End of semester

Over the past month or so I havent had much of a chance to write any posts but now my exams are finally over and I have more time on my hands again which is great! Although I havent gotten any results back yet I am confident that they will be fine! I worked really hard and I prepared myself for them as best as I possibly could have so no matter what happens,  I can be proud of that.

Although I did get anxious and stressed at times, I think I coped with my exams relatively well. It really helped having my wonderful boyfriend there for support and also keeping a healthy balance by getting some exercise everyday helped me too. At times though I know I got stressed and wasnt great company for my boyfriend to be around, but I am thankful he didnt take it personally and was surprised by just how understanding he was.

Now My exams are over, I am looking forward to doing some extra shifts at work (so i can hopefully save a bit of money as I am very broke at the moment). I am also excited to now have more time to dedicate to growing my herbalife business. Herbalife is something I am so incredibly passionate about and of I can build a career for myself through helping others feel fantastic 24 hours a day, 7 days oer week, then that will be a dream come true.

I am in the midst of starting up a fit club which is super exciting and I cant wait to see what else the future holds! The weather is finally starting to warm up now that summer is approaching as well which is another added bonus! This summer is going to be the first summer in a long time that I have had a really good relationship with food as well as good self confidence so I am really looking forward to it!

Im just about to make myself a herbalife cookies and cream frappe for dessert and then I will probably just snuggle into bed and watch some telly for the rest of the night. It feels so good to do this now after not having had the time for so long! I hope everyone is really well. Please let me know if you have any specific post topic requests or any questions you would like answered.

Learn to love your body

I never thought I would love my body again, especially at a healthy weight but I actually love my body more now then I ever have in my life. I accept it for what it is and just appreciate all of the wonderful things it allows me to do. Lifes too short to spend time hating your body, what good can possibly come out of doing that? So please, try your hardest to love yourself and your body, it will make recovery so much easier and more achievable! Here are some tips from the National Eating Disorder Association on how to learn love your body

20 Ways to Love Your Body

Compiled By: Margo Maine, PhD

1. Think of your body as the vehicle to your dreams.  Honor it.  Respect it.  Fuel it.
2. Create a list of all the things your body lets you do.  Read it and add to it often.
3. Become aware of what your body can do each day.  Remember it is the instrument of your life, not just an ornament.
4. Create a list of people you admire:  people who have contributed to your life, your community, or the world.  Consider whether their appearance was important to their success and accomplishments. 
5. Walk with your head held high, supported by pride and confidence in yourself as a person.
6. Don’t let your weight or shape keep you from activities that you enjoy.
7. Wear comfortable clothes that you like, that express your personal style, and that feel good to your body.
8. Count your blessings, not your blemishes.
9. Think about all the things you could accomplish with the time and energy you currently spend worrying about your body and appearance.  Try one!
10. Be your body’s friend and supporter, not its enemy. 
11. Consider this:  your skin replaces itself once a month, your stomach lining every five days, your liver every six weeks, and your skeleton every three months.  Your body is extraordinary—begin to respect and appreciate it.
12. Every morning when you wake up, thank your body for resting and rejuvenating itself so you can enjoy the day.
13. Every evening when you go to bed, tell your body how much you appreciate what it has allowed you to do throughout the day.
14. Find a method of exercise that you enjoy and do it regularly. Don’t exercise to lose weight or to fight your body. Do it to make your body healthy and strong and because it makes you feel good.  Exercise for the Three F’s: Fun, Fitness, and Friendship.
15. Think back to a time in your life when you felt good about your body.  Loving your body means you get to feel like that again, even in this body, at this age.
16. Keep a list of 10 positive things about yourself—without mentioning your appearance.  Add to it daily!
17. Put a sign on each of your mirrors saying, “I’m beautiful inside and out.”
18. Search for the beauty in the world and in yourself.
19. Consider that, “Life is too short to waste my time hating my body this way.”
20. Eat when you are hungry.  Rest when you are tired.  Surround yourself with people that remind you of your inner strength and beauty.

