Stress

Lots of people don’t like talking about stress, or mental health.

I’d say even more so this last year. But things can take a turn at anytime in your life.

I tried, I was doing okay, but this month of April, I had my vaccine shot (first one) and it kicked my ass. I then got a cold which wiped my smell and taste away again.

It’s pretty easy to see where I started to introduce food again, and though it’s been a little up and down in the week it’s been going up and up, till it hit critical with extra stress as above this month.

I have limits set. And set for a reason, so that I have to address it. Before the turn last year it was extra weight and stress. Now I’ve no extra weight to lose. I’m under what I was in 2019. But not quite as low as hospital weights.

I’ve done what I can this week, cut the coffee, drank more water, and it’s coming down, I had 3 days of rest from food. Its really hard for anyone to understand the feelings around this.

I’ve tried my doctors, eating disorder groups and talking but no one gets it.

Food is the devil. There no pleasure only pain. I can just about taste sweet stuff. Spicy, nope. Got the hottest Siracha sauce today going. Was like tasting mayonnaise and Paul couldn’t stand it… Haha

But it sucks.

I get to go to the docs Friday. 3mth checkup. Its been 9 mths since I had bloods done. I feel okay, but I’ve lost half my hair and have bald spots… 😭

I was getting new hair growth, but if I curb the food again 😭

I want to see a way out of this, but the emotions around it are some of the worst.

Went shopping today, the washing aisle was like walking into a human waste facility. Gag…. Ugh grin and bare it.

I had to buy some new clothes, have only wore slippers for 12 mths like most people. My other shoes had it. The rest all packed away.

Wonderful isn’t it… We also have moss growing in my bedroom…

The ombudsmen have at least emailed me back. The company coming out come the 11th May for more tests…

This month ahead is gonna be busy. But I have the most amazing people around me. For that I am very very grateful. They know who they are.

I don’t talk much, I don’t post much. I hide in my work and my worlds.

If you hide in other people’s worlds and enjoy it, review those authors. Tell them you love their work and why.

If you don’t love it, and want to hit that 1 or 2 star button, hold off, that person might just be at the end of their tether. A little kindness or just not posting goes a long long way.

Love ya all 💕

Hair loss

It kinda goes without saying that I have a lot, lot of hair.

But when it starts to drop out in clumps, you know your body’s stopped supplying it with the means to grow, it happened at this point in 2007 and again in 2015, but it still doesn’t mean its a shock. The body knows how to look after and preserve itself, and rapid weight loss, 48lb is a lot in 14 weeks. 😭

I guess its almost a good thing I do have a ton of it, but already its feeling the strain. But three days of brushing out tons, hurts, it gets so knotted it stays where it wants in the morning and brushing it out ughh nightmare.

Where do I see myself going right now, sadly not to a good place. The years off to a rough start, covid has taken far too many people I care about already and I don’t see this letting up.

I’m trying and failing, and trying again. Food sucks, some is okay, but the rest I just can’t stand.

Hugs for all, even distanced ones count. X x

💕

First drink, and real test… Vibrant Vegan :)

So it was my birthday, and I wanted to try one drink. We picked run, and made some dark n stormy.

Sadly it was terrible. 😭 And tasted liek sweaty socks. So no alcohol for me.

After my birthday, and my rum tasting awful. I want very hopeful in trying this, but it didn’t smell bad.

At least not like the meat products I’ve been cooking for Paul.

It was spicy, and I could taste the kick. I felt it had taste though wasn’t quite sure what, tomatoes, and the cashew nuts were distinguishable. The quorn added texture.

I thi k at the moment, texture and some flavours is good. But I am not going to get it. Not like a normal person.

I tried a small but of banana this morning. That was a, no. Bobby got the rest.

Parosmia and me moving on

I think the hardest thing to get used to with parosmia is the unpleasant smell. The thing we love about daily life becomes the worst.

Cleaning, cooking, anything.

The worst, you can’t tell what’s what. So there’re some things that you will miss that are pretty dangerous. The smell of burning, gas. Anything that’s off food wise. It all becomes so very different when things kinda all just smell the same.

Yep, and smell the same they do. Everything has this smell, this taste, and it never leaves you.

There are almost no real words to describe what this actually does smell/taste like. Rotten meat? poop… they are about the closest people have been able to say, and for the most part I’d agree. The rotten meat is the worst, the fact everything is rotten is the worst.

So you wake up with it, you smell like it, nasty, horrible. When you’ve a pretty poor impression of yourself as it is, this makes your anxiety 100 times worse. Because I don’t smell nice, I smell horrid. I think everyone can smell the same as me, and that I smell like this.

Go to wash in the shower, and the shampoo, the soap. Makes me feel sick. It’s hard to try to tell the brain that you don’t actually smell like this, that the shampoo and soap are fine, that you don’t stink.

Toothpaste, omg, please. You want to scrub your teeth with rotten meat? Holding your nose kinda helps.

Cooking is a hard no. I haven’t cooked anything in 15 weeks.

Last night my husband asked me to make him a sausage butty. This is the first time I’ve been near the kitchen to do anything, as I said in 15 weeks.

It wasn’t pleasant. But I did it.

One of the things I’ve looking forward to doing in the next few weeks is to try out some new companies I’ve seen advertising. With covid and not as many of us eating out. There’s been a few crop up that supply ready-made and healthy meals.

I’ve got three very different sets of food orders coming in.

One meat, one veggie, and one vegan.

It wasn’t a good start. My delivery this week never came. Though it saddened me, the company were wonderful over the phone, and rescheduled it for this week. Accidents happen and rather than deliver something that was out of safe temperatures, it was destroyed.

Hopefully, there will be no issues this week and I can at least start to write up something more than my plans.

