Skinny Love: Tilda Swinton and an update

So, I am really, really not fond of myself today, and that's kind of an understatement.

To give you all the quick version: I did well on the abc for an almighty four days (yeah, really long, that), and then screwed up majorly with a HUGE binge yesterday (or huh-yooge, as Stephen King would say).

I don't even want to go into the sordid details of how and why it happened - yes, there were certain circumstances, and if I wanted to indulge myself I could go ahead and blame it on other people, on the particular situation, on the fact that I'm on my period and so on and so on.

But, we all know that sort of thing is deceiving yourself in a cowardly fashion - if I slip up and binge it is my own failure, a lapse in my self control, and no one else can be held accountable.

Oh well.
I got up at five thirty today and started the day with a run and a little weight lifting work-out afterwards, so at least that's making me feel good about myself.

Not so good is the fact that I'm invited to my parents for lunch today, so even if I wanted to pick up at day five again, I don't think I'll manage the 100 cal limit.
Perhaps if I add the burnt-off exercise calories, though...

In any case, in the spirit of not liking myself, I have decided to shift my blogging focus to other people for a change - no fun in talking about yourself all the time, right?

So, I've decided to declare this "Skinny Love" month, and do a mini-series of posts on people that fulfill the following set of criteria:

A) They inspire me in some artistic fashion, be it through their music, their style, their image, through writing or acting or any other creative pursuit, or simply through the entire concept and presentation of their persona.

And B) They are, in keeping with the obsession theme of this blog, visually inspiring to me by being thin or in other words, skinny.

(You are, of course, welcome to take up and participate in this idea if you find it amusing; I'm not running a trade-mark on it anytime soon, ha.
In fact, I'd be curious to know - which skinny minnies happen to have been inspirational to you, dear readers?)

Starting with: La incredible Swinton.










I absolutely love her as an actress - she embodies my every definition of "ethereal" with effortless poise - otherworldly, detached, incomprehensible and infinitely graceful beyond mundane definition, simply and utterly other.

And that photo-shoot she did a good while back for Another Magazine?
I can't even say enough about how she looks in those pictures above, how eternal and perfect, like a statue flawlessly set into stone, a monument of grace and beauty and dignity and spirit.

Where being thin is concerned, I don't even picture her as a person who purposefully tries to maintain or achieve this as a goal.

Much rather, if I had to guess, I'd picture her as someone who simply doesn't have food as a large part of life on their agenda, whose mind is too busy with ideas and their realization to ever think about eating in an active manner; someone who might often forget to eat, if not by chance reminded, while immersed in an other and inspirational part of existence that revolves around things untouched by the trivial absorption of calories into the body.

And that's the kind of ethereal we'd all like to be, aye?

PS: Have a happy Easter, everyone...

Eldritch Abomination

So... I sorta kinda majorly binged today.
It wasn't even just one giant binge, but continuous piling on of calories throughout the entire day in absolutely unnecessary amounts.
I had every intention to keep counting, though, so as to hold myself responsible.

I think the worst thing one does when bingeing is to get that feeling of complete abandon, like the world could end in a fiery blaze and it wouldn't matter, and fuck it, I'm not even counting the calories right now because the balance is so obviously shot to hell.

For me that's always a way to avoid feeling properly horrified, to avoid facing the consequences of my actions - I don't even want to know that devastating number in irrevocable precision; I do not want my head to spin at the exact account of what I have just devoured.
It's like a Lovecraftian Horror - the mere sight of it will make you go insane with frenzied despair.

So, I stop counting during a binge.
But , as we all know , sticking your head into the sand doesn't accomplish anything - I need to face up bravely to what I have done so that I can do better tomorrow.

... yeah, so far for theory.
In praxis, of course, I couldn't handle it.

I did have every intention to, but finally stopped in abject horror when I was starting to inch past 2000 and still could not bring myself to quit.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, the Eldritch Abomination that is my bingeing calorie intake wins again.

Basically, it adds up to me consuming a quantity of food that could have fed a small village of less idiotic individuals. (Much the same as a Cthulhu-ish monster would consume the village itself, ha. Bet that adds up to a lot of calories... not to mention that I totally feel as huge as Cthulhu right now.)

God, I shouldn't be joking about this.
It's gross. Utterly disgusting, despicable gluttony in its purest form, a real proper binge after not even 3 days of moderate restricting.

... which is, yeah, pretty fucking miserable.
I know I need to step away from this kind of behavior if I ever want to stop being cripplingly unhappy with myself again.

Yet I mustn't allow myself to wallow in my failure and be overwhelmed by self-hatred and despair. There's always a chance to do better tomorrow, and I need, no I WILL be focussing myself on that.