Feeling happy and comfortable in my own skin

Today I am going to the football with my boyfriend and some of his family which will be great! I just have to wait for my boyfriend to get home from work (I know, only my boyfriend is crazy enough to vuluntarily work on his Saturday mornings after a whole week of working atleast 10 hours everyday). 

As I got ready this morning, I found it so nice to be accepting of myself and how I looked as this never would have happened to me in the past. Although i still have times when I feel self conscious and suffer from poor self esteem, it is just great to feel confident in my own skin sometimes too. 

Here are a few selfies I took this morning to mark this wonderful achievement of bejng able to accept myself, the way I truly am supposed to be. I encourage everyone in recovery from an eating disorder to aim for this type of self acceptance as it really is the most wonderful feeling, when you no longer hate everything about yourself all the time.

Good body image day

Ever since I was a little girl, I believed that it was wrong to like how you look. I believed that if someone said something they liked about themselves, they were arrogant. Therefore every time I ever thought aything nice about myself, I would get angry at myself and think I was doing the wrong thing. I suppose that this is why I eventually hated myself and how I looked so much.

I know that I often write on here about having bad body image days, but I never talk about feeling comfortable with my body even though that happenss sometimes. I guess the reson why I don't usualy talk about it is because a part of me still believes that it is wrong to like yourself or think something good about yourself. But I am now learning that this is not the case at all.

I woke up this morning feeling positive and confident and as I put on a short pair of black shorts, I wasn't really bothered at all. As I was walking through town,  I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the shop windows but instead of feeling fat or unhappy with how I looked like I usually do, I felt fine about my reflection. Not overjoyed or excited, but still good.

Yes my legs looked much bigger then they once did but I din't instantly see this as a bad thing or feel self conscious as I usually would have. Instead I thought about how strong and toned they looked, which I think must be due to all the walking I have been doing. 

When I got back home, I tried on a new pair of work pants that I have recieved from the bendigo bank, not knowing if they would fit me or not and I was delighted when they fit me perfectly. I felt happy that I could order adults clothes (even if in the smallest size) and have them fit me perfectly!

I wanted to write this post today to show you all that there really isn't anything wrong with accepting yourself and thinking good things about the way you look. In fact, I encourage you to try and think good things about yourself more often nas accepting yourself really is an important part of the recovery process. 

Just because I didn't hate my reflection when I saw it this morning does not mean that I am self obsessed or egotistic as I once would have thought. It just means that I have been able to find peach with who I am and how I look, which is exactly what it should be like.

And finally, I wanted to write this post to let you all know that it is possible to accept the way you look after having an eating disorder. When I was underweight, I never thought for even a second that I would ever be able to accept my body at a normal weight, but now I do. In fact, I like my body more now then I did when I was underweight! :)

Accepting my weight

I weighed myself this morning for the first time in a while to see that my weight is still exactly the same as it was months ago, which I think is a good thing. To me, this indicates that I am looking after myself and that my body is sitting at my natural set point weight. The figure I had before I got anorexia has returned and I have lots of energy to live the busy and active lifestyle I want to live.

I feel fit and healthy and dont experience any of the symptoms of starvation that I had when I was underweight. With a BMI of 19, I know that I am still quite small and that my weight is at the lower end of the 'healthy weight range' for my height and this is what I remind myself, everytime I have anorexic thoughts about wanting to lose weight.

To me, losing weight also means losing hapiness and that is something that I definetely am not willing to give up. So althoug I may not like and appreciate my body 100% of the time, I am able to accept is almost all of the time and whenever I am self conscious, I can manage to talk myself around and make myself see that the expectations I have of myself are not unrealistic.

