This is a reply I posted on the minimins forum about whether legalising food is a good idea or not.

I’m firmly in the legalising is ok camp I’m afraid. Even if that means we do put on weight first. It’s ok. It’s ok to put on weight. Your life will not end. It takes some getting used to, it’s scary, it goes against all the advice we receive (but fortunately it DOESN’T go across the research associated with IE).

Dieting is bad for you. I’ll probably get flamed for saying that on a primarly dieting website, but it’s true. There is so much research out there that proves it. Yo-yo dieting (which is inevitable given that it’s practically impossible to keep the weight of once you have done it) is worse for your health than staying the larger size in the first place. And that hurt me to read for a long time. I felt like such a fool for believing the dieting propaganda. I felt let down, that I’d wasted my time, that I had been well and truly duped.

All of the IE books I have read with personal accounts give personal experiences of people eating junk food a lot at first. It’s almost important to the journey. There is nothing wrong with it. It gets it out of your system and you move on. The only time I started messing up my IE journey was when I joined the Normal Eating website and started following her rules of how many fists of food, numbers for a hunger scale etc. I’m sure it works for some, but for me there was far too much of an underlying feeling that we should only eat 1.5-2 fists of food, we should eat a paleolithic diet, we shouldn’t eat carbs as there was no “essential carb”… too many rules for someone taking her early steps along a very delicate path.I’m pretty sure I put on weight at first. The only time I fall back into bad habits is when I start telling myself I shouldn’t eat this now, or I shouldn’t want this food, or I shouldn’t be this hungry. For me it’s that immediate.

Legalising food is not about saying “I can’t eat whatever I like whenever I want and will do so all the time”, it’s about “I can eat whatever I want whenever I WANT IT”. I’ve written about this before. Eating a chocolate bar when you want a chocolate bar is great. Eating a chocolate bar when you want an apple is only ever going to be as satisfying as eating an apple when you want a chocolate bar. We’ve all been there. It isn’t satisfying at all. Intuitive eating is about be able to learn what you want in terms of body hunger rather than mouth hunger, but even then it isn’t all the time. Normal eaters eats out of mouth hunger sometimes. Intuitive eating is about letting go of other peoples rules and creating your own. Read around. If stricter rules TRULY work for you, use them. If they make you feel deprived or make you feel inferior to the rule giver, throw them away, they will only do more harm that good.

The difference between eating what you want all the time and eating what you want when you want it is provided in the other BC principles. Eating something you don’t really want is not enjoyable at all when you are tuned in to what your body wants. Eating past satisfaction level is not enjoyable if you are tuned in. Eating when you aren’t hungry in the first place doesn’t bring that sense of celebration that it brings when you are hungry. You don’t really enjoy it unless you are really hungry.That’s not to say you shouldn’t eat unless you can be true to all the principles. You try your best and you instinctively, naturally, without much effort if any at all move towards normal eating. Putting effort in, restraining yourself often turns IE into another diet that is followed by yet another backlash.

Have I lost weight yet? I don’t know. I don’t weigh myself. Weighing myself is dangerous for me. It tells me I’ve failed to stay at a “healthy weight” (although the research about the truth of BMI is fascinating!). It tells me I don’t deserve to eat, to go out or to even live on the bad days. It tells me I should go on a diet. Most importantly though, I don’t care what I weigh. I’m not a number. My number is not me. My number is not my health. Overweight fit people are healthier than slim unfit people, period. I am not even my clothes size. The label in my clothes is just a non regulated number of inches of material that varies between shops. When I had a 29″ waist, I needed a size 18 pair of jeans in one style, a size 10 in another style in the same shop!!

I am me. I am so much more than my weight or my size. Far more affects my health than my weight and size. Mental health needs to be included here too. Now that I am free from peoples rules about my size, I am free to put my energies into training to be a chocolate fairy, training to be a psychologist, practising yoga, taking my children to the park because I’m not afraid of going out anymore, becoming more confident in my body and letting myself have a sex life again. Hell, I’m coming to the point I was absolutely completely and utterly terrified of. I don’t care about my size. Right now, I don’t care if I stay fat forever because I am HAPPY! I have a LIFE! I still have issues with food but now I can LIVE!

But for once, I am putting my money on the fact that I probably won’t stay fat forever because I am sorting out the problem, not the symptom.

I’m still suffering from sievebrain syndrome and I’ve completely forgotten to write about my yoga class.
I’ve been trying to find a week-by-week course as so many round here are run in six week blocks and are term time only, which is no good for me. I managed to find a lovely class in the village my mum used to live in, run by a lovely young lady called Katherine. She is so encouraging, tipping you slightly this way or that way when you haven’t quite got it right. When you do get it right, she beams a great smile at you as reassurance.
She also tells us all the names of each move in Sanskrit as well as English which makes it feel very authentic.
We started off with breathing exercises, then did some warm up moves, then some bigger sequences. At the end, Katherine lit two candles and turned all the lights off while we lay in the dark and did a relaxation exercise. It was so calming, I’m surprised we didn’t all fall asleep!

That was on Tuesday night, and I am still aching today but I can’t wait to go again :OD

Thankyou to everyone who has left me wonderful messages of congratulations.
It’s really appreciated :O)

I did it! I got a place on the Chocolate Fairy training course!!
Still no post as their Office Fairy was off ill last week, but my email this morning paid off, and Sophie has very kindly let me know that they want me to be a Chocolate Fairy!

