Patience, PJ. Patience (hmmmm)
So let's take stock. Where am I and what's working for me right now?
1. Support
- I try to add a new person to my growing list of supports every week. I have learned the important lesson of 'support not secrecy' and because I hate the thought of being a burden to anyone the more supports I have, the less likely I will feel like I am constantly boring just a handful of friends with my problems.
- Also means that when I have a specific problem (like I did the other day with my jeans not fitting) I knew who to turn to. My regular friends wouldn't understand why that was such a big problem for me. I know that even though they love me and want to be there for me, their first response would be "that's not a problem, look at how tight my jeans are, I'm the one who needs to lose weight". So I rang D - she gets it.
I am not weighing myself at all as this would definitely cause me to panic and I know this for certain. And I know that panicing is not good for my safety.
I am not exercising because my body would not cope with it and I do not want to have a heart attack.
3. Meal Planning
I have realised that I have been having trouble especially with dinner. Once I've wrangled the pickups, struggled with homework, and cooked dinner amidst whining, bickering and a leg clinging toddler it's so easy to come up with 1001 excuses why I'm not hungry and couldn't possibly eat dinner (note: that's excuses, not reasons). And after reading the list of suggestions compiled by June Alexander for mums with ED this is what I came up with:
- All meal planning is done ahead of time (on sundays). I have a basic plan from my dietician, but the actual dishes are up to me.
- Pre-cook five dinners on sunday night
- this frees up my evenings so I can eat with a much lower stress level
- also means that the cooking is done at a time when I won't actually be eating the food so there's much less pressure
- my husband is in the room with me while I'm cooking so it's all a bit friendlier :) - If I go out to dinner I choose someone else (my husband or a friend) to pick off the menu for me. And whatever they choose is it. No swapsies.
4. Relapse Prevention
I've decided to go back to my counsellor at least one more time to try to talk about ways to deal with conflict better. I know it's something that I am hopeless at and avoid like the plague, and I know that getting upset is my biggest relapse trigger - so I really want to deal with it for my own benefit.
5. Future Improvement
I still restrict while I'm at work. I hate eating in front of people, and it's just so easy to be too busy and 'forget'. So I really need to come up with a better strategy for dealing with this one.
4 comments:
You impress me so much with all that you're doing PJ.
My favourite from this list is the cook all of your evening meals for the week on a Sunday - I think this is amazing and hope it's working well.
Big hug, xx F
To make meals easier consider making crock pot recipes or creating bases that you could add to. For instance, I'll be posting I recipe for barley black bean salad, which you could add on to to meet all your needs in one dish.
As for the general tone of your post, how awesome! As I see it recovery is like this: remember when your little one first learned to walk? During those weeks, he/she was not likely to be forging ahead with their verbal skills. Same here. Perhaps there's progress with therapy and insight some weeks, while other aspects of recovery come to a stand still. Ultimately, though, you end up as a fully developed, healthy being--as long as you keep pushing forward.
You are doing a great job.
I think I am in a holding pattern, but holding on to secrets and not support but I am getting there, closer by the day. Thank you xo
Go PJ!
You are proving to be more than brave enough. Sometimes I think that anything that is not going backwards is forwards, but from what you are saying here, it doesn't seem like there is a whole lot of standing still. Rather, there is small little steps forward in lots of areas.
Good on you for continuing to enlist the support of others and for going back to see K. Really hope that goes well and you learn lots from it. Keep being brave, explain why you were hurt and what upset you. Sit with the uncomfortableness and see where it leads. May be better than you expect.
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