“And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun,
the near and the dear ones, the old and the young…”
– John Lennon, “Merry Christmas (War is Over)”
Ah, Christmas – an enchanting season of celebration and wonderment…and hectic shopping trips and online deliveries, endless food preparation and overeating, feeling bloated and uncomfortable.
Wait, let’s try that again.
Continue reading “How Can You Make Sure You Have Fun this Christmas?”
I started turning to food when I was around 12 years old. My emotional attachment to it had begun before that but I was about 12 when I started to binge habitually, in secret, to the point that I felt sick. As a result, I began to put on weight.
At 19, I did what we’re told to do if you want to lose weight – I started dieting. The restriction of dieting only served to ramp up my binge eating. With every diet, I’d lose weight and put it back on, and a bit more besides. As my weight increased further, my self-esteem, which had always been really low, plummeted even further. Continue reading “What is eatonomy?”
Dressed to kill, you appear in the doorway to the party. There’s an immediate hush among the assembled guests. Maybe a few gasps. You stride confidently across the room to the bar. Before you utter a word, the bartender hands you a glass of champagne with an admiring smile.
You turn to find the other guests clamouring around you. “You look incredible”, they gush.“You’ve lost so much weight!”. “How did you do it?”.
“Just sheer willpower and utter fabulousness”, you smirk triumphantly. You take a sip of champagne and think: “At last, I’ve arrived”.
“A final message Ellen wanted to share was about the fat shaming she endured from the medical profession. Over the past few years of feeling unwell she sought out medical intervention and no one offered any support or suggestions beyond weight loss. Ellen’s dying wish was that women of size make her death matter by advocating strongly for their health and not accepting that fat is the only relevant health issue.”
This is an excerpt from the obituary of Ellen Bennett who died on May 11th this year, aged 64. Shortly before, Ellen had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and was given just a few days to live. According to her family, she was “an unforgettable character” who enjoyed careers in politics, film and TV.
“It was going really well and now it’s not and I’m just so annoyed and angry with myself.”
This is something I hear a lot.
I understand.
You’ve been doing really well listening to your body about when you’re hungry, what you feel like eating and when you’ve had enough. You’ve been leaving food on your plate (something you thought you’d never do); you’ve turned down ice-cream because you didn’t feel like it (unheard of) and you ate just one brownie rather than devouring the whole batch (say whaaat?!).
We can spend so much of our lives waiting.
Waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for things to get better.
Waiting for the ideal moment.
I know I did (and sometimes still do).
There was an awful lot of time between acknowledging to myself that I had a binge eating problem and healing my relationship with food.
Most of that time I spent waiting.
Julie de Rohan 