Blogger of the Month - Stephanie Dreams

I really hope you’re enjoying this series of posts and that perhaps you’ve discovered a new blog or two to follow. It’s so hard to just pick one blogger a month because there are so many great bloggers out there – I’ve got a list longer than my arm of candidates for my blogger of the month award! If you have a particular blogger you’ve been loving recently, I’d love to hear about them.

So, let me introduce you to my March Blogger of the Month; Stephanie over at Stephanie Dreams Blog.

I discovered Steph’s blog a while ago and she’s been on my list of Blogger of the Month contenders for ages, so I’m really glad I’ve managed to get her blog up this month. I thought I would share with you just a few things that I love about Steph’s blog and I hope you will too.

Steph

Steph has been blogging since late 2009, and started off her blog as an online diary, which she says has now grown into her own special corner of the Internet. She comes across as a really lovely, down to earth lady with a passion for dogs that rivals my own!

Days Out

Steph, her husband and her gorgeous doggies like to go on pretty days out, walks and visits to various attractions, and she always takes such beautiful photos when she does. For someone who struggles to get out much because of her health, I feel I can live vicariously through Steph’s beautiful photographs!

Doggies

As I mentioned, Steph has the most gorgeous little menagerie of dogs, including her absolutely adorable chocolate spaniel called Severus. I adore seeing all her photos of her furry friends, both on her blog and on her Instagram. She always makes me want to take photos of our furries and I’m often feeling puppy broody for another little one!

Outfit posts

Steph loves a good outfit photo shoot and I find her style so inspiring, as it’s affordable yet fashionable. She always manages to find a nice backdrop for her outfits and you will often find me popping down to Primark to pick up something she has photographed!

Home bits

I love reading blogs of ladies who have their own homes, and Steph’s blog is no exception. I really enjoy seeing the little finishing touches she puts to her home, including beautifully scented candles, vases and canvas prints. So much inspiration for when I do eventually move out myself!

Gift ideas

Steph is great at finding cute and unique gift ideas, so I’m always popping onto her blog when an event or occasion is coming up to get some inspiration. From chocolate gift sets to home accessories, there is always an idea or two on her blog.

5 years of blogging

One particular post on Steph’s blog that I really enjoyed was her latest blog birthday post – she’s been blogging for 5 years now, which is just awesome! I thought her photo shoot was so cute with her balloons in the middle of beautiful woodland. Just shows what you can achieve if you work hard at something you love.

Disney times

One of my favourite things about Steph’s blog is her amazing love of everything Disney. When she got married there she had some awesome photo shoots done around the park, and if I’m ever feeling sad I always pop over to her blog to look at all the happy photos. They make me want to go to Disney even more every time I look at them, so if you’re a Disney fan I’d definitely recommend checking them out.

Amazing wedding

I’m a sucker for a good wedding, and Steph has the most beautiful photos from both her wedding at Disney and her wedding party back home. She looked absolutely beautiful in her dress and head garland and she has so many Pinterest worthy photos that I’ve been saving for inspiration (OK, I need to find a man first, but a girl can dream right?!)

So, that just about sums up my Blogger of the Month for March. Steph is also on YouTube, which is fantastic, so I’d definitely recommend searching for her if you enjoy her blog. If you’ve not checked out Stephanie Dreams before I really hope I’ve helped convince you to and that you’ve found a great new blogger to follow.

*All photos are taken by Steph over at Stephanie Dreams

I love to find new blogs to follow, so if you have any recommendations I’d love to hear them.

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Sunday Spotlight - 8th March 2015

In my life this week…

Difficult week

Unfortunately this week has been what I can only describe as awful. I don’t like to be too negative on my blog, but I do also think it’s important to be real. I’ve been struggling with my mental health for a long time, but this week my mood has just plummeted, my eating disorder thoughts have got stronger and my anxiety is sky high. When I go to sleep at night I pray that I won’t wake up, and when I wake up the next morning I just cry. It’s horrible. I’ve given up looking for reasons as to why my mental health gets worse, because nine times out of ten there isn’t a reason, and I just end up beating myself up because I can’t find a reason. I’m trying to get an appointment with my psychiatrist because I can’t carry on like this, but I’m not really sure she’s going to be able to do anything to make this better. I get scared when I feel this bad and nothing I seem to do helps. All I can say is, I really hope next week might be a bit better.

