January 1 2016!

How refreshing is January 1? It has so much hope, a sparkle and a freshness that I hope I can carry on for every new day.

I have a few random thoughts I wish to share..

I was reading aloud The Alchemist to James and playing with the excess fat on my hips, as I tend to, unconsciously. I started instead to rub my hand lightly over my thigh, and noticed how soft and smooth my skin is there. As I continued I realised that all this time I have been so concerned with how flabby I am there, that I have not noticed how smooth and soft the skin is. The more I continue this journey, the more I see this is the case. While I have been concerned with all of my 'faults', I have not noticed all of my 'perfections'. The way I'm starting to see it, you can choose to see your faults or you can choose to see your perfections but like it says in my book 'Overcoming Binge Eating' if you look for fat, you will find it. All that time I've focused on my fat, and failed to notice the beauty of my skin.

The other day I felt James was upset with me, and I put more makeup on and considered straightening my hair, thinking if he'd just see how pretty I look he'll change his attitude. I realised suddenly that this is not what he wants, nor is it what he is attracted to, so I went out and offered to help him with something instead, I committed an act of love, instead of thinking my looks would do the work and the more I focused on him and making him feel good the more things got better. I realised that to make someone fall in love with you, or to keep them there, you must love them and show you love them. My looks will not keep our relationship together. When I am upset with James never do I think 'oh well he's so good looking it doesn't matter' although I easily could. No. It's the things he does and the person he is that helps me to forgive him and all this time I have been leaning on my looks to fix things instead of my acts.

So we come to a new year and of course I have resolutions. But this year they're different. I'm not committing to ridiculously unbalanced health goals. I have one key theme and that is healing. My focus this year is to heal and to do this I am going to:
1. Focus more on being and less on doing
2. Aim to meditate every day
3. Continue to see Juliet and write this diary/blog and continue structured eating and continue avoiding diets.
4. Explore my creativity through writing, drawing and colouring in. Focus on creating, for the journey not for the product. 
5. Continue to explore who Acacia really is. All these years I try to figure out what I want to be and it always changes, but that's no surprise when I don't even know who I am and have lost touch with what I love.
6. Read lots of books. Fiction and non-fiction. Whatever I please.
7. Make James's life as happy and as easy as possible.. Commit an act of love every day.

I promised myself I'd write more, yet I haven't been too committed to that by the lack of posts! Anyway here I am. Mostly, on the whole, I am very content and happy where I am. I enjoyed a beautiful Christmas day with family full of turkey, ham, prawns, potato bake and salads. I devoured 2 servings of pavlova for dinner because I could. Then I ate a couple of chocolates and it didn't bother me. We woke up, went for a big run/walk and got in the car for a drive for 8 hours to Melbourne.

 I am allowing myself to indulge in the food that I love, but trying to not graze between meals. Am I happy with how my body looks? No. It is soft, I have cellulite and the beautiful lines and firm muscles I used to have are gone. BUT appearance is temporary and it means nothing. Would I have been happier on Christmas day had I been lean but counting macros - unlikely able to eat particular foods, anxious about not being able to weigh and measure my meal and probably annoyed because I would have binged.. definately self-conscious anyway because despite being lean I still never looked good enough? No. I wouldn't have. I'm happier now, because my weight and my body fat are never low enough, never good enough.. but enjoying food and moments with family and loved ones are always enough and should always be savoured.

However, despite all this I go on Instagram and see people with the bodies I want and I feel a tug inside me... I could look like that! I know what I need to do, but my thoughts don't go that far, not planning how to get there, just reacting to that tug inside me that causes me to feel envious, jealous, a longing for something I feel I'll never have..

But then I remind myself, I can have that. I can be fit and healthy if I don't get extreme. But why do I want it so bad? It took away my ability to live, that obsession with appearance. It negated all the other incredible things about myself, it covered up my creativity and caused rifts in my relationships. Is that what I really want? Looking like that won't make me happy. Perhaps when I'm truly happy I'll look like that anyway because I'm no longer medicating with food and I have a healthy relationship with the gym, but to focus on my appearance as the outcome? That's not what I want anymore.

