Update

I've had a few comments on my last post asking for an update so people can see how I'm getting on. This post doesn't mean I'm going to be posting regularly again yet though.

The past few months have been extremely hard for me for several reasons. The first is the break-up with my boyfriend which I'm still not completely over, even if I have stopped crying about it on a regular basis. I still think we should have worked together but I can't sit around waiting for him to realise he's been an idiot. I'm not over him yet, I'm not ready to start dating again by a long way but I'm getting there.

I started a new, challenging job in September. I went through a few months of not being sure I was doing the job right, wondering why they'd hired me and thinking that I was never going to get the hang of things. I think I have now. It's got to a point where I think I'm doing a useful job and I'm really enjoying some of my work.

The other implication of the new job was it meant moving home. I moved to a new town most of the way across the country (this is England, not Amercia, so it's not as bad as it could be) from where I'd been living. This means I'm a fair distance from my friends and family. That was incredibly tough.

But I've survived these changes.

I had some bad days. I had some really bad days. And I had some occasions where I spent too much of the weekend eating half the menu of the local Chinese take-away.

There were some extremely rough moments when it felt that relapse would be all but inevitable, but I got through them.

One of the things that helped was something I wouldn't have expected to. I started taking kung fu. I went to the class for the first time more or less on a whim. I'd been here a couple of months and barely knew anyone outside of work, so I could go the entire weekend without real human contact. So I looked up classes and courses that were on at the weekend just so I'd be out there meeting people. I saw kung fu listed and figured why not.

I think that was a good decision for a wide range of reasons. Firstly, and probably most importantly, it's fun. I enjoy the classes and like the instructor. I like the other people taking the class so I get some socialising and am even starting to meet a couple of them outside the classes as well. But the reason that has most significance for me as a formerly disordered person: it's exercise that I don't control.

My instructor is the one who decides whether we have a hard or an easy class. He's the one who determines what we do and when and tells us we should be going home at the end of the session. He is the one who determines how hard I should be pushing myself, not the amount I ate the day before. If you go to the gym, you're in control of how much you exercise, how long and how hard. If you've had over-exercise as a symptom of a disorder, this can be dangerous. But my kung fu instructor has no way to know whether I ate normally or binged the day before, so the exercise is separated from the food. It becomes something that I do, not something that I do out of guilt.

My instructor also brings up the subject of food occasionally in class. For some people, this might be off-putting, but it helps me. He tells people off if they don't eat enough. One of the worst mistakes you can make is admitting in class that you haven't eaten breakfast. It's nice for me to hear someone saying that we should be eating more. He encourages healthy eating, but he does it by encouraging eating, rather than saying things are forbidden.

It's been good for me to know I have an instructor who cares about my general health and who won't be afraid to ask me what I've eaten. I hate lying, so I'm more likely to eat decently to avoid having to if he should ask me. The second time I nearly fainted in class, he started taking a strong interest in whether or not I was eating enough. He doesn't know I used to have an eating disorder and I doubt I'm going to tell him but it's reassuring to me to know that there's someone who'll ask me whether or not I ate after getting home from work, so I'm less likely to skip meals.

If you're in recovery and you had over-exercise as a symptom of your disorder, it can be difficult to know how to get back to exercise. There's no clear boundary between exercise and over-exercise. So I would recommend joining a class or a club of some sort. Make it something you enjoy, so exercise is fun not punishment. And make it something where someone else is in charge. That way, you'll be doing the same level of exercise regardless of whether dinner was half an apple or half the fridge. By turning over control to someone else, your disorder isn't the thing determining how hard you exercise.

So, in conclusion, I'm doing alright. I'm enjoying my job, I'm starting to make friends here and I've found a form of exercise I can enjoy without abusing it. There's another good thing that's happened to me over the past few months that proves there can be good even in bad times. I signed a publishing contract towards the end of last year and my first novel will be in book shops from September.