By the time I get back to the weight I was when I started this journey to reclaim a healthy relationship with food it will have taken me two years.
Two fucking years, ladies and gentlemen — and to be frank, it’s not what I signed up for when I decided I wanted to be free of the starve/binge cycle in September 2009.
No-one told me it would take this long, and if they had, I probably would have said “Pass”, signed up an on-line trainer and hooked up with my old boyfriend Calorie King.
But now, seeing how far I’ve come, I don’t regret it for one minute. I am so much happier and freer now I can make rational decisions about what to eat without feeling driven to either not eat anything that isn’t “whole food” or to eat everything that the corner shop sells containing sugar and/or fat.
It’s a long road, and it’s not over yet (if it ever will be) and it takes extraordinary courage and bravery to choose this path. It is hard going. It is slow going. It won’t happen overnight …
You have to let go of being in control, you have to trust the process, you have to go through binge after binge until you don’t feel guilty anymore. You have to look at a body carrying extra fat without self loathing. You have to feel pain, loneliness, uncertainty and fear. You glimpse moments of perfect peace that scurry away almost as soon as you see them. You think “fuck it, this is bullshit”.
But you keep on going, no matter what.
No matter that you’ve eaten marshmallows for dinner, or that buying bigger sized clothes leaves you sobbing in the change room. No matter that you have nothing to talk about with the health and fitness community and it leaves you feeling so alone. No matter that you feel like a monumental failure.
And then slowly you start to feel different. Food is just food — it’s lost its magical powers. Your body is curvy and sexy, not fat and horrible even though you’re still the same size. You start dealing with the pain in the rest of your life and discover that nothing is as bad as never being happy with yourself. You string hours, then days, then weeks, then months together when you really like yourself. The promise of the body you want easily and effortlessly finally starts to come true. The world has changed and it is brilliantly exciting not knowing what tomorrow will bring.
I don’t know about you, but two years doesn’t seem too much to pay for that kind of result.