OK so after my exam success in year 9, I began to feel a lot better. Although I had given up on weight loss, I had kinda accepted my body the way it was.
I read this book called Body confidence by Astrid Longhurst, here's the link:
http://www.play.com/Books/Books/4-/217514/Body-Confidence/Product.html?ptsl=1&ob=Price&fb=0&&_$ja=tsid:11518|cc:|prd:217514|cat:Books+%3E+Health.
It was the best book I had ever read! She taught me so many valuable lessons. The main one was that when you hate your body because you think it's not perfect, you're not in unison with your body and if one thing goes wrong (she gave the example of a toothache) you will not even value yourself THAT much to get off your ass and to to the dentist. You have such low self-worth. Because you think that your body is horrible, or it isn't the way you want it to be. I did get a lot out of this book. It taught me that I should accept my body for the way that it was, instead of trying to change it or look different just for the sake of peer pressure or media influence etc.So for once in my life I was actually HAPPY with my body the way it was. I felt great. I loved my curves. I had bags of confidence. I was talking to people I wouldn't normally. I was living.
But this feeling didn't seem to last long. I would look at my body and start feeling fat again. I would say to myself, yeah you're body is great but if you could just lose a little here.. just tighten that bit there... etc. And it all started again! And then I was in two minds. I felt so conflicted. On the one hand, I loved my body and was really confident in it. On the other hand, I wanted to lose weight. And no matter how hard I tried, could not make the two sides corroborate with each other; they wouldn't work together. So I realised that I'd had to adopt either one of those ideaologies. And for some reason, I went for the "you should lose a little bit of weight" idea.
I have no idea why I chose it. Probably because I was piling on the pounds- and fast. And I felt like I had to tell myself once more it was time to lose weight. Yet I had resigned myself to the fact that weight loss was some far, impossible, distant, unreachable, unachievable DREAM or fantsasy I had. So I just lived life, and let myself put on gradually more and more weight. Of course I wasn't HAPPY about it, yet I felt there was nothing I could do to change my situation. So I'd have to acceptit. And I did.
The part of me I hated the most was my stomach. It just ballooned so much and was so out of proportion to the rest of my body, it made me look pregnant. I guess the reason why was during year 8/ year 9 I had a really strict regime for sit-ups. I managed to get an almost flat belly by enduring a regime of around 300 sit-ups a day, split into 100 in the morning, at lunch and evening. I did it for a couple of months and it did work. But of course, I gave up.
At the end of year 11, I sat my GCSE exams. I got really stressed out about them. I generally get very stressed out about exams, especially important ones. They were really important because I'd got rejected from the sixth form my Dad wanted me to go to and I felt like such a failure. I had places at other colleges but he wanted me to go to that one. And I didn't really care where I ended up. But the fact is I had no idea where I was going to go. My future was so uncertain, and I hate uncertainty. I needed to have some sort of direction in my life.
Anyways, I got so stressed that I became really ill with a nasty mucus cough. I went to the doctor, who gave me some amoxicillin (see below)- an antibiotic- cos she thought I had a chest infection. Btw I know amoxicillin is usually given to like babies, but at the time I could not and would not swallow tablets! So I had to take amoxicillin in liquid form.
But it didn't help at all so I went back to the doctors. She listened to my chest. I told her I had been wheezing a lot. When I breathed, I was making dolphin/whale noises!!! It was quite peculiar. It was then that I was diagnosed with Asthma.
It was strange because obviously I knew a lot about asthma but I never thought I had it. I was given blue and brown inhalers and told when to take them and given a thick information leaflet as well as print-outs from the BMJ website. I took some time off school when the cough was realllyy bad so when I went back, I told my friends that I'd got Asthma. It was a disease that everyone knew about but what they didn't tell me- and what I now know is that Asthma is an autoimmune illness.
So I came out of high school with great GCSE results and managed to get a place into the sixth form my Dad wanted me to go too- yippeee!!
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