Postcard from the Edge

So I put on a stone in a month.

It started with a binge at a ball the night after my birthday, continued through Cannes and Devon and a weekend in Kent and another ball (the worst binge in recent memory) and finally ended – I hope – with a black tie dinner in Cambridge Saturday night, where I sunk so low as to finish someone else’s roll when she wasn’t looking. Really. Could I make this sort of thing up?

Last Wednesday I went to the doctor and asked for a referral back to the eating disorders unit, and tried not to burst into tears when I was told what I already knew: That it will be over a year before I can get treatment. I also called the place that treated me last year to see if they could recommend anyone private – I would happily pay for help at this point, especially if it means I can avoid going back to 233 pounds.

Saturday – sometime between fearing that my dress wouldn’t fit and the binge – I made a decision to do something I’ve been resisting for a couple of weeks now. Yesterday I went back to following Slimming World strictly, and it wasn’t easy. It’s not that I find the diet difficult – it’s not. It’s that having Bachelor No. 2 around provides much temptation – temptation to eat what he’s eating, and not to exercise, and to have a couple of drinks. It’s not that he isn’t supportive – he is. I’m trying to explain and he’s trying to understand, but he doesn’t. Not quite, not yet. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t been through it can understand it – the panic and the fear and the self-loathing and the wish that you could hide or go to work in exercise clothes or anything that would prevent you from having to put on your jeans and discover that they don’t fit. (Mine still do, but just barely.)

This morning I sat in a bakery with Bachelor No. 2, having eaten my healthy breakfast first. (I had tea; he had coffee and pain au chocolat.) I didn’t feel like not allowing myself to eat anything there was punishment – as I told him, I felt like it was something positive I was doing for myself. In a strange way, it feels like a relief.

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In the middle of all this, I haven’t stopped exercising. It hasn’t been quite as frequent as it was, but I’m still running and doing Pilates and yoga and even some cycling. And last week I even had a session with Mad0nna and Gwyn3th’s personal trainer. Honestly, dare I say I thought it would be much harder than it was? The biggest challenge was to my mind – the usual fat girl freakouts about how surely I couldn’t do what I was being told to do (skip and gallop and run sideways on a moving treadmill).

Yesterday, I also started the hundred pushups challenge. (BN2 has decided to do it with me. He used to be quite the athlete – fencing and body building – so I took great pleasure in being able to knock out many more than he could…)