When I am thinking rationally, I know that there is nothing wrong with my body at all. I am healthy and my body is able to function well at my current weight. I may not be super skinny but I am certainly not over weight either and have no reason to need to lose weight. In fact losing weight would make me less healthy anf harm my body, so I therefore should not desire to do it at all.

So when I do start feeling self conscious I just need to remind myself that it is only my anorexia making me feel uncomfortable and that my anorexia would make me feel like this, no matter how thin I was. And by ignoring these thoughts, I honestly believe that I will eventtually stop having them all together.


 

Being skinny isn't important

As I was watching the movie yesterday, I couldn't help but notice how thin the main characters legs were and I found myself longing for her figure. But then, I asked myself how life would get better for me if I was to look like he girl in the movie and I couldn't think of anything at all. The truth is, I have looked like the girl in the movie before but I was unhappier then and hated myself more then too.

Perhaps the girl in the movie naturally looks like that but something that I must accept is that I DONT. It may be healthy for the girl in the movie to look the way she looks but for me, I cant be happy and healthy at that weight. So I have to choose, be happy and healthy at mu current natural weight or be thinner and miserable. To me, this choice is pretty simple.

And then of course, there is always the possibility that the girl in the movie is not at her natural set point weight either and that she is actually very underweight. Perhaps she has an eating disorder, or maybe she just feels pressured to make her self look the way she does because of the industry she works in. Either way I feel sorry for her if her job makes her feel as though she cant just be herself, as it probably makes her feel as awful as it made me feel.

So I know I shouldn't compare myself to the girl in the movie, or anyone at all for that matter as everyone is so different and you never know what others may be going through. Yes, skinny girls may look beautiful sometimes but so do bigger girls. You DON'T have to be skinny or underweight to be beautiful, you really can be beautiful at any size! And being skinny really is not the thing that should matter most to you in life.

This may be a little depressing to talk about but at your funeral oneday (In a long long time) do you want a loved one to stand up in front of the crowd and say how caring, thoughtful, happy, beautiful, wonderful and brave you were? Or would you rather someone stand up in front of the crowd and say, 'well I don't really have much to say about them but they were skinny'.

At the end of the day, being skinny really means nothing and it makes me so sad to think that I once placed so much value on something that actually is so unimportant. Andn I wish that I could make all of you who are currently struggling see this too. Having a successful life really does not mean looking a certain way, but instead it means being a certain way. It means being a good person who you can be proud of and who others look up to.

Havinga successful life may mean something different to everyone. It could mean having a great career, having a family, being a good person or, if ou are like me, it might just means doing what makes you happy. And I know that being super skinny does not make me happy and that it therefore will not allow me to have a good or successful life. Please, think about what I have aid here really carefully as once you realise that life without anorexia is what will make you truly happy and healthy and once being thing becomes a lot less important to you, recovery really does become possible.

Self acceptance is the key to recovery

This time three years ago, I was laying in a hospital bed after being diagnosed with anorexia. Although my weight had not dropped extremely low, I was hypothermic and my heart was weak. I had stopped eating all together before being admitted to hospital and I absolutely hated everything about myself. Over the past three years, a lot had happened. I wish I could say that since I was admitted, I continued making positive recovery progress but sadly that is not the case at all. Unfortunately, my anorexia got a lot worse before it got any better and it wasn't until this year that I have actually made any recovery progress at all.

As I read back over my journal entries from when I was in hospital, the thing that stands out to me most is tthe hate I had for myself. I think that out of all the things I have achieved over the last 3 years, learning that I was worth recovery and that there was nothing wrong with me, as I am naturally supposed to be were the most important. I am so glad that I finally realised that I did not deserve to live life with anorexia and that whilst I was anorexic, I would never be happy. I honestly believed that not being skinny enough was the reason for my unhapiness and that the only way I could ever be truly happy was if I lost weight.

