on losing weight

I've been mulling over the decision to talk about my weight-loss on U+T. I've mentioned it here and there, and have had a few questions about it on Twitter, so thought I would write a bit of an introduction. I guess it's mostly for myself, but I want to write more about this part of my life on my blog, and I wanted to make it clear that this hasn't been an easy ride. I think a lot of the blogs and articles I read want everything to look like some beautifully curated Pinterest photos of healthy food (I admit, I'm guilty of that too) - but mental illness and struggles with food can often go hand in hand, and although the extreme end of eating disorders (like anorexia and bulimia) are often talked about, other kinds of eating problems are glossed over (particularly if you are anything but underweight). I still walk a fine line between happy and depressed, between obsessing over food and being aware that you need to eat healthily, and that's something I'll always have to deal with.
So that all said, take everything I say from here out with a big pinch of salt - I am no expert, obviously.. I'd also like to ask you to be respectful in the comments (if you decide to read this mammoth post and comment) as I know weight can upset people easily.

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I think in order to understand how I got to be the weight that I was, I have to explain that I've always had a strange relationship with my body. It's always been an other to me. It was something other people talked about, made fun of, or touched (whether I wanted them to, or not) and I just never felt like it was a part of me. When you are a young teenager and you are very sad all of the time, you spend a lot of time with other people discussing you as though you're not there. Your body and your mind become this thing that is everyone's business and suddenly the only thing you will always have, your body, becomes something public, that doesn't belong to you any longer. Because you are so young and desperately sad, your choices are taken away from you, and you don't get to have a say in it anymore, because other people know what is best for you. (It's not that I regret the things other people decided for me, I can definitively say that I would not be here today if it wasn't for the actions of my parents and doctors - however, these are thing you only appreciate in hindsight, ten years later.)

I think that because I went through a hard time when I was a young teenager - in the years when you begin to understand things about yourself - that gave me a strange relationship with food, and eating. When I was younger and some difficult things happened - I thought it was because I was too fat, that those things might not have happened if I were thinner. I stopped eating for periods (a very, very, very stupid thing to do) and would binge on junk-food when I was alone - like it made it okay if no-one else saw me do it. I did a lot of silly things at that time of my life: to put it simply, I could control what went in and out of my mouth and I could control pain, when I couldn't control anything else around me.

I got a bit better, mentally, after a few long and hard years, and my eating returned to 'normal'. It wasn't healthy eating, but I didn't really care, because I was having fun, being at art college and in my first year of university where everyone was sort of crazy anyway so I didn't feel so singled out. It wasn't my little sixth-form where everyone knew everyone and everyone knew me as the girl that cried all the time. And at that time, I wasn't in full-time therapy, I was off-meds for some of it, and I sort of didn't give a shit. I lost a bit of weight at first, but then I began to go the other way, embracing the fact I was bigger, starting not giving a fuck and following all sorts of amazing bloggers, like Gabifresh, Franceta Johnson and Nicolette Mason, fell head over heels for the body-positive movement that was happening.

Then things began to sort of fall apart at university, realising that I hadn't put my trust in the wrong people, I did stupid things again, I needed therapy again, I was on medication again.. After a particular horrible incident - when I was crying over the fact a pathetic man had called me fat - I realised that I was okay with being fat; I even blogged about it. I wasn't upset because he thought I was fat, I was upset that fat was the insult he was attempting to degrade me with - not unintelligent or shallow or arrogant or anything that I would've been more insulted to be called. But fat - like the most insulting thing is how much I weigh, not what I am like as a person. It was just, pathetic, pretty much, and that is still what I think about people that use that as an insult.

That was such a pivotal moment: it was like thinking for my entire life that being skinny would be the thing that would make me a better person, that being thinner would somehow cure all the emotional baggage I had, hoped it would cure my depression. In the back of my head I would always hear a voice saying: that boy did those horrible things because you're fat, you didn't get that job because you're fat, you failed those exams because you're fat. It's vicious, and horrible, and I know everyone feels like this occasionally, but this was like a mantra that I lived by until suddenly, one morning in a quite art studio at university, I realised that nothing I thought about being fat was true.

So for a while after university, I completely stopped caring. I was fat, and so what, I still got shit done and lived my life. It was like, the biggest weight (haha) lifted from my shoulders: this giant self-conscious thing I had been dragging about behind me for twenty years had suddenly had gone and I realised that this was really what it was like to give zero fucks. It feels really good. I urge you to try and get to that place, mentally, if you aren't already there.

This Christmas, though, I realised that I would like to be healthier. Healthier, not skinnier, that was the key. It was putting health before looks, how I felt over what I looked like: I just wanted to be able to run up the three flights of stairs and not feel out of breath, to be able to do more. And so gradually, over about eight months, I've lost five stone.

I'm not thin; I'm not even really that healthy, but I'm a lot better than I was. I can't run a marathon, but I can look in the mirror for probably them first time in my life and not shy away from what I see. It's helping in other aspects of my life, too, with friends and the relationships in my life. I know this statement is potentially problematic, but I really feel like it is true for me: you cannot love someone until you love yourself. How can you really care for other people when you spend 90% of your waking time thinking about how much you hate yourself, and obsessing over what you look like?

It has taken me nearly a decade to get to a place where I want to reclaim my own body. I know I've barely scratched the surface on this journey, but at least I've made a little progress. I'm not saying the way that I've gone about things is the best way, God, no. I have a few really amazing friends and a surprisingly supportive family that have helped along the way but I know that I have done a lot of the hard work myself. The hard work being all that thinking that comes with this kind of stuff, fighting the deluge of internal insults and assaults on your self-confidence that everyone deals with daily. But it's nice to feel like I occupy a bit less space, and a lot more of my body, these days.