I know I have to take it easy. My whole month of December will be basic re-feeding. Lipotrim have an acceptable plan, and I followed it for 4 weeks’ last time. So it’s gradual. I still have to watch myself and be careful not to rush.

So nice and steady.

For some things I’m taking a more keto approach, with bread and carbs, and I got myself a nice bread maker to test, to make my own things. My first two attempts were interesting. Lol

No pictures 🙂 not yet. Maybe when I get the hang of it, and I’m actually able to eat. For now, it’s okay toasted for my husband with Jam on.

Have a great day all.



The Pro-Ana Movement – What the hell is going on?

This article is written by  Helen Butcher and she’s asked me to share it here to help bring awareness for this terrible illness, and the harm this can do to both sexes.

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Pro-Ana’ Movement – What On Earth Is Going On?

In a former life, I worked in mental health services. It was a job which wrenched my heart on a regular basis, and frequently made me very angry with the incompetency of society in general (and health service managers in particular [1]) when it came to mental health. But I never got frustrated with the patients themselves. Until, that is, I came across the ‘Pro-Ana’ phenomenon.

‘Pro-Ana’, if you’re not familiar with the term, is short for ‘Pro-Anorexia’. ‘Ana’, for some of the movement’s adherents, is a kind of goddess – a deified personification of weight loss and beauty. Her devotees willingly sacrifice their meals, their sanity, and (sadly) their lives in her service. The ‘Pro-Ana’ community offers its members ‘thinspiration’ over the internet, including extreme tips on calorie elimination, and advice on how to hide one’s eating disorder from friends and family.

This is where it gets weird. ‘Pro-Ana’ individuals are frequently all too well aware of the fact that they’re ill. They KNOW that they have an eating disorder, they KNOW that it’s making them miserable, and they KNOW that they are putting their health in extreme danger. This isn’t something unique to pro-anas. Many people with eating disorders know that something is wrong but nonetheless shy away from getting anorexia or bulimia treatment [2]. Pro anas, however, wear their disease as a badge of honor [3]. They are proud of their illness, and will do all that they can to advance it. Pictures are posted on forums of jutting clavicles, stick-thin thighs, hollow cheeks, and drumskin bellies. These pictures are in turn torn to pieces by the frequently vicious community, who pick out imagined imperfections and exhort the posters to go to even more dangerous dietary extremes.

Which brings me back to my frustrations.

I could kind of understand the Pro-Ana movement. If I worked at it, I could frame it as a method of coping for mentally ill people – a way of presenting their illness to themselves in a manner which meant that they did not have to feel weak and humiliated by it. While I did not necessarily approve of the method, I understood the motive, and could assimilate it into my non-judgemental view of their illness as a symptom. Indeed, some ostensibly Pro-Ana sites do come from more of a ‘moral support’ angle than an ‘encouraging anorexia’ angle – and that’s kind of laudable when done properly [4]. Where I fell down, however, was on the treatment meted out to other sufferers within the community. Eating disorders are dangerous enough on their own. Many of the eating disorder patients I saw had horrendous trouble drowning out the repetitive thought-cycles in their own heads, which poured scorn and loathing upon them. To have this internal chorus reinforced by the sufferer’s contemporaries on the internet put a lot of my patients in very real danger of death.

I remember one patient in particular – let’s call her ‘Sally’. At the age of sixteen, when Sally should have been studying for her GCSEs, she was instead going back and forth between mental health units, hospital, and her family home. She had anorexia, and – as is so often, sadly, the case – it had not become apparent to her loved ones until her extreme weight loss became noticeable. Generally, by this point the disease has quite a hold upon the patient. This was certainly the case with Sally. However, while in our mental health unit, Sally displayed a willingness to recover which was unusual in anorexia patients. She made determined efforts to eat, and participated to her fullest capacity in our therapies. This gave us a lot of hope. With this kind of attitude, there was no reason why she could not make a full recovery and live a long and happy life. Yet every time she was discharged, she was hospitalised and then sent back to us within months.

What on earth was going on?

Basically, every time Sally was discharged, she’d head straight online. She was seeking support from those who were experiencing the same kind of thing as she was – perhaps tips on how to get healthy. But what she found was her own disease, given voice and writ large across the internet. Her efforts to defeat anorexia were screamed down with extreme vitriol, her body derided as fat and unattractive, her whole life picked apart by the community she thought would help her. Yet she kept on going back. Someone that deep into self-loathing will do anything to gain a sense of ‘tribe’ – even if their chosen ‘tribe’ is almost literally destroying them from the inside out.

Needless to say, I was horrified at the extent of the damage fellow sufferers can willfully inflict upon one another [5].

Sally’s story has a reasonably happy ending. Once her parents discovered what was going on, they began to monitor her internet usage closely, and sent her to a therapist who specialises in helping young adults have a healthier relationship with social media. Sally is on the road to recovery – although it’s likely to be a long journey for her, and the years of anorexia have taken an undoubted toll on her health.

For the hundreds of eating disorder sufferers who get lured into these Pro-Ana forums, however, it may well be a very different story. And that troubles me. It troubles me greatly.

[1] Daniel Boffey, “Leaked report reveals scale of crisis in England’s mental health services”, The Guardian, Feb 2016

[2] Bulimia, “Bulimia Treatment”

[3] Sarah Rainey, “Secretly Starving”, The Telegraph, 2013

[4] Mandie Williams, “Unpopular Opinion: Pro-Ana Websites Were A Positive Influence In Helping Me Recover From My Eating Disorder”, XOJane, Apr 2014

[5] Geraldine McKelvie, “Revealed: Scots student tells how he starved himself to the brink of death after being bullied by anorexia trolls”, Daily Record, Aug 2013