As a side effect since starting this blog, I have noticed that the general re-focussing on food avoidance and weightloss has served to pointedly alleviate the acuteness of my depression.
Maybe that's why I'm always happiest when I'm doing this, "getting skinny"... yeah, I know, revolutionary thought, that - the entire calorie-counting game is just something we do to keep our minds off of more unpleasant things anyway, big fucking surprise there.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit of the cheap-mouthed cynic right now due to my own (literally) enormous failure.
I'm feeling deplorably weak; I just wish I was one of these girls that simply don't eat without making a fuss about it, firm resolve and no bitching about the struggle and the slip-ups.

One "nice" thing that I binged on were frozen strawberries though, which was good because a) they barely make a dent in the calorie count obviously and b) sucking on frozen berries on a hot day is one of my favourite pastimes in general.

They also colour your hands a lovely shade of purple/red when you are grabbing them out of a cardboard box one by one, so you can look like you have just committed gruesome slaughter while walking along in the sunshine or sitting down in a park.

Mmpfh, wish I'd stuck to them...

Sunday's essay rant: Food and I, the endless dance

I know that my relationship with food isn't exactly "normal" or healthy, that it hasn't been for ages - certainly not since I was a 12-year old kid, with my parents begging, yelling, threatening, pleading with me to have "just a few spoonfuls of soup, please!", and me crying into my soup as if that was the end of the world, wailing like there was no tomorrow, thinking that they were torturing me, trying to destroy my life; that they wanted to purposefully turn me into a fat and hideous monster.

Here's the thing though - I have never felt "hindered" by that, I have never felt restricted in my liberty by the desire to be slim, the desire not to eat.

I have felt, instead - perhaps falsely - that the times I was most at liberty, most at peace with myself, were those where that desire came to fruition.

Times when I was fasting every other day and going to the gym often twice in 24 hours, were the times when I felt "right" and freed from the oppression and restriction that masses of fat and the crushing failure associated with them impose.

Really, it is the other end of the scale, no pun intended, that has always made me feel trapped, imprisoned.
The moments when I'm bingeing, eating far too much although I'm not even hungry, eating and eating because if I'm not eating nothing then, hey, I might just as well eat everything.
Because I am unable to distinguish a margin of "just right" in between extremes, because there's either all or nothing, so every bite that passes my lips seems "too much".

And once that first bite of too-much, of more-than-nothing has been consumed, the day has turned into a bad day anyway, and I might as well, no I actively need to make it official by wrecking it with ridiculous amounts of food, so as to punish my transgression, so as to show myself just how properly I have messed up.

I am sure a lot of you are all too familiar with the mechanisms I am talking about...
The thing is, that I cannot bring myself to see the restricting/starving side of things as the oppressive, abusive partner in that dance.
I realize it is a masochism tango on the whole, still only one participant seems hurtful, the other endlessly liberating.

The days were I actually manage to consume few enough calories so as not to trigger that switch in my brain to flip, as not to trigger a binge because "it has all gone wrong, anyway" - those are the good days.
I feel proud then, like a bulimic who has manged to keep their food down for a change, has managed to eat little enough so they won't feel the need to purge.

Only I don't purge when that switch gets flipped, when I've had that one piece of fruit salad too many, I simply start bingeing where I have been eating "reasonably" before.
I've always hated the thought of purging enough to avoid it on most occasions (I go out of my way not to throw up out of "natural" causes even), which I guess is some kind of blessing - and still I engage in that ridiculous "all or nothing" scheme, where everything spins out of control as soon as I feel I haven't stayed completely in the straight and narrow with restricting my intake.

I don't know what that makes me or where it will lead; all I know is that I want to go back to the good days, where I keep myself in check and keep my intake in check, where I starve myself just enough to be skinny and free.

And I know that am unable, at this point, to see those days as anything other than liberating, highly desirable.

PS: Getting graphic on the subject of food, I'll add today's estimated calorie intake which stands at about 620 (Half a grapefruit, a cup of steamed veggies, 170g of soy yogurt mixed with applesauce - they incidentally list the same calorie content per 100g -, a 70g piece of a boiled potato, a smoothie at 133 cals, 2 cocktail gherkins, half a slice of brown bread and 40 g of Gouda).

Meh, that's ok, about same as yesterday; yet I feel full and vaguely guilty.

So much for the no-binge-days being liberating, eh? I guess it only makes me feel that way when I am already skinny, otherwise the hideousness of the bod cancels everything out.

Oh well, gotta think positive though, and a moderately successful restricting day is certainly good news.