Scan at UCLH

On Friday, after having to stop some of my medications and therefore feeling super poorly, my Dad and I made our way up to London. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much of the journey – I slept on the train all the way up and then we managed to find a taxi but I was in a bit of a daydream as I was in so much pain and felt so unwell. The taxi took us to University College London Hospital, which I’ve got to say is an amazing hospital. I did get a bit tearful because it seemed like a massive reminder of just how much I want to work in the medical field, and at the moment that just isn’t possible. But anyway, the reason I went up there was to take part in some pretty exciting research. They’re trying to develop a scan for people with EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) who have gastric motility problems like I do. So, they’re scanning healthy people, people with diabetic neuropathy and people like me with EDS and motility problems. I had to lie in the MRI scanner on my stomach for 15 minutes, drink some water, and then lay there for another 45 minutes while the continually scanned me. It was pretty claustrophobic, but I felt so unwell that I just closed my eyes and tried to doze a bit! I felt pretty wobbly after, but it was nice to be able to take some painkillers after having to stop them for a couple of days (the ones I take can affect motility so they had to be stopped for the scans). I’ll be really interested to follow the research and they’ve said they will send me a video of my scan, which should be interesting!

Image from NHS

Disney DVDs

I got very excited this week when my friend told me that Disney DVDs were on BOGOF on Zavvi, Amazon and Tesco. As some of you might know, I’m trying to collect the full set of Disney DVDs (all 52 of them!) so every time they go on offer I’m there! After much deliberation, I decided on these four to add to my collection. I’ve never actually watched the whole of Alice in Wonderland and have never seen Brave, so I can’t wait to watch both of them properly. And after the week I’ve had, I think a Disney session is very much in order right now!

What has grabbed your attention this week? I love hearing about people’s new discoveries and you may end up sharing something that makes it onto my list next week!

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My Slimming World journey so far

As you may know, at the beginning of this year I decided to have a go at Slimming World, which you can find here. They very kindly gave me a four-week trial, and I thought I would let you know how I’ve been getting on and what a typical day of food looks like for me.

So, for breakfast I always have some orange juice and Cornflakes with coconut milk.

If I’m at college, I tend to have a gluten free cereal bar at about 11am, but if I’m just at home I don’t eat anything between breakfast and lunch.

Then we come to lunch time, which I found the most difficult to work out on the Slimming World plan. I have a Fortisip, which is prescribed by my doctor because I struggle to eat enough to nourish me. Depending on how I’m feeling, I might have a little bit of chocolate afterwards, but it depends on what my nausea and stomach pain is like.

In the afternoon I like to have a cup of tea and a bowl of popcorn.

Then for dinner, I will have something like a Jacket Potato, although I struggle to eat the whole thing, so usually end up having about half. Another day, I’ve also had a go at one of the recipes from my Deliciously Ella book, which was really nice.

If I’m really honest, I haven’t been counting syns like you should on Slimming World because I’ve struggled to fit it around my extremely restrictive diet. Since starting Slimming World my digestive problems have got worse, which has meant my appetite has completely gone and I’m struggling to eat enough to keep me going. I have lost some weight, but I’m not sure I can put it down to following the Slimming World plan unfortunately because I’m struggling to eat enough as it is. Saying that, reading all the Slimming World materials has made me more conscious of what I’m putting in my body, so rather than just reaching for a cake or biscuit, I am more mindful about nourishing myself with healthy foods.

Unfortunately I’ve also found that it has triggered my eating disorder rather more than I had hoped. The biggest problem is that, when my eating disorder was really bad, I was weighing out everything I ate and it became an obsession. I think having to weigh out foods on the Slimming World plan has fed into those old ideas I held around food and I have felt myself slipping back into eating disorder behaviours, which is obviously something I need to be really careful about. Because of this, I have stopped weighing things out before it got any worse, and instead I just try to make a healthy judgement about what I think my body needs.

I think it would be wrong of me to discuss exactly what I’ve lost, but I’m definitely happy with the way things are going. However, after discussing my weight loss with medical professionals, they are rather concerned about the prospect of me losing weight, so I think, because of this, perhaps Slimming World isn’t the right thing for me to be doing. Yes, I would still like to lose some more weight, and I will definitely be using what I’ve learnt from my Slimming World experience to help me plan my meals, but I also have to put my health and mental wellbeing first and work with my medical team. It’s not easy – I’m desperate to lose weight, but I don’t know how much of that is healthy and how much is my eating disorder getting stronger again. So I think I need to try and focus on getting enough nourishment to keep me as healthy as possible and hopefully by doing that I can reach a healthy weight that I can feel comfortable with.