What do I want? I want to see friends at amazing cafes and indulge in the foods I truly want. I want to feel TRULY in control of what I eat. I want to go to the gym and workout because I love it, not because I hate me. I want to have wine at dinner and dessert afterwards. I want to draw and write and colour and sing in my spare time, because my mind is not filled with 'fitspo' and 'inspo' and my eyes are not glued to social media, in the hope that if I look enough I'll starting looking 'enough'.

In four days a new year begins. 2016, for me, is a year of healing. It's a year of finding myself and learning to love myself again. It's a year of enjoying myself and 'being', not always having to be 'doing'. It's a year that will not have diets or restrictions. It's the year that I will realise I am enough. Right now. As I am. And I look forward to that.

It's none of my business

So I had this realization today. James and I have been fighting and it made me so anxious to think about if we split up, and also if he doesn't love m.. but I realised oh if someone else likes me it's none of my business. Even if James loves me or not, it's none of my business. I have finally realised I can't control someone else's feelings towards me. I can try to control them, by doing artificial, incongruous actions that I think will impress them, but truly deep down I don't know. I don't know why James loves me - if it was my decision I'd say it was my looks, but then I don't think that much of my looks so sort of think it's not that. But either way, it's only a guess.

Balancing Decisions, Drinking alcohol & moving to Goa!

I really need to write more. And meditate more. Most of all just be more. In the now type 'be' not 'I'm insufficient'. Let's rephrase. I'd love to make more time to write! I'd also like to write a guide on loving yourself. But I guess I have to learn that first.

Our friends Kate & Gaurav are here to stay from Goa, India and it's so incredible to have them. They own and run a yoga studio in Goa and James and I are going next year to do their course which is very exciting. We had a wonderful night drinking wine & eating cheese and talking about all sorts of things, including loving yourself. Gaurav told this story about how he once saw a celebrity wearing a certain type of shoes so he thought 'I must have them'. He goes to buy them but they don't have his size, only a size smaller. But he buys them anyway because he had to have those shoes. His feet were sore and cramped but he wore them anyway until one day he realised he didn't like having sore feet trying to fit into these celebrity shoes. So he bought shoes that fit him, still wonderful shoes that looked good, but ones that fit him and he was much more comfortable. I laughed at the thought of how many shoes I've bought that were too small just because I had to have those ones. And now I have bursitis and arthritis in my toe and I'm 27! I still own a pair of shorts I bought in Holland. I remember dieting and exercising for over 2 hours a day. I was so insecure about James cheating on me with this girl, Donne, or another girl Lauren, that I thought I should lose weight because he'd never leave me then (the irony of this came only just this weekend). Anyway I shrunk enormously, so I fit into these teeny tiny shorts for about a week until James came over. One of the things we have always loved to do together is eat.. so we did... and I ended up putting the weight back on. I've never fit into those shorts since.. but ridiculously still hold onto them. Waiting for the day they'll fit. Omg that was in 2007!! I have been holding onto them for 8 years!!!!!! For 8 years I have tried to fit into those shorts and yet I haven't again.. and instead of giving up on the shorts and the diets I've scolded myself and thought I need to work harder and be more persistent. Fuck. Trying to lose weight for 8 years.. if that's not persistent I don't know what is!!!

Anyway I've digressed. As usual. So the irony of this notion that James would never leave me if I lost weight.. is that over the weekend we had a wedding & I was hanging around this guy all night, dancing and having a good time, but of course incredibly immature and disrespectful to James... and he and I almost broke up yesterday. So the irony of wanting to look good to save my relationship, is that my need to impress others and have external validation for my looks is that it actually almost lost my relationship, and all this focus on my appearance has meant I have lost focus on the values that are important to me. The person I want to be. It's like Gaurav said, when you focus so much on trying to be something that you're not, you lose focus on who you really are, and that side of you becomes unconscious. It's like the other day when I realised how much I used to love to write and draw. Every holidays, every weekend, I would be drawing or writing, or doing both in these great books I used to write for my dad. And then I became a teenager, and became focused on boys and how I looked, and I lost that creative side of me. It served no purpose (or so I thought). And then I became an adult and everything I did became about earning money and trying to be the best at something that would earn me money, like fitness for example. And I never drew and I never wrote because they were pointless, they weren't going to earn me money, unless i did a journalism course which I considered for a while.. but decided against because there's no money in it and I want to write creatively.. so I just never wrote at all. So I am very excited because today is the first day of nearly 2 weeks off and I want to write and read and draw every day.

