It Gets Easier
Part I - Food & Drink Recovery
In case you hadn’t heard – it’s the New Year! Livers and digestives tracts across the globe can breathe a purple, gurgling sigh of relief now the gruelling late December shift is complete.
As the maelstrom of ways in which to become a ‘New You’ flood our collective news feeds and psyches, I thought I’d offer a little about how I became a New Me, via overcoming my two most shameful problems – food and drink.
I should offer an immediate caveat that what I found useful is/was specific to my circumstances and not to be mistaken for advice. I’m not an expert on the crippling, devastating full-blown disorders that ruin lives – both from eating disorders and substance abuse.
Nor do I have any judgement on people who get hammered, gorge themselves into a stupor or hit the gym seven days a week – as long as it’s fun, and doesn’t feel scary or out of control, have at it.
Being not ‘as bad’ as others was a huge factor in delaying the recognition that I did have a problem in those areas. I might not have been physically hooked on anything, I might have had a BMI in the ‘normal’ range, but things were far from okay. My mind was a dark mess of self-loathing, while I skipped around parties and film-sets pretending I was happy and had it together.
I’m incredibly fortunate that things got bad enough to force me out of denial and into healing, but not so bad that I was hospitalised, institutionalised, or worse.
The Old Me treated NYE as any other night out, and I subsequently remember very little, if anything, about any of them. An abundance of Christmas celebration foods, a privilege I didn’t even recognise, would send the Old Me into a tailspin of uncontrolled binging and bloated remorse.
New Years Day was spent like every morning-after-the-night-before – vowing change, espousing Resolutions, knowing deep down that none of it would stick.