'd been wanting yesterday with Hannah but they only had it in petite :( I wanted it so much that I even tried it on but it was way too short....so, I looked in the tiny Topshop in town today and they had it there, in my size! awesome coincidence. I also bought some little silver earrings in the shape of angel wings :) take a look...





ps I know our house is really dated :) you get used to it!
since I was standing in front of the mirror with a camera I decided to get a pic to represent a) the weather in Durham and b) the best part of Sundays...



PYJAMA day! and it wasn't even that I hadn't been out...I went out, and changed back into them when I got back :D fleecy ones from Primark no less. plus the warmest hoodie I own, complete with fleecy lining all over. what's really bizarre though is that I just wear this in the house for comfort cause we don't put the heating on in the day...I actually went outside with just that (and jeans not PJs of course!) and no coat today and was fine! yay recovery...

in the interest of feeling far more secure and happy about what I eat today, I have some more pictures :)



total obsession at the moment! it's actually from a bottled pancake mix they reduced to 25p in Tesco after pancake day...but somehow it actually tastes better than when we made them from scratch ourselves...maybe I'm just bad at pancake making! anyway, pancakes with bacon are amazing, and having the other one with banana & banana curd makes an awesome sweet/savoury breakfast.



I felt so skilled when I made this last night! (don't laugh...) I actually poached an egg...like in swirling water with a whisk all pretentious style. tis on top of a haddock fishcake, with potato/caramelized onion rosti and asparagus. best meal I've had in ages :)

right, I am 1600 words into my essay due tomorrow and need to make dinner so I'd better wrap this up! suffice to say I hope I am not being irritatingly positive and over the moon again but I really do feel amazing today. nothing I've ever done has been as worthwhile as the past couple of months...no joke.

so, I have been trying to write this post for quite awhile. and I just deleted everything I had and started again, cause I want to talk about what's honestly been on my mind all day. funny that! ;)

the past week has been pretty hard, and today in particular. for some reason a lot of old anxieties and hesitations around food seemed to come up, and every time I didn't occupy myself I found myself counting, adding up, worrying about planning my meals. and in a way that's really out of character for me I was spending my time thinking about whether I had 'balanced' my diet right...had enough protein/carbs/vitamin K24, or if I was skewing my calories too much towards the morning/evening/date of the apocalypse, if the feng shui of my diet was right...you get the picture. I also almost backed out on 'social eating' with my housemates a couple of times cause the prospect of the 'challenging' foods we'd planned made me incredibly anxious, when the week before I wouldn't have even thought about it twice. add a few times where I purged and had to 'replace' meals and you definitely have a week where my eating disorder was trying to get a foot in the door so to speak.

so I found two possible reasons/triggers for this and am addressing them both at once today. firstly, essay deadlines and uni are obviously pretty stressful at the moment. so I took a deep breath, told myself that the first year doesn't matter THAT much, and took a day off today to go out with my friend Hannah. which was definitely a good decision :D also, I only gained a lb this week, which don't get me wrong is good, but a definite slowdown from the past couple of months, and possibly explains some anxiety cause whenever the 'difference' between what I need to maintain and what I'm eating decreases I seem to get really nervy and plagued by ED thoughts. so I took a leap today and increased a bit more...I'm hoping I can sustain the 2lb/week gain I had going before so that I can get to my target by early summer. it's quite amusing looking back...there was definitely a time where I'd never have thought I could cope with that rate of gain let alone get impatient and want to sustain it throughout refeeding! but who's complaining...I feel comfortable and good in my body now and I'm definitely not second guessing that.

anyway this brings me around to what has 'really been on my mind'. deciding to increase wasn't hard (especially with some helpful thought tennis from my friend today :D ) and fitting in the extra calories wasn't hard. but from then on I've found myself totally unable to get my brain away from intrusive irritating thoughts about how I 'eat more than anyone else/gain faster/eat more unhealthily' and so on. how everyone will and should think that I just do these things (increasing, food challenges etc) cause I'm 'greedy' or 'weak'. comparing is actually the devil. deep down I know that only I know what's right for me, and that isn't necessarily the same as what's right for someone else. but my brain is still on overdrive. see, this feels like I am making some long slightly obnoxious request for reassurance. I don't mean it to come off that way. obviously, I need to be able to reassure myself and feel secure in my own choices. but I thought I would ask if anyone else struggles with comparisons, and with 'pre-empting' other people's beliefs about them. I assume it would be a common theme with eating disorders but I feel incredibly obnoxious/self obsessed talking about it, and that in itself made me think it was something I should write about! so...question for anyone...what are your experiences with comparisons? :)

speaking of challenges though I have a new one planned for Monday. it's going to be quite a sad experience...



I am giving up this for a week :(
'this' being yogurt & cereal, of course. I've already stopped eating loads of foods which I used to think I 'liked' but were actually just 'safe'. but greek yogurt is one which IS safe and I did eat when I was ill (albeit without all the toppings!) but I'm pretty certain I actually do really like it. however. I am sure I will live without it for a week and food is really not so important that I need to eat my favourite things ALL the time incase of a famine tomorrow, whatever my body might like to think about that. so, I am giving it up as of now (just ate my last one) so that I have the opportunity to/am pushed into eating more different things and probably trying new foods :) wish me luck!

mainly to say ask me questions here!
I originally thought of starting it cause I wanted to be able to help anyone with questions as I got further on in my recovery. obviously I am still in the early stages, but at the same time my memory of the very first few days and weeks is extremely vivid still so I can help with that ;) and I can also talk about how I am overcoming specific challenges with binge/purge subtype anorexia til I am blue in the face. I've always found that treatment can be difficult here cause they always assumed I was either totally 'anorexic' or totally 'bulimic' in thought patterns, whereas I found myself somewhere in between. so I basically worked out some particular techniques and ideas for myself, and would love to be able to help anyone with similar problems.

ALSO though, I am more than up for fun, random or silly questions :D I can ramble on about anything and will probably answer most things unless they're things I wouldn't even tell my best friend or something ;)

sidenote about my picture on Formspring...it's me at my highest weight, and I put it up there cause for the first time I'm actually starting to see myself then as attractive, which has to be a good thing! there are only a handful of pictures of me then and one of my closest friends took this one, cause I wasn't leaving the house much (weight issues, eyeroll) but I went to see her cause I'm so comfortable with her and she managed to cheer me up and even snap a smiling picture. anyway, I avoided that picture for years, hating myself in it, but for the first time I'm sort of aiming to get back there (well, a bit higher, but you know what I mean!) so I thought it would be a fun one to put up.

aside from that shameless self promotion, I haven't been up to much today except work, but as I said in my last post I went out with my amazing 'food friend' as she said in a comment on Saturday! we've been really close for months, and recently we've been going out for lunch on Saturdays as a sort of weekly fun and a challenge. so this time we went to a really cute little restaurant in a town in Yorkshire, and bought some SERIOUSLY weird food in the stalls nearby. check this out...



yep. BANANA CHEESE. nah, I'm kidding, it's not actually cheese. you know how lemon curd is sometimes called lemon cheese? well yeah, it's effectively banana curd, made with bananas, sugar, eggs and butter. weird, but seriously good! my favourite way to eat it so far is with cream cheese, cause it's really sweet so that cuts through it nicely. but it also goes well with PB to make banana/PB toast but in a spreadable form!
ok, enough weird food info for the day :P but I thought that might amuse someone.

seeing as people seemed to like my grumpy face food, here's another example of me being childish in the form of a bagel (with BANANA CHEESE!) and banana/PB evening snack...



more when the next essay of doom is handed in (three from six done now!)