This blog is not about me. You see, I’ve more or less conquered the demons of my eating disorder and I’ve moved on. I no longer exercise to purge the “bad” food I ate yesterday. I don’t diet or count calories in order to stay at a magic number on the scales. I am not preoccupied with how I look which was never good enough anyway.
This blog is for those of you who are thinking about or just starting to take this journey of freedom from bingeing/restricting and excessive exercise. I understand that some of you who read this blog don’t agree with intuitive eating and are convinced that I’m on the wrong path. I respect your point of view but I’m not writing to convince you that I’m right.
I’m here to serve those of you who are tired of fighting. Fighting is exhausting. You have to have control, willpower, determination, motivation and single-minded focus. You “pull yourself into line” only to have all your hard word undone by a few days of eating all the things you’ve deprived yourself of for so long. You cry when you stand on the scales, you can only see flaws when you look in the mirror and you only feel comfortable in your skin when it fits inside your size eight jeans. You make love infrequently with the lights off. You are sick of always having to watch what you eat and the hours you spend in the gym leave you exhausted and in physical pain.
But you my friend are the hero of this story, not me. You are the only one that can figure out how to have the body of your dreams without obsessing about what you eat and how often you exercise. You can follow your dreams without fear. You can throw away the scales, you can buy bigger clothes, you can never go to the gym and still run around the house naked feeling beautiful and sexy. You can eat chocolate at Easter and enjoy a glass of wine without guilt. You can be who you were meant to be, not a carbon copy of some Photoshopped young woman in a magazine. You can be funny, flirtatious, intense, selfish, and ‘too much’. Nothing bad will happen if you try on being authentic — something magical and exciting will.
There is a simple test to determine if you are living your life honestly. Think about what you would do today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow. If the first thing that comes to mind is all the food you could eat because it wouldn’t matter and skipping your training session, then something is out of balance.
If today was my last day on this earth, I would probably not even waste time with eating. I would call my friends and family, I would make love to my boyfriend and I would write and/or photograph something that I would be proud to leave behind. I would give half my money to a school in Zimbabwe and the other half to a cat shelter. And then I would go somewhere tropical and beautiful so I could take my last breath surrounded by nature.
Food is nice but not important. Moving my body is good but I would never choose to spend my last hours on earth on a treadmill or a spin class. I’d choose walking perhaps, shagging definitely.
Who are you really? What is the dream that you are too scared to speak of because people would disapprove? How would you spend your last day on earth?
You are the hero of this story, of your story, and you are the one who gets to write it. Start now. I’ll be watching with interest and cheering you along.
Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself. — Joseph Campbell
→ This post was heavily influenced by Justine Musk — You Are Not the Hero of Your Blog