Although I know I need to keep working on it, I think that the most wonderful thing I have achieved in the last 3 years is self acceptance. I can honestly say that I dont want to be someone else anymore, I just want to be the real me. Who cares if I am not the skinniest or the prettiest, I am ME and that is all that matters. While I have wasted a lot of time over the last three years being unhappy and miserable, not living at all and barely surviving, I am so grateful for where I am today and I am so proud of everything I have achieved. Although it has not been an enjoyable journey, I think that everything I have been through has helped get me to where I am today. Afterall, if I had never hit 'rock bottom,' perhaps I never would have felt the need to make a full recovery.

Once I would have said that the key to making a recovery from anorexia was being able to eat lke a normal person again but I now realise that it is so much more then that. Now I have realised that the real key to recovery is being able to accept who you are, not just the way you look but also who yo are on the inside. You may not love every single little thing about yourself and that is completely ok. You just  need to be able to accept yourself, despite what you may see as imperfections. I dont think recovery is possible if you dont accept yourself so perhaps if you are trying to recover, you should work on accepting yourself for a while before you work on everything else.

I honestly thought I would hate myself forever but this has not been the case and it doesn't need to be the case for you either. You can do it, I believe in you!

forgiving yourself

Although I have spent the last 24 hours really upset and frustrated with myself for something that happened at work yesterday, I have finally realised that beating myself up wont help matters at all. I have always been a perfectionist and have always been very hard on mysef whenever I made mistakes.

The thing that I need to keep reminding myself is that everybody makes mistakes and no one can be perfect all the time. I think that it is important that I can learn to accept this simple truth, that no one can be perfect all the time. Just as important is that I learn how to forgive ourselves, if ever things don't work out the way I would have liked them too or if I make a mistake.

Sometimes unfortunate things happen and sometimes we may be partly responsible for these things happening but there is no point in continuing to feel guilty and upset about these types of things forever. We need to be able to accept any mistakes that we may make in life, learn from them and move on.

So right now I am going to forgive myself for what has gone wrong, learn from my mistake and just do everything in my power to stop it from ever happening again. There is still a chance that the situation will be resolved but if not, it isnt the end of the world. I should just be grateful that I am healthy and I should not waste anymore time being unhappy, especially since being unhappy won't solve any problems.

Remember that no matter what mistakes you may make in life, all that matters is that you learn from them and do everything in your power to make things better. Nobody else is perfect in this world and you are no different. So forgive yourself for any mistakes you may have made in the past and move forward. Making mistakes really is inevitable but letting them get you down isn't!  

Hating my bum

Everybody has a part of ther own body that they hate or dislike. I guess the secret to being happy and having a positive self body image is not to change the thing you may not like, but to instead learn to accept it and live with it.

The part of my body that I have always hated as long as I can remember is my bum. In my opinion I have always had a big bum and have always been incredibly self conscious of it. Growing up my dad and brothers would always tease me bout my 'big bum' which I think made me even more self conscious and made me worry even more about it.

For some reason, any body fat I ever gained always did go straight to my bum and even now, since becoming weight restored most of my weight gain has gone straight to my bum (and also my chest). I suppose that it is due to genetics or something but I know that I need to learn to accept it as this is obviously the way I am naturally supposed to be.

I just need to remind myself that I should be happy that I am healthy and enjoying life. It is so silly to be worrying so muuch over my 'big bum,' which probably isn't even that big. I think that a part of the reason why my bum looks so big to me is only because my waist is so tiny . So in fact I probbably only have a ''normal' sized bum but a smaller then normal waist.

I think a hugely important thing for me to learn is that there is nothing wrong with being 'normal.' My anorexia developed in the first place because I wanted to be skinny and because I was not happy with just being 'normal' sized. I suppose that it is related to my perfectionist personality but it is definetely something I am going to keep working on utill I overcome it.

So everytime I feel self consious about my bum or catch sight of the reflection of my body in a mirror or window and feel unhappy (which has been a lot lately), I just need to remind myself that my bum is ok. It is just a part of who I am and I need to accept that. :)