I think I gained a bit of weight from our trip to Maine. I really don’t know if that is a fact - I am not weighing myself and my jeans fit fine. But my face looks bigger to me.
It makes me grumpy.
I am not at risk of giving up IE and jumping on the familiar diet bandwagon. I am pretty comfortable in knowing that would only make things worse. But I am frustrated by the negative thoughts I have when I see a picture of myself. I want to be one of those cool HAES bloggers who has the confidence and self-esteem to be happy with the mirror. Granted, I’m not even practicing HAES fully yet anyway. I won’t pretend that I am treating my body well - yes, sometimes but not the majority of the time. Not yet. Work in progress and all that jazz.
It’s really the fatness of my face that bothers me. I am able to rework negative thoughts about my body when they come up. But my face - it’s too personal. I don’t feel like I look like me. The face I see in the mirror doesn’t bother me - it’s the one in photos. It looks so different.
So I don’t know how to combat that. And that really bothers me.
A therapist I used to go to suggested that one way of dealing with feelings like that is for you not to fight them. Instead, you should let them ‘flow’ freely through your mind and try to detach yourself from them as much as you can. What you should aim for is to basically become a sort of a non-judgemental bystander, for lack of a better word…
I don’t know if it’s going to be of any help to you, but what it did for me is it helped me detach myself from my eating disorder. Once I didn’t perceive myself to be a part of the problem or the problem itself, I was able to start fighting against it.
All the best :o)
B.