I am also very excited because Kate and Gaurav told us we could buy a house in Goa for $30,000 and live off about $2000 a month (lavishly). If we sold our house and James's business we could literally just put our money in a savings or term deposit and live. Just live. Not work. Just live. And it would give us the space to meditate, and be creative and live the life we've always wanted. We have to leave every 6 months for our visa, but that is okay because we could travel! And come back to Australia to see family. It makes me so excited because I see photos of Kate on Facebook living this incredible life and I watch her journey longingly and thinking how I wish I could have that life.. and now I find out that James would be keen on it! So we will go in November (11 months away, too long!) and we will not sell our house until we have done that. We will also not have a baby (which I am fine with) because moving with a kid would be too hard, although I guess not really but taking mum's first grandchild overseas might make life difficult. I would miss mum so much though, and my family.. and our friends, but I think it would be okay. Mum could come to visit and I would go home to visit her.. I am just so excited!

So I also had my psych yesterday and she said my eating looks more relaxed (which it is) and my weight is stable (which is great because I thought I'd gain) despite eating and drinking like a Queen the last week! So I am learning that I will not gain weight if I just eat normally. And I am learning to love myself and not try to lose weight. She's also helping me see that you can be healthy and focus on health by including more exercise and more fruit and vegetables and less processed food, but not excluding whole things like sugar or carbs or fat or counting calories. And I'm happy with that. We also had a big chat about the weekend and what happens when you drink and she drew a circle and said normally we have boundaries set by our values and morals but when we drink these become blurry and we do something outside of those boundaries because the alcohol affects the front part of our brain that is responsible, and makes decisions and problem solves. It is a depressant so it slows this ability to make decisions down, and delays our decision making so sometimes we act first, or it completely interferes with our decision making so we don't think at all ( like the boy who climbed on the crane and fell to his death one new years eve). So we did a balance of pros and cons of drinking and I realised the two things that draw me to drink are the confidence and relaxation it gives me (which I can find in other ways and will increase the more I do positive things) and also the social aspect. But there's no reason I can't go to things and see friends and enjoy myself without drinking. Also, like last night when I drank a bottle of wine, I can still have nights like that with friends.. just maybe not the massive benders out with lots of people.. perhaps it's better to go easy on those nights. And so through all this analysing we found a middle way for me. And that's what I'm finding more and more, is that there's a middle way. I can have my cake and eat it after all!

A picture sometimes doesn't tell any words

I went out to a friend's birthday on a weekend. I was tagged in a photo afterwards and while I'm not genuinely smiling but posing (because 'what if my top lip goes thin in the photo?', 'what if my eyes are squinty?', 'what if my cheeks look chubby?' etc. etc. run through my head too often when I see a photo being taken) I think 'she looks like a normal, fairly pretty girl'.

For 12 years I have looked like a normal girl. It's funny that no one can tell what's going on behind those eyes. No one would know the number of times my head has been in a toilet bowl, fingers down my throat. No one would know the tears I've cried at my inadequacy, my failure, my inability to be successful at anything, not even dieting. No one would know how little I think of myself, or how much I beat myself up for breaking my rules, yet again. No one at work would know that on some days every minute I sit there I am in excruciating emotional pain, unsure how I will get through the next 60 seconds, let alone the whole day.

We had a family lunch on the weekend (with all my siblings who have no idea about the bulimia) and my 19 year old niece was telling me about a book she read about eating disorders. I thought to myself 'why is she reading that? Maybe she has one!' And I would never know. We don't talk about it. It's shameful. It's embarrassing. It's raw and awkward and while it's completely acceptable to fat-shame yourself and whinge about how much weight you've put on, it seems like it's not okay to open up and say you have an eating disorder. Saying you have anxiety is fine. Saying you deal with it with the mechanisms you do, doesn't seem socially acceptable. Maybe that's just my views.

