Kerrie's Diary Thread - A New Beginning

KerrieW

Full Member
OK this is my attempt to get my head back in the right place to do this diet. After several weeks of messing around is has got to be time to sort myself out - when I started LL and then later switched to CD I stuck to it completely for a bout 6 months and lost 7.5 stone taking me down to 11 stone - the lowest I have ever consciously been. I am 24 years old and apart from a brief few months when I was 19 (and successfully lost some weight with WW) I have never been able to wear nice clothes or feel like I looked decent. This has had a huge impact on my self-esteem especially regarding my thoughts around my self-worth, I don’t particularly feel I am worth knowing, talking too or bothering with generally. As a result of that attitude I have let a lot of people treat me like crap but I also over-react to a lot of situations because I am so frightened about people eventually turning on me. This has also spilled over into many other aspects of my life including professionally. I am currently working to get my PhD at a cancer research institute and find it very hard to focus and do the work I need to - now I am worried I will not have the data to complete my PhD and then I will never get into the career I want to. Everything all feels so much and so overwhelming I just don’t know where to begin to make it all right. I’m also having some family troubles as well.

Thankfully there is one aspect of my life that is going really well despite my messed up head - my relationship. I have been with my lovely boyfriend for just over 6 years though for most of that we have lived 200 miles apart - I am at Newcastle University and he lives in Peterborough (where I lived before coming to uni). After I finished my bachelor’s degree I immediately started my PhD so stayed up North with him down around the midlands. We planned to move in together when I started but to do it the sensible way - he continued in his present job and started looking up here. So far that has not proved successful - the type of job he wants mainly needs to be applied through agencies and it’s been quite difficult to get the recruitment agent pushing him forward for the right sort of jobs (though they can come up with many unhelpful jobs that aren’t appropriate at all). But we keep going seeing each other every third weekend to really make an effort to keep our relationship going. Despite the struggle of living apart we are very happy together although people always tell me long distance doesn’t’ work I think we are proving that wrong.

It’s him that has suggested that when I started a VCLD last time I really had my head in a different place and that formed the foundation of my success - I knew what I wanted and I had a plan to get it. I had a start date and a group of people going through the same thing (I started on LL). I also think that the shock of going to the information session and being weighed at nearly 19 stone (in my head I was somewhere around 16 stone) really gave me the drive to get moving - I just hadn’t realised it was so bad. Everything went well till mid-November at which point I placed myself in a stupid situation by going out for a long day without taking a tetra along. After lots of walking, at about 4pm I was really dizzy and my Mum and brother who I was out with told me I would have to eat as we had several hours to go before we got home and I clearly wasn’t going to make it. So I had something to eat. I don’t blame them for suggesting it - it was my decision to eat and they were right about how I was not going to make it without fainting. At the time Mum was on CD as well but tended to have occasional days off and on that day she had chosen to have a meal. This made me feel a bit better because I knew she had successfully got back on in the past. After I had eaten - and I was almost in tears during - I was disappointed that I hadn’t just had lunch with them earlier in the day rather than some silly piece of cake just to get my blood sugar up. And so the spiral begin - I decided that I may as well eat that day and ended up having an evening meal and some junk as well promising myself I would get back on the next day, a Sunday. Of course I didn’t and ended up eating rubbish all day then too - it was scary how quickly I slipped back into binge mode. However on the Monday when I left Mum’s and came back home I behaved myself - back on the shakes for a week and tried to put it behind me. Got through a week, got weighed and had lost weight - decided to celebrate by having a meal! Already I had slipped back to a place where food was my comfort and reward system in a completely uncontrolled way. Went through several weeks in the same fashion still mainly managing to lose weight until one week I gained. By that time it was so close to Christmas, a holiday I had already planned to eat for a couple of days. I don’t regret doing that - I had sole sourced through my holiday earlier in the year by knew that I wanted to eat over Christmas, I know there are people who would disagree with that decision but it is done so not a lot of point arguing over it. My plan was to get back on in January and deal with the weigh gain. I went to my counsellor for more packs but didn’t get weighed as we both agreed it would probably not help me to get back on track. Since then I have stopped, started but never managed to get past day 2 and speaking to my boyfriend again at the weekend he pointed out that this time I have not planned it and haven’t got my head in the right place so I am perpetually setting myself up for failure. He told me to write it all down and the maybe consider showing it to people if I felt it would help and show it to him if I felt up to that but do whatever works for me.

So I am going to post this and make this the start of a diary - a diary of my new start and quest to get back to the place where I knew what I wanted and how to get it. My plan for the next few days is to try and low carb as prep for going back on sole source - Saturday is my planned day and I am going to do everything in my power to get my head straight and maybe deal with some issues that are obstacles to all aspects of my life not just my weight - I have classic ‘daddy issues’ though nothing particularly serious just living with someone who was not a particularly nice person until the blessed day where my parents finally split and then several years of on/off relationships with him making our current situation difficult. I am also struggling with Mum a bit as she is of the school of thought that believes in just moving on and forgetting the past. While to some extent this may be healthy right now there are things that I need to talk about so I can finally begin to deal with why I have so many destructive behaviours and then I can finally set the past to rest. I don’t particularly have any friends as a result of the kind of person I am (totally neurotic springs to mind) and my family are not really able to accept I need to talk about my issues so that leaves my lovely boyfriend and minimims - so I am aiming to fill in a section of my diary every other day at least and finally ask for the support I need.

At present I am definitely about 3 stone heavier than I was but I am leaving the scales alone and will not be weighed again till I can get back into my size 14 jeans easily. Hopefully this will happen in 8-10 weeks.

Just want to say, especially for the benefit of any newbies - this is truly the best diet I have ever done and I really hope it works for you just as much as I hope I can get back to a place where it is working for me. Sorry for the uber-long first post and the fact it’s a bit muddled - needed to get some thoughts on paper so to speak!

Love Kerrie x
 
Back
Top