I'm Letting Go and Giving it Over

Brace yourselves gals, I have a feeling that this is going to be a long post.

I'll start from the beginning.

For those of you who have been keeping up with my (sporadic) posting lately, you'll know that I had an appointment to see my dietican yesterday. The last time I met with her was in October and I was 2 lbs away from my lowest goal weight. Since then school and work kind of overwhelmed me and I slowly starting backing off from my appointments. The Christmas season arrived, I found myself overexercising and restricting and I lost a little bit of weight. Not a whole lot of weight, but enough to make it noticeable. And then one day I was faced with a lie: that I was bigger at my current weight than I was last year when I was at the same exact weight. And I fed into it, practically enticing the ED to come back into my life so that I could be small again. You see girls, even though I was starting to become comfortable with food again, I was scared.

I didn't want to get better. I didn't want my ED to go away. And so I held on.

Fast forward to the present. When I started restricting again, of course I started to lose weight, but not necessarily as fast as I would have liked. I started freaking that my body was still holding on to the weight and restricted more and exercised more vigorously. Eventually I was so entangled in the web that I had spun for myself, that I was trapped. I feared that if I started to eat more I would gain back the weight very quickly. So I kept myself where I was, refusing to make a change.

This is hard for me to admit but, I wasn't necessarily stuck in my ED. Before when I have relapsed I honestly began to fear food again and weight gain, and was generally AFRAID. But this time--and again this is hard for me to admit--I just didn't want to keep getting better. I held on to my ED even though I had already done a pretty good job in beating it down earlier in the year.

ED wasn't holding on to me, I was holding on to it.

So yesterday I was mentally preparing myself for the appointment. In my mind I had already firmly made the decision that we were going to just TALK and there would be no meal planning or changes to my diet or anything. Just a nice friendly chat. Because I did NOT want to change.

But I think that God had a different plan.

As usual I was running late yesterday morning and was in a scramble to get out the door. I arrived to first period with like a minute to spare and was very frazzled. When I arrived though my teacher announced that she was sick and was cancelling the class for the day. Great. No toning exercises. I decided to take a walk around one of the local neighborhoods while I was waiting for next period to begin. And I asked God to please meet me while I was out walking because I wanted to discuss this whole "RECOVERY" thing.

And He did.

While I was walking I began thinking over everything--events I have gone through, unforgiveness and anger and self-acceptance issues. And I realized that this whole eating disordered thing isn't really about any of that.

It's about TRUST

To put it simply, I don't trust God with my future. When I can't handle life, instead I turn to my ED to cope with all the changes. And I take control.

And I realized that I have never fully trusted God with my life, PERIOD. Even when I made the conscious decision to try recovering again last year, I didn't give over total control. I wanted things to be a certain way. Ashamedly, I even BARGAINED with the doctors for a weight that I wanted to be at and for the amount of exercise that I wanted. Never once did I say, Okay I'll do it your way. And when I realized all this, I knew what I had to do, and I knew what God wanted me to do.

Yesterday I made a VERY hard decision. Probably the hardest decision I will ever make in my entire life. I gave over my eating disorder to God. Fully. Completely. There is no going back. I am never again going to return to it. I may still struggle but I am NOT going to bring my weight down or allow myself to relapse anymore. There is no more back door. I am moving on, I am moving forward. I am going to start a new life and not look back on the past any longer. It's going to be a long, hard haul, but I am in this for the long run.

I will no longer live as an ANOREXIC.