EmVeg
Do a little dance!
Okay, I just so had to share this with all of you, because my life has completely changed and I just need to get it all out.
So tonight was my week 14 meeting, and I am 2lb away from my goal of 9 stone 10lb. Starting RTM on 20th April and feeling so very positive about it all...a little scary looking but I know I can cope with it. (HA! Thats me saying this.)
Now, yes, I'm very happy with having lost the weight and being so, so close to goal...but its not actually the reason for my "glow" these recent weeks.
I shared with those of you on here in the few months I was waiting to start this diet that I had been bullied at school relentlessly. But in a way where these girls would tell me they were my friends and how cool I was, then humiliate me becuase it made them feel better about themselves....and not just one group of them. I was so desperate to have friends I let so many different people do this over and over again. I had a mother with severe manic depression who made me incredibaly unhappy, had very little if any friends growing up. I had no confidence 4 months ago, and lived my life thinking it was inevitable that I would fail at anything and everything I tried to do.
I want to explain a little more about how low my self esteem was, purely to show you how different I am now. I truly hated myself. I self harmed most of my teenage life as it was the one tiny morsel of control I had in my life..and it was a way of punishing myself because I must be such a horrible, horrible person to deserve the life I felt I had.
I contemplated suicide often, but honestly (and thankfully) I was always too much of a coward to do it. But I know I was heading that way in my own head. I was becoming more and more susesptable to the ways of my mother. When I was 15/16 I completely shut down. I didn't speak to anyone - I didn't do anything. I just existed in silence and self-hate. That was my life.
Then I met my OH and for a while it lifted me. For the first time someone else seemed to like me and I started to believe I could too. But the honeymoon period finished quickly,...and although we are still together, he doesn't make me feel good, and in all honestly a lot of the time I really wasn't happy. I still couldn't like myself, so how could I belive he could.
I stopped my A Levels because I convinced myself I would fail them (even though I achieved 5 A*, 4 A and a B in GCSE and was predicted to d overy well). I believed I couldn't live up to it so decided to stop before I was humilated again. Since then I have worked with children in a nursery, but the pay was so, so poor (5,000 a year for 40 hours a week...increasing to 8,000 when I turned 18...niiice) so I decided to temp in an office and eventually found my way into admin as a career.
Now, I know this doesn't sound like a big thing, but I have always wanted to work with children, and always maintained I would never work behind a desk....well I felt I had failed that too. I thought it was the only thing I'd ever be competant with and would have to make do.
Things "spiralled" with the OH...and we got engaged and moved in. And lets be honest, it was probably more to do with my low self esteem than it was to do with our relationship. When I thought about going back to school the fact he's 5 years older and we were supposed to be saving for a house/wedding and it wasn't practical for me to stop working. Plus (probably guessed it!) I'd only fail at it...
SOOO....that brings me to December 2008, the month before I start LL.
I hated myself. I was fat/ugly/unhealthy. I felt in a dead-end relationship I was just stuck in (also, my mother loves him - when we "broke" up she was hysterical so we got back together as she is still very fragile...so it felt like no way out). I felt like I was in a dead-end job that I was stuck in, and I was never going to get a better job and I should just deal with it. Thanks to the bullying I couldn't believe I had any friends that liked me and constantly sabotaged my relationships with people..then wondering why Iwas always home alone while people went out without me.
I was 19 and, honestly, I felt like my life was already over.
NOW!!! Fast forward 3 months to the day of my final foundation meeting.
I am confident, I like myself, I appriciate myself. I AM NOT A FAILURE, and I can see all my previous accomplishments that I never even acknowledged before then.
I am happy with my size now, yeah I've still got some lumpy bits and some wobbly bits but I'm comfortable with that - I feel like its me.
I have now enrolled in evening college for 3 nights a week from September to do 3 a levels in the next two years. I am doing this to then do a part-time or home degress in History or Biology...and have already looked into Graduate Teaching Programmes to work while training. This way I'm not resentful that I feel I can't do what I so want to, but then the OH won't resent me for us still living with my parents when he's 30 because I'm at university.
I have always said teaching would be my ultimate job, but I was never confident in myself to actually go for it. Now I am.
I don't hate myself anymore. And I can appriciate that I am with my OH because I want to be, not because of my mum. He does like me, or he wouldn't be with me. But, even better, I know that if I don't want to be with him anymore, that I can survive both him and my mum. I can do it for me, because its my life and I am the one that matters.
My mum is still bad, but she doesn't affect me as much she did. I understand more that she is ill, and it isn't all personal against me.
I know that other people can like me, but I also know that if they don't then it isn't my problem. Those I care about are my friends and like me for it. End of.
What matters is that I LIKE ME. And I really, truly do.
So thank you LighterLife. I am completely on my way to being the person I want to be. I am going back to college, I have more of a social life, and for the first time im my life I have that elusive self esteem.
4 months ago I was a depressed 19 year old who's life was over.
Todays its just beginning and I can't stop grinning.
For anyone out there that is struggling - I wish I could bottle this feeling up for you to have a tester. But keep going with it and you too may get a whole new you.
I know I've finally found ME. And I love it.
mwah!
