Food is Medicine

Warning! The following post may be to much information for some of you.

For the past few weeks I have been busy gaining weight and increasing my calories. It hasn’t been completely intentional, I lost some weight in 2014 and became a little underweight. My anxiety around food was awful and my diet was poor. Over Christmas I relaxed a lot, indulged in some yummy foods and was expecting to gain a few pounds back.

Well I did, 10 pounds to be exact, making me 7 stone 7 lbs again, and a lot healthier.  I ate out a lot with friends and family, and didn’t hold back when ordering dessert! At times I did feel guilty about how much I was eating, felt sluggish and a little out of control, but I’m lucky to have great people around me who always encouraged me and assured me I was doing the right thing for my health.

Today, something happened that proved that all of these extra calories were indeed good for me and making me healthy again. Today I got my period! I’m sure for many girls getting your monthly reminder is a pain in the backside and a nuisance, but to me, it was amazing. It’s been thirteen months since my last period, in the past four or five years I can count on one hand how many periods I have had, and If I’m honest, in 2014 I started to lose hope that I would ever be healthy and fertile.

Who knows, I may not get another period this year, but what I do know is that this time I am so motivated to keep up with the progress I have made. I am going to maintain my weight, stay healthy, and hopefully let go of all the anxieties I have around food once and for all.

It’s another chance for me to be the healthiest and happiest version of myself, and i am not messing it up this time.

Little Black Ant

Just a little black ant

in a dead, grey garden

looking for the seed

that will make him his fortune.

Just a little black ant

almost getting trodden

always busy working

yet you’re easily forgotten.

Just a little black ant

you’ll never hear him whining

such a special black ant

who will never stop shining.

Making do without Makeup

I often have these life epiphanies when I’m standing in a store, bamboozled by so many products that everyone seems to be telling me I need. It was in sainsbury’s last year whilst I was staring at a whole selection of various chicken cuts that I decided to go vegetarian.

Today it was boots. Surrounded by make up.

I went in to town to go and buy a blusher brush. Finances aren’t exactly great at the moment, so I was just looking for something cheap but of good quality, apparently no such product exists.  I then started to think about all of the other things I ‘needed’, a highlighter, new foundation, new mascara, a blending sponge. Of course, if I bought all of these things my bill would soon rack up and I’d be left penniless.

And then I started to think, how disordered the makeup industry is. These people are making so much money from women’s insecurities, they are literally telling us we need these products to feel beautiful. One product that seems to be pretty popular with women is the ‘skin perfecter.’ Really? This is a cream that supposedly makes my skin ‘perfect’. Perfect in whose terms? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my skin as it is, or anyone else’s for that matter.

Another makeup fad at the moment is this ‘countouring’. I hadn’t heard of this makeup method until recently, but looking at YouTube videos, I am disgusted. Countoring means shading and highlighting your face with various products until you’ve more or less changed your whole face’s appearance, some of the transformations made women look unrecognisable. Again, what was wrong with their faces before? Why are we told we need to change our faces?

I was standing in boots thinking about all this, and I just got really angry. I felt like these products were needs and not wants. The way they are marketed makes us think that we can’t do without them, and that we have to spend our money on correcting something that never needed to be corrected in the first place.

So what did I do? I walked straight out of Boots and in to HMV, I bought myself a new CD with the money I would of spent on a blusher brush, and I went home to wash my face.

I am me, and I am enough

I was sixteen. I was at that age where you’re really seen as a teenager. Many people still say they feel sixteen even in their thirties and forties and eighties even, personally, I couldn’t feel further away from that age.

I was notorious for changing my hair. I’d have it short and blonde for three months of the year, then it would suddenly be long and dark, and then when I was bored of that I’d do something really different with it, like dye it red and buy curly extensions. This may seem like a trivial little detail of my teenage years, but reflecting back, I can see it was quite a big indicator to how I felt about myself growing up.

I never experienced any big trauma, no violence, I didn’t lose anyone close to me. For years I was so confused as to how I became anorexic, why I started to lose interest in life, what reason did I have to feel depressed? At just sixteen? I did the treatment, I ‘recovered’, I went to Uni, and I forced myself in to believing that the thoughts and guilt surrounding food was just something i’d have to live with. That was until this year.

You could call it a mini relapse, I lost weight that’s for sure, I intended to lose weight. I counted calories and restricted myself, and I was happy to see the number go down again. My weight didn’t go down to near as low as it had been previously, but the cold fact staring right at me was that I never truly recovered, and I never really tried.

See, being underweight, being a cause for concern, well that made me feel special. It gave me a sense of identity, a label I guess. Looking back at my teenage years, I was always worried about not fitting in. I was never a part of any clique if you will, I was the one listening to fall out boy in the morning and then ashanti in the evening. I didn’t fit in to any category, I wasn’t especially good at anything, I had nothing I was really passionate about. The hair changes make sense now, I was always trying to change my identity.

The same goes with social networking sites. I find that I am always changing my profile picture. This is not because I’m vain, or because I love how I look, it’s quite the opposite if anything. I’m always unhappy with how I come across, I’m always worried about what label people are going to put on me, and this is the biggest thing I need to change in my life.

We are not in Hogwarts, we can’t just wear a hat that will pick out all of our traits and decide which house we belong to. Neither can we force ourselves to search for our passions and interests. I’m not claiming to be anything anymore, I’m not trying to fit in to any style or clique or group. For the first time, I can happily say ‘I am me, and I am enough.’

Thank You 2014

2014. What a funny year you were. Maybe many things happened that I was expecting, I turned twenty-one, I graduated, Simon and I actually went on our road trip. But many things also happened that I just didn’t see coming. Simon and I relapsed and was on autopilot for a while, my friendship group changed completely. A lot of shitty things happened, but I am thankful still for those shitty moments, even very recent ones, as recent as last nights even.

Because with every shitty thing that’s happened, I have learnt something valuable. I have grown as a person over this last year, more so than any other year. I feel like I know myself so much better because of what I have felt. When you are right at the bottom, it’s like you have a little pep talk with yourself, you know it’s a life-changing moment when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, and yet there’s a small voice in your head saying ‘we’ll try again tomorrow’

We cannot hold on to guilt and self-hate. Yes, we feel these these all of the time, we constantly feel like we aren’t hitting the mark, but these negative thoughts are plaguing our present, and they are stopping us from feeling true happiness.  Of course, we WILL always make mistakes in life, that’s human nature! Bad things WILL come our way, we WILL have to deal with bad situations. Those are our daily struggles and problems, but we cannot change that. What we CAN change, is how we react to those problems. If we let them seep their way in to our thoughts, they will take over the reins of our minds, and it will become very difficult to return to a state of happiness.

Instead of giving in to these bad thoughts, we need to separate ourselves from whatever the problem is.

I am not claiming to be anything. I am not a psychologist, I am not a philosopher. But I am Lowri, and that is enough. The changes I have seen in myself over the past year is amazing, like I said, there were of course bad days, but they have brought me to where I am now, and I am so happy with where I am now. Hopefully, the more I read, and the more positive I become, I will understand all of this a bit better.

Until then I am just dancing in my own happy vibes.