 Last night I wrote a tweet that said, Dear Anorexia, I have nothing left to prove to you. I choose not to lose a stone in 21 days. Instead I choose life, I choose health, I choose love, love pookie. And I ended it with just holding myself accountable because it's never just a stone and I'm struggling with this one. It's so tempting. And I wanted to take a moment to explain the context of that tweets a little bit because it's really important to me that I'm trying to be authentic and honest in my struggles but also honestly it helps me because when I hold myself publicly accountable, it enables me to more easily do the things that I need to do to keep myself healthy. So the kind of wider context of this tweet is a TV show that was on last night that's encouraging people to lose weight that they've gained during lockdown and it's part of a kind of wider call to curb obesity. And the issue with it was this trending hashtag, lose a stone in 21 days. And there's been lots of input from various eating disorder charities and advocates and so on saying this is really damaging and the ways in which they're encouraging people to lose weight are the kind of gateways into eating disorder behavior and it'd be really triggering for those of us with a history of eating disorder and so on and so on and so on. I didn't watch the program. I didn't share an opinion on it prior but when I went on to Twitter in the evening to share my three good things that I do every day I was ambushed with this hashtag again and again and again lose a stone in 21 days and what my head and the anorexic voice which no matter how healthy I am in body and mind is always there waiting the anorexic voice in my head went lose a stone in 21 days. You can do better than that and it's there and it's kind of going I wonder if you could lose two, three, maybe you're heavier now so it'd be easier to lose weight than when you're lighter so you can and it goes and it's instantly there nagging away at me testing me challenging me and I'm a very competitive person with very high standards many of you will know this about me and so instantly I start challenging myself I start wondering and I had to just stop right there and allowed and to my network say no I'm not going to do this I'm not going to go here I'm not going to engage with this voice at all and to directly challenge that anorexic voice and the reason why I felt the need to tweet it was partly because I felt like if I was beginning to have these thoughts these feelings this kind of triggering of this eating disorder narrative there'd be loads of other people who were similarly feeling that way even if like me they're currently at a really healthy weight I'm doing apparently quite well that doesn't mean that we're not having to battle with these thoughts these feelings these voices all the time and I also needed to say out loud I'm not going to engage with this I'm not going to let that anorexic bully tempts me into this because if I don't say it out loud if I don't acknowledge hey I've had this thought and I'm not going to do it actually what happens is that I quietly do listen to that voice and I just quietly get on with it and without necessarily even proactively engaging with it I would find that I challenge myself to lose the stone in a week or whatever and that I kind of go there and the problem with that anorexic thinking and behaving for me and for many others I believe too is that once you start it's like an addiction it's really really hard to stop and one day becomes a week becomes a month becomes six and suddenly you're very very poorly so I need always to recognize this stuff as soon as it arises to put it out there and to very publicly say I'm having these thoughts I'm not going to go with them I'm going to fight them and I think the other thing that I just wanted to acknowledge here is that it is a battle and one of the things I really struggle with when it comes to things like eating disorder awareness weeks and campaigns and so on is that we see these brilliant stories of recovery and they're really inspiring and my story doesn't look anything like that it's been really up and down and a lot of the time it's quite messy just a couple of weeks ago I was having to talk to my psychiatrist because I'd had a PTSD flare up and I found myself completely unable to eat because I was so anxious and suddenly this became impossible and my family are crying at mealtimes because I'm unable to eat and they're worried because they remember where this leads and how I wind up unable to even sit in a hospital bed because I've starved myself obviously I'm a long way from that right now but it can happen really fast and it's terrifying and we all fear it constantly it's like this extra person in our family there all the time and most of the time it's okay and most of the time I can keep it quiet and most of the time I just manage it but sometimes it rears its ugly head and I don't know if it will ever fully go away and I guess yeah so my recovery is not perfect I get it wrong some days and some days it's fine and some days it's easy but sometimes it's hard and sometimes I mess up and sometimes I do the wrong thing and sometimes I make my family cry and sometimes I make myself cry and ugh it's messy but you know what we're managing and actually that really matters that we're managing we manage each day it matters that my children my husband my mother-in-law felt able to say to me hey you're not eating we're really worried about you what can we do to help with this what would make it easier what foods would be better how can we change mealtimes let's call the psychiatrist does your medication need changing all those kinds of questions that we never used to ask and that matters it doesn't matter that it's not perfect every day it matters that when I stumble when I fall that I'm able to pick myself back up and when I'm not able to pick myself back up that there are people all around me offering their hands helping to guide me up and support me along the way so that turned into a bit of a ramble but basically that's the context behind my tweet the context is yeah I look happy and healthy I'm the heaviest I've ever been and I don't say that with any shame or worry or concern I'm actually really delighted I've bought a whole new wardrobe of clothes that fit me and I like this size and granted maybe it will change again a bit once I get a bit more active and once lockdown's over but I'm really quite happy I'm really quite healthy and I don't want to engage with that anorexic voice but it's there it's there all the time and it's always just waiting for that trigger for that weigh-in so that it can take over me again and I have to fight hard to stop that from happening and I just wanted to be open and honest and authentic and messy and real about that okay I hope that you are all well and that anyone who has been triggered by this program last night or any other kind of of the context of COVID and lockdown and the pandemic that you're doing okay I'm here right alongside you we battle this together all the time it's okay to not find this easy every day it's okay to have beliefs I would urge you please to reach out to those around you who can and will support and help you if you're finding things hard and please know that I'm on your team and we got this good luck