Day 0: Comfort Eating

It is not often that I have fully formed words come to me but I believe those occurrences are special, and for this reason I have resisted changing what is below; the words remains as they were first written.

Up until the the age of about 21 and my last year of university I was overweight. Despite the teasing when I was younger I think at some point I had decided not that this was normal but rather the way it was for me. It's not like I'd never known that the weight was hindering me, stopping me doing the things that I wanted to - but it's that I really had believed I could not change it.

Then it finally came to a point where I began seeing the impact on my quality of life that it had - there was one too many occasions where I was out of breath having just run for a bus, one too many nights out where in the process of doing only what everyone else did I'd sweat through all my clothes. I was ashamed.

The best thing I did at this point was seek help. It was a time in my life where I had resumed counselling because I had been finding it hard being myself, and I sought another form of help with my weight. I was pointed at a book called "How to Overcome Binge Eating" and, despite having never had a clinical diagnosis of an eating disorder I could identify with so many things written in that book; I knew I had an eating problem.

My struggle with food is closely, and at times even intimately tied up with my mental state. I am a comfort eater - and I began to see how regardless of how much I felt better for having eaten something tasty it was quickly replaced by a loathing when I truly saw what it was doing to me or when I understood the amount I had eaten; this then becomes a vicious cycle. Though I do not have a binge eating disorder I still feel this pull towards food, and at times when I feel weakened I have what I consider to be small scale binges where I eat more than I need, sometimes without even being hungry and I find it hard to stop.

I managed to beat this once before - I managed to gain a level of control over my food intake and as part of establishing a healthier lifestyle I started to exercise. As a consequence I lost most of my weight.

If I am honest with myself, I am facing another battle with food and with my weight. I am a keen runner and I run distances of over 10km two to three times a week. But I have felt myself slipping back into bad habits; I have felt myself unable to stop eating and moments when I realise in hindsight that I was not hungry after having a meal. It has become a much more regular occurrence to have unnecessary snacks despite having recently eaten meals that should have been sufficiently filling.

No two situations are the same and I see that this struggle by sheer virtue of the knowledge I already did this once before will not be the same. In some ways perhaps it is more difficult as it's so hard not to allow that to seem like a self regression. But in the spirit of being eyes open with admission as a first step towards improvement despite the regular runs and the bottom half of my body being stronger than it has ever been I am feeling heavier than I want to be again and have weight that I want to shift.

I was very proud of myself the first time I lost the majority of my weight, and for me it was never about being showy but rather it was about being healthy. I always believed that it is in sharing that we truly grow, and something about standing up and saying this for the record feels like a very positive step. Perhaps I can even be so bold as to think my endeavour might provide comfort, encouragement or with a great deal of humility inspiration to others who find themselves in a similar situation.