I've been toying with the idea of telling people. I don't know. Only my mum, my fiancee and my best friend know. I have a friend who knows I've been seeing a psychologist, she knows I've been having some trouble, but she has no idea that I'm bulimic. (Actually, that's just spurred me into an idea. Which has nothing to do with what I'm typing. Language is reality. If I keep saying "I'm bulimic, I have an eating disorder" then I will stay stuck in that situation. I am a recovering bulimic. I'm in recovery. I can put those bad habits(?) in the past. I'm recovering. I am recovering too. I've done so well. Four weeks and no restriction.)

I digress. Back to the telling people thing. Should I talk about it? I'm sure they know I've got some sort of issue - I'm always on a diet, always not eating something in particular. I don't want to be that girl any more. It's also the friend's hens this weekend that I want to tell, and I feel like it would help to be more open about it, because I'm very anxious about the hens and want to have a get out of jail free card if I need it. I guess I can just leave. But I want an excuse to be driving not drinking. I guess I don't need one do I? One of the things I need to learn is that I don't need excuses, the truth is usually sufficient. One of the things I need to work on is owning my shit. Like being able to say 'do you know what, I am exhausted and I am not drinking and I love you and this is no indication of my care for you, but I need to go home, I hope you understand'. And not give a shit if someone thinks that's rude, or thinks it's uncaring. That's their issue, not mine. I know I adore my friend, she knows how much I adore her, I don't think how long you stay out for is an issue.

And the other friend of mine who's going and last weekend was saying how glad she was I was going to drink. I need to just say to her, 'I've changed my mind. I'm going through some heavy stuff at the moment, this isn't the time or the place but I'm seeing a psychologist and I need to stay sober for my own peace of mind. I'm still going to have a good time and enjoy myself, but this is what I need to do.' And I need to forget about impressing her by getting drunk. Because at the end of the day, that's her shit if she can't have a good time without drinking, or needs me to be drunk too.

I took yesterday off work AND today. And I felt really guilty. But then the other day my friend said to me 'mental ILLNESS is still an illness' and she's right. It' s a shame we can't call our boss and say, you know I'm just not coping emotionally with life right now, and I need a bit of a break. It's a shame we can't say that to our doctors to get a medical certificate, but to be honest, I think that's what I am going to say - I'm going to to to the medical centre and tell the doctor I am a recovering bulimic and life has just been really crazy and I needed a break. And I'm going to see what they say. Maybe all of these ideas that society doesn't like us admitting mental illness are just in my head. I mean, if I had an employee who said they were struggling with a mental illness and needed time off I wouldn't challenge it, would anyone? 

I knew writing would help me again!!

Tuesday 8 December 2015

Today I had a great session with Juliet. Considering I went from feeling like I was going to jump off a cliff to feeling like I have a bit more room to move, I am very pleased.

We spoke about my inability to say no to other people, and to need to be the best at everything. "What if you're not the best?" she asked. It was a hard one to answer. "I'd feel inadequate, not special" even saying it was hard. "Is James the best at anything?" she asked me "no, but he's very popular and good at things" "do you think he's special" Yes.

It's given me room to move. I can do my best while simultaneously admitting that that doesn't have to mean driving myself into the ground to get there. Doing my best can mean saying no sometimes. I think that's what I have to learn, I'm certainly not doing my best with Arbonne when I'm shattered and have no energy, I'm not doing my best by my friends to saying yes to things that i don't have time for then not doing a good job. I'm not doing my best at work having to take time off because I'm exhausted and I'm not doing my best by James never having time to help him with the chores or spend quality time with him. And I'm definately not doing my best by myself not taking time to process what I need ot when it comes to having an eating disorder and recovering from it. So really by doing so much I'm actually doing worse than if I gave myself some room to move.

I need to leave my job though, that's taking up too much time. So I might stay there til the end of February, then go to India to do Kate's course and come back and get back into personal training & also do yoga teaching. That gives me some hope and it also helps me realise that I don't HAVE to finish area or push myself so hard if it's not the right time. Recovery needs to be my number 1 focus. My absolute number 1. I can't be focusing on other things right now. Or I'm going to burn out and relapse.