So tonight was my week 14 meeting, and I am 2lb away from my goal of 9 stone 10lb. Starting RTM on 20th April and feeling so very positive about it all...a little scary looking but I know I can cope with it. (HA! Thats me saying this.)
Now, yes, I'm very happy with having lost the weight and being so, so close to goal...but its not actually the reason for my "glow" these recent weeks.
I shared with those of you on here in the few months I was waiting to start this diet that I had been bullied at school relentlessly. But in a way where these girls would tell me they were my friends and how cool I was, then humiliate me becuase it made them feel better about themselves....and not just one group of them. I was so desperate to have friends I let so many different people do this over and over again. I had a mother with severe manic depression who made me incredibaly unhappy, had very little if any friends growing up. I had no confidence 4 months ago, and lived my life thinking it was inevitable that I would fail at anything and everything I tried to do.
I want to explain a little more about how low my self esteem was, purely to show you how different I am now. I truly hated myself. I self harmed most of my teenage life as it was the one tiny morsel of control I had in my life..and it was a way of punishing myself because I must be such a horrible, horrible person to deserve the life I felt I had.
I contemplated suicide often, but honestly (and thankfully) I was always too much of a coward to do it. But I know I was heading that way in my own head. I was becoming more and more susesptable to the ways of my mother. When I was 15/16 I completely shut down. I didn't speak to anyone - I didn't do anything. I just existed in silence and self-hate. That was my life.
Then I met my OH and for a while it lifted me. For the first time someone else seemed to like me and I started to believe I could too. But the honeymoon period finished quickly,...and although we are still together, he doesn't make me feel good, and in all honestly a lot of the time I really wasn't happy. I still couldn't like myself, so how could I belive he could.
I stopped my A Levels because I convinced myself I would fail them (even though I achieved 5 A*, 4 A and a B in GCSE and was predicted to d overy well). I believed I couldn't live up to it so decided to stop before I was humilated again. Since then I have worked with children in a nursery, but the pay was so, so poor (5,000 a year for 40 hours a week...increasing to 8,000 when I turned 18...niiice) so I decided to temp in an office and eventually found my way into admin as a career.
Now, I know this doesn't sound like a big thing, but I have always wanted to work with children, and always maintained I would never work behind a desk....well I felt I had failed that too. I thought it was the only thing I'd ever be competant with and would have to make do.
Things "spiralled" with the OH...and we got engaged and moved in. And lets be honest, it was probably more to do with my low self esteem than it was to do with our relationship. When I thought about going back to school the fact he's 5 years older and we were supposed to be saving for a house/wedding and it wasn't practical for me to stop working. Plus (probably guessed it!) I'd only fail at it...
SOOO....that brings me to December 2008, the month before I start LL.
I hated myself. I was fat/ugly/unhealthy. I felt in a dead-end relationship I was just stuck in (also, my mother loves him - when we "broke" up she was hysterical so we got back together as she is still very fragile...so it felt like no way out). I felt like I was in a dead-end job that I was stuck in, and I was never going to get a better job and I should just deal with it. Thanks to the bullying I couldn't believe I had any friends that liked me and constantly sabotaged my relationships with people..then wondering why Iwas always home alone while people went out without me.
I was 19 and, honestly, I felt like my life was already over.
NOW!!! Fast forward 3 months to the day of my final foundation meeting.
I am confident, I like myself, I appriciate myself. I AM NOT A FAILURE, and I can see all my previous accomplishments that I never even acknowledged before then.
I am happy with my size now, yeah I've still got some lumpy bits and some wobbly bits but I'm comfortable with that - I feel like its me.
I have now enrolled in evening college for 3 nights a week from September to do 3 a levels in the next two years. I am doing this to then do a part-time or home degress in History or Biology...and have already looked into Graduate Teaching Programmes to work while training. This way I'm not resentful that I feel I can't do what I so want to, but then the OH won't resent me for us still living with my parents when he's 30 because I'm at university.
I have always said teaching would be my ultimate job, but I was never confident in myself to actually go for it. Now I am.
I don't hate myself anymore. And I can appriciate that I am with my OH because I want to be, not because of my mum. He does like me, or he wouldn't be with me. But, even better, I know that if I don't want to be with him anymore, that I can survive both him and my mum. I can do it for me, because its my life and I am the one that matters.
My mum is still bad, but she doesn't affect me as much she did. I understand more that she is ill, and it isn't all personal against me.
I know that other people can like me, but I also know that if they don't then it isn't my problem. Those I care about are my friends and like me for it. End of.
What matters is that I LIKE ME. And I really, truly do.
So thank you LighterLife. I am completely on my way to being the person I want to be. I am going back to college, I have more of a social life, and for the first time im my life I have that elusive self esteem.
4 months ago I was a depressed 19 year old who's life was over.
Todays its just beginning and I can't stop grinning.
For anyone out there that is struggling - I wish I could bottle this feeling up for you to have a tester. But keep going with it and you too may get a whole new you.
I know I've finally found ME. And I love it.
mwah!
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) how incredibly mature and grounded you come across - reading your previous posts over the last few weeks, I had no idea you were just 19.
