Yes, powerful images and concepts. Lets say it now. All of us. As appropriate.
'I love my body. It has served me well, it has been with me in the happy times and the sad times, it has walked and run and swum and cycled for miles. It has made and supported children, I have fed them to healthy growth from my body. Lovers have enjoyed my body with me, it brings me pleasure. I love the feel of warm wind on my skin, I love the feel in my body when I snuggle in front of the fire'
My body is aging now but dammit, I don't give up on it, the better I look after it now, the more pleasure I will get from my body.
Thoughts on coping. As I said, I went to my counselling session really really upset that I had fallen back into old habits and spent some time talking around this. My counsellor suggested trying anchoring when in a bad emotional state. I rejected this, when I'm in a panicky despairing binge I don't even want to try to get back into contact with the good times I have used as my anchor.
Then I realised that often, I can foresee that something is going to be difficult. That is the time to start preparing and donning the mental armour. Reminding myself that I have been through some exceedingly hard times before and survived.
In fact, those hard times are a big part of who I am now. Thinking like this makes going into a situation like filling in those blasted DLA forms less of a daunting proposition. Perhaps even thinking every day as I wake about the challenges that the day could throw at me and how I will face them. Eventually this will hopefully become part of my normal habit.
This all made me feel stronger, then I came accross a very simple diagram in a self help book that gave me some clarity.
Imagine a circle with the words, .... bother it, I can't remember it exactly and have just spent a fruitless hour looking through my files for the book it came from .... basically it was a diagram of a very simplistic cycle of feeling bad, doing bad things, feeling that we are bad endlessly feeding into each other. It was a book about breaking free of inapropriate coping mechanisms.
Wherever we are in the cycle, eg, ate more than was healthy, we feel bad, we feel like we ARE bad, if we are bad, we do bad things. That is it very simplistically buut it rang bells for me and made sense of why I get cought up in the binge part of the cycle. I used to binge and fast but have lost my will power to fast now.
There are more explanations as to why the binge fast cycle exists, when we give our bodies too little food our primitive survival orientated part of the brain interprets as this as being a famine situation and makes us do what a subsistance level hunter/gatherer person would do, which is eat as much as possible at the next possible opportunity to help cope with the lack of food.
If we exercise as well, that primitive part of the brain interprets that as running away from danger, couple that with less calories than normal and a binge is just round the corner. Then, it seems, the feeling bad because of binging perpetuates the binge.
Right now, getting personal again, I am feeling very strong, strong enough to go to a group and admit I messed up, see what the scales say and start again. I can't stay for the chat part as my boy is unwell and I need to get back asap but, yay, feel good factor here I come.
ps, having clothes that feel loose and comfortable always helps. I get to a despairing stage when all my clothes are too tight and I dare not wash the only thing that fits as I know that when it is clean and dry again I will have grown more and it won't fit anymore. I can feel better about myself if I am comfortable in my clothes. Wearing too tight clothes as a punishment just doesn't work, however much I try and kid myself.
things can be saved xxx
