Whirling blog (aka the whiny post)

I met up with my PhD friend on Thursday and we discussed blogging. I told her I hadn't blogged for a bit because - yes, I'd been busy - but mainly because I felt so down and didn't want to sound negative and miserable in case I annoyed people. "Why don't you give it a whirl anyway?" she said, reminding me that this is supposed primarily to be for me. And so I am.

Every day I get up feeling fat, and I squeeze into clothes that despite being the biggest in my wardrobe, don't really fit. I am wearing a knackered old bra because my usual lingerie is so tight that I have got scars where the sores formed at the sides of my breasts - and even this one occasionally stabs me uncomfortably. I worry about what to wear - all the time. I feel like a scruff - all the time. I am, in all truth, pretty scruffy anyway, but being dumpy and frumpy seems to exacerbate it. I feel like apologising for taking up space (in the world) - I try and remain inconspicuous in the background but that's harder when you're bigger. And the only thing that makes me feel better is eating something sweet or chocolatey. Just while I'm eating it of course, and then the guilt and the panic sets in that I'm not losing weight. And I'm trapped in this vicious circle and I feel too miserable, too low, too tired and too weak to fight my way out. And I don't know what to do to make myself feel better that doesn't have a calorie implication attached.

I did Circuit of Hell twice last week - and that's the most I managed to do to escape this state. I am still not well enough to cycle - this is not an excuse. I had 2 days of reasonable eating and then the stress cranked up at work and I mainlined sugar for 3 days. I've not been good this weekend either. The good choices I've made are heavily in the minority.

Last Wednesday I put on 4 things in a frantic rush to get out and two were missing buttons, the skirt had a badly ripped lining and the third top looked beyond awful. I went in a missing buttoned top which I safety pinned on - of course by the time I got to work, the button had gone. As had my gold and pearl necklace that I shoved into my bag to put on when I got there to try and look a bit more elegant. Bf bought me that necklace. I wanted to crawl under my desk and cry and cry. Instead I had to go to a function where I - honestly - looked like a bag lady and everyone else was dressed up. Then I shot back into the office to try and squish a day's work into 20 mins during which time I steadily ate Love hearts from the bucket on the desk behind me.

What do I do? Give in and buy bigger clothes? Or carry on squeezing into, looking awful and actually breaking my current wardrobe. Okay, pretty much everything I own is from ebay so wrecking it shouldn't be a disaster fianancially but it feels wretched. But then buying bigger stuff would feel like defeat.

And I can't talk about this - I can't articulate this even to people who I know would be sympathetic. I can't find the words and I'm afraid that if I said this aloud, I might start crying and never stop. I say a few things to my closest friends and pathetically I sort of hope that they might guess the rest - fill in the huge blanks I've left unsaid. And it's not fair to look for someone else to make this better, that's not their job.

The fear that grips me is that I can - very slowly and very painfully - lose a little weight, probably. Then I go away and it piles back on - worse then where I started. This means that the trajectory is up. Say I manage to lose weight now; at the rate I manage this, if I'm lucky, I will be back to where I was when I went on holiday by Christmas. This, you may remember, was half a stone heavier than Easter, a stone heavier than the end of LL and a stone and 10lbs heavier than my lightest ever. And just over a stone from that weight where I felt less panicky, less desparate about my weight and appearence. I was still overweight but I felt I could take my time, do it right, do it healthily - and if it were slow, I could live with that. But that's two stone away from here. Here is desparate and here is really miserable.

So sorry for quite probably being annoying, for definitely being negative and for definitely being whiny. I know there's a way out but I can't see that glimmer of light and hope from down here. Not yet. Soon, please.