Musing on weighing in and maintaining... and you should read these links

 It should be this simple, shouldn't it?

This Mizfit post on NSV's landed in my inbox today and it majorly got me thinking... NSV was not a 'non scale victory' for this writer, nut a NO scale victory. How is that even possible, would be the first words out my mouth until very recently.

It couldn't really have been much more timely, considering in the last couple of months I have given up the scale, and now given up calorie counting, and I've been feeling, shall we say, a little lost without either to quantify my successes and failures, my good days and bad days, how to have a sense of achievement, and so on. So to hear that someone as ferociusly fit healthy and active as her doesn't weigh herself, and her 4 year old daughter doesn't even know what a bathroom scale is, was just brilliant.

I hope to god that when I'm lucky enough to have children, I'll be strongwilled enough to have been able to lose my babyweight and develop a confident enough view of myself to also not have bathroom scales, and not inflict my decidedly ropey history with them onto my children. I never, ever, want them to develop the same ED patterns as I've had in my past.

Have I ever told you about that, blogland? I don't know if I have.

*May be sensitive for some, please don't read if you think this could be a trigger for you in anyway. Thankyou*

Suffice to say, the main reason I chocse to lose weight very slowly over 18 months, and by a controlled method like calorie counting, was because history dictates that I cannot be left to my own devices. Between the ages of 14 and 17, I had a terrible relationship with food, and with myself. IT was only when we covered eating disorders in my Psychology A-level that I realised just how bad my behaviour had become, and recovering from that took a very long time, if it has even happened at all.

My average week consisted of one breakfast, one lunch, and one dinner, and never on the same day. If I ate once a day, we were doing well. I survived pretty much solely on caffeine and cigarettes and a weekly binge on an entire 2 litre tub of ice cream in my room, then self hatred and and starvation/exercise again to pay myself back for my poor behaviour. Age 16, I was 8 stone 12. That's not anorexic, I would never say I was, as my BMI was still okay at 5 foot 8, but I was ill, psychologically, there was absolutely nothing normal about my relationship with food, exercise, my body image...

Realising in that psychology lecture that what I though was just a binge eating disorder for the last 3 years actually shared an awful lot of traits with anorexia and bulimia was enough of a shake up for me to snap out of it. There was no way I wanted to be that girl, that had to go to a clinic, a hospital, be monitored for her actions... I spent an awful lot of time reading material from eating disorder charities, and learning where I was going wrong, and hoping it would sort me out.

Unfortunately for me, snapping out of it seemed to lead to development of the binge eating disorder behaviour that I'd thought I had in the first place, and the associated gain of weight over the next few years to my all time high at the start of this 'diet' of just under 15 stone. (Perhaps more worryingly, is the fact that that works out as an average of just over a pound a month over the whole time period. Scary stuff, and probaly why I'm so nervous about trying to do this without stabilisers any more!)

So, losing weight was always going to be a battle for me, between having control, and something controlling me. My anchors were my scale and the calorie counting sites, and they were there to stop me going crazy and retracing those steps from my teens of starvation, binging, and purging all over again. Which was great, but the result of that was becoming every bit as dependent on that scale, and logging those calories, as I had been dependent on denying myself of everything a few years earlier.

(Side note, read this other post of Mizfits: The Power of the Scale... It truly sums up my addiction to them better than I ever could, as a several-times-a-daily weigher)

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that although making the decision to stop weighing yourself, and to stop counting calories, is no big deal to your average dieter/new maintainer, it's probably been harder for me over the last month or so than the entire porcess of losing weight and now learning to maintain over the last 2 years or so.

 I'm pretty sure maintenance and physics are the same in terms of getting your head round them...

I'm feeling lost without something to quantify myself against, and I honestly don't know how I'm going to cope with it. I'm trying my best to be positive about it, to take my lead from the likes of Mizfit that being fit and healthy without weighing and logging and restricting is entirely possible, but this is the first time, effectively, in over 10 years that I've tried to have a NORMAL relationship with food. I don't actually know how that's meant to work! What is it, does it even exist? I know 'intuitive eating' supposedly exists, I've said before that I hope to learn to do this, but given my past performances of eating without constraints, do I even have the ability to do this?

I'm hoping with the support of my online friends (thanks guys!) and my husband being who he is, that things will fall into place fairly naturally this time round. After all, I'm not just doing this for myself anymore. I'm doing it to keep me fit and healthy, sure, but I have to keep him fit and healthy too with the food choices we make together (he's type 1 diabetic, if you've not heard mention of this before) and I have to make sure we can raise fit and healthy kids in the near future. I never, ever, EVER, want them to have as f-ed up a relationship with food, health, body image, themselves, as I've had over the last decade.

I'm turning 26 in a couple of weeks. Maybe the timing is just right for making this the start of my non-weighing, non-logging, non-counting, normal life....