My mum came along to zumba with me today and on the way we ended up talking about food and weight and she made a comment about the fact that some exercise would result in me losing weight. The way she said it along with several other comments made me so angry. It was like she thought that because I’m not as tiny as I used to be I’m not as good as I could be, not good enough because for the first time I have hips and a slight belly. The icing on the cake was when a rather large woman went past in a bright pink shirt that probably wasn’t the most flattering thing she owned and my mum said “Don’t ever become like that”.
The whole conversation made me so furious. She acts like gaining weight is the worst possible thing I could do, like it makes me less of a person. I may not like my body much but I’m at my highest weight and more comfortable and confident in myself than I have ever been and I’m certainly leading a much better more fulfilling life now than I was when I was miserable and starving at my low weight. I then decided her opinion on anything weight, food or exercise related was utterly useless and I was going to ignore it.
This led me to thinking about recovery and life in general. I’m not going to aim for super fit or super healthy any more, I’m going to aim for happy, healthy and recovered. True health is mental as well as physical. I’m going to go to zumba because I enjoy it, I’m going to work out in the gym because I enjoy feeling strong, I’m going to try and get really into yoga because I like the concept and I really want to be able to do all those back bends and balances and things. I’m going to eat what I want when I want it and ignore the inevitable jibes about grazing from my mother. If I want a cinnamon swirl with my tea in starbucks then that’s fine, if I don’t that’s also fine. If I want a latte and a cinnamon swirl (a really scary combination for me ED-wise) then I’ll have them both.
In the end no one except my mother actually cares what I look like. Whatever she thinks I’m not fat, I’m on the small end of normal. I physically healthy, relatively strong and I’m finally learning how to dress in a way that flatters me. I want to look back at the end of my life and think ‘Yeah, that was fun!’, which I can’t do if I spend all my time letting my ED run riot. Enough is enough. Time to fight like hell until it’s gone.