Apart from my children being born and getting married, I don’t think I can ever remember a time when I have been so happy! I am absolutely over the moon! I’m 21 years old and I’ve already been given the chance to do the exact job that I want to do. And to think, this time six months ago, I thought I’d have to be training for 6-7 years before I’d be able to even start!

[super ginormous beaming grin]

Sorry ladies!
I’ve emailed Sophie just incase it’s lost in the post.
I hope I don’t seem too pushy. But I also don’t want to just be waiting and waiting and come across as though I’m not really bothered about it.

Today I managed to offload both children at my mum’s and meet my best friend, Natalie, for lunch in Nottingham. She’s 5 months pregnant and just had her scan on Friday. She’s having a little girl. And it doesn’t make me the tiniest bit broody. Honest. Nope. Not one tiny weeny bit. Ahem.

So we met, and stood in the centre and tried to decide on somewhere to go for lunch. And all that could spring to mind was - McDonalds, Costa, Starbucks and Wetherspoons. In a city as big as Nottingham, that was all we could recall. How sad!

Anyway, we managed to make it up to the Cornerhouse where there are a few and settled upon Bella Italia. The food was ok, nothing special. The service wasn’t great but not poor. I had Torta Caprino, which is Goat’s cheese and spinach tart, followed by a lemon tart. They also sold flavoured sparkling Sanpelligrino which was lovely.

I just had a bowl of tomato soup for my dinner, but it was so dull I only ate half.

I started a bit of preparation work for my OU course as well. It doesn’t start until the 6th October, but I have all the materials and they sent us a Preparing to Study booklet on learning to how read and taking notes efficiently.

Only another 9 hours until the morning post comes. Fingers still firmly crossed, and I really, truly appreciate all the support you have all given me over the last few weeks. It means so much, even if I didn’t get a place on the training course, that you all think so highly of me. Thankyou :O)

Still nothing…

And it felt good.
Not planned, not for long, but today I chased my three year old son around a playing field. It’s not easy to run in flipflops, as I discovered, so I kicked them off and ran the way I used to when I was young. It felt so good and I felt so free! And it wasn’t exercise, I was just running, just for the hell of it.
There is a proper running track around the corner from me, so I’m going to try and find out if I can run barefoot on there. I have some running shoes, but I felt so much freer with no shoes on. Odd perhaps, but if it actually gets me moving, it’s worth a shot :O)

Nothing came in the post today. I couldn’t sleep last night because I was so nervous thinking about getting the letter. Roll on Monday! I’m feeling a strange mix of excitement and nervous. Excited because I could be given the chance to do the exact job that I want to do and I get to start so young. Nervous because there is no other place I could do this kind of thing except on my own, which was my original plan but (A) I wouldn’t be qualified for probably 6-7 years and (B) I would be sad to miss out on working for such a wonderful company. Pink beanbags instead of chairs, friendly, down to earth women instead of know-it-all experts, training courses in beautiful hotels instead of suited, stiff boardrooms - how fantastic is that?

I just wanted to copy these across. This is from the 2nd January this year.

I can’t take credit for this as it was written by the lovely Rache but it struck a chord with me, currently being some 3 stones above my preferred weight.

Being overweight can feel like one of the saddest of life’s problems because it’s the one you can’t hide. If you’re overweight then you can’t stop everyone looking at you and wondering why you’re the way you are. Is she depressed? Is she lazy? Is she unmotivated? Doesn’t she have a sex life? Doesn’t she care? Isn’t her health suffering? Is she just a slob? Everyone else can keep life’s difficulties under their hat, but if you’re overweight it’s there for the world to see.

Standing in a queue you can’t tell a wife beater from a burnt out trader on cocaine from a potential mass murderer or a child abuser. But an overweight woman who has gained a few stone through a few years of bad eating habits as her problem clearly on display. And it makes her a easy target.

It makes me so sad to have my fears confirmed: that a lot of thin people do think I’m a lesser person for being overweight. I’m lucky in that my self esteem does not revolve around how I look but I’d be lying if I said it never crossed my mind. It doesn’t help to hear all of this though; and it certainly doesn’t make me want to do anything about it. It just makes me want to eat.

And this one is from the 10th April. I read Beyond Chocolate in full on the 26th March.

I’m not on my no food diet anymore.I woke up on Day Three, and the thought of not being able to breastfeed Leo anymore just about killed me.
So I’m still fat.
It’s not cool to be fat, and I don’t think it’s cool to care about it either but I do. I hate it. I hate that everywhere I go, everyone I see can look at me and see that I have a problem.
I’m working on it.
But for now I’m sad.

In a way it’s sad to read. Sad to see how much my size was overshadowing everything else in my life. Nothing mattered much apart from the fact that I was (am) fat. But it is also good to read. Good to see how far I have come, good to see that I am building a life now, away from that awful obsession (both with my size and with my food).

It can be easy to forget how far you have come sometimes. When you find yourself, six months later still without that perfect relationship with food and size that you can’t help imagining at first, it’s easy to beat yourself up for taking to long, still being this size, still relying on food.

I am reading Beyond a Shadow of Diet at the moment, which is actually aimed at therapists treating clients, but the authors wrote in one chapter that if all we had to do was be told what to do, then we wouldn’t have a problem in the first place. It reminded me that it’s ok to find this hard sometimes, it’s ok to be frustrated with myself, but that it’s ok to be where I am. I’m still trying, that’s what counts.