More of Me To Love Today

 If I were Oprah I would put my picture on the cover of my own magazine and lam bast myself about how I have failed to stay thin.I am not Oprah, I am me and today I woke up and realized that I indeed have gained back most of the weight I lost when I was on my strict diet and exercise/turned into bulimia regime. My punishment was to put myself through about 30 minutes of abusive exercise and screaming at myself for "being a fat pig".  "How could I have let this happen?" I cried as I ran furiously around my room, doing squats and lunges, jumping jacks and other "fat burning" cardio  moves. I did this until I collapsed on my bed, crying in misery and shame.

How did your morning begin? I hope better.

The good news is this. I have not purged by vomiting for about 6 months. I stopped obsessive exercise (except for this morning) and now I walk daily instead. At some point, I would like to be able to do more aerobic exercise but for now it is too triggering for me.

So, without my eating disorder, I feel like I am back at square one. Before I lost weight. I was about this size. Tired and thinking I was a loser and a failure for various reasons, losing weight and cleaning up my diet seemed like a very good idea then. I could suceed at that, I did. To an eating disordered person who borders on anorexia, gaining back weight means total failure.If this is not a failure, to let myself be my natural weight when I am not forcing it to be thinner by strict diets and exercise, then you could have fooled me. If this is not the failure that society and myself say it is, then the next failure in line to claim its stake is the fact that I have no children, am single, 45, live with my father and cannot seem to create enough income to support myself well in the area where I live. It is easier for me to fail at weight loss, because there is a chance that some day I will be thin if I just try hard enough. If all else fails, I have that desire. But if I don't have that, I have me and my other failures, the ones that I have very little motivation to change for the better. I feel ashamed of that fact. So this morning rather than face those feelings  and love myself through them, I turned to body abuse. Somehow that feels right and like a success. I burned calories and fat and that today, is a success in my mind.

As they say in my ED recovery group, we use what we have in our tool bag to get us through. I have my ED when things get intense. I could call someone, I could tell myself that just like there was a good reason for having an ED, there is a good reason why I don't want to create a better life for myself. There is a good reason why I cling to depression and longing. It serves something, I just don't know what. It is a part of me that thinks this is the only way I will get my  needs met. Just what are those needs? This is a good question. How can I get them met? This is another good question. It is not wrong or bad that I fall back into this default. Dieting and exercising won't make it ever go away. I am here to find out how to  move through this and learn from it. Today, it feels like swimming in mud. But I will keep on swimming.