Have you given Slimming World a try? I’d love to hear about your experiences

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The Happiness Project - March

I was recently given a book by a friend called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and after hearing about it online and then flicking through the book I was inspired to do my own Happiness Project. If you haven’t heard of the book, it is basically about a lady who was tired of feeling run down and miserable all the time, so she decided to do something about it. She started off on a project that would span an entire year. Every month was assigned a theme, and within these themes she came up with a selection of goals to help her reach the happiness theme of that particular month. It’s a really inspiring and thought-provoking book, so I would really recommend giving it a read if you ever get the chance.

So, I decided that I am also fed up of feeling sad all the time. Having depression makes life incredibly difficult and, whilst I know I can’t cure myself, I can be more proactive in my choices, which in turn could lead to an improved state of mind. Conducting my own Happiness Project seemed like the perfect thing to start, what with it being a new year and all that, so I started thinking about how I could do one for myself. I have decided to use the same monthly themes that are talked about in the book, because I feel I am able to come up with relevant goals for each of them, which are personal to me. Obviously no two happiness projects will be the same, because we all have individual challenges that cause us unhappiness and different things that make us feel happy. But I felt I could relate the themes to my own life and come up with a range of goals that cover all aspects of my life.

I thought I would make a series of posts, over the next year, so that you can experience my Happiness Project with me, and perhaps even join me and do a project of your own. I will do a post at the beginning of each month, detailing the monthly theme and the goals I am aiming towards, and then at the end of the month I will do a brief wrap-up about how I have got on over the last month and reflect on how the project is going.

So we are now in March, and the theme for this month is to ‘Aim Higher.’ My goals this month are as follows:

Film more YouTube videos

I’m really getting into this YouTube things and I really enjoy filming my videos for you all. I find I’ve got so many ideas for videos but I just never seem to get them either filmed, or up on time, so this month I want to try and focus on getting more of my videos filmed and uploaded. I think what puts me off is that it just takes so long to upload and export the videos, but what I think I might do is start doing that overnight so the video is ready when I get up in the morning. I’ve already got a bit of a backlog of videos filmed, so I’ve got plenty to keep me going for the next month!

Promote my blog

I’ve found I’ve hit a bit of a wall with my blog followers just recently – they just seem to have stopped going up, which does feel a bit disappointing. I’m by no means doing this to get hundreds of followers, but it is nice to know people are reading what you’re writing and that you’re entertaining people, so I do get a bit dejected when my numbers slow down. So somehow, I need to start promoting my blog a bit more. I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to do this yet, so if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions I’d love to hear them! I definitely want to start commenting on other people’s posts a lot more, as I think it’s always nice to get comments and it’s also a good way to get yourself out there a bit more. This is going to be a bit difficult to measure, but I think it’s just important that it’s something I keep in mind.

Ask for help

This is a more personal goal for March. I’m not always that good at asking for help when I’m struggling. I tend to just let things build up inside me and then they get to the point where I just end up breaking or exploding, and this is something I want to learn how to avoid. So whether it’s at college, with my health or just in my personal life, I want to push myself to ask people for help more. I’m a very independent person, but I need to learn that you can still be independent but still let other people help you, because it’s impossible to do everything in life for yourself.

Enjoy now

Now this is something I’m really not very good at. I’m well known for either fretting over things that have happened in the past, or working myself up into a state about what might happen in the future. Because of this, I don’t often find that I enjoy where I am in the here and now and I think this is such an important thing to achieve. We only get one life and if we don’t enjoy it now, we’re never going to get another chance. This isn’t going to be easy to achieve, but I’m going to really try hard to find some moments that I can just be mindful and enjoy the present, even if it’s only for 5 minutes.

So there we have it. Four different goals to work on this month, and I think that the majority of them are definitely achievable, although some of them are definitely dependent on how much time I have. I’m still planning to work on my goals from previous months, as the idea is that you are meant to carry your goals forward so at the end of the year you are practising everything you set out to do. For my cinema trip for this month I’m hoping to go and see Cinderella, which looks amazing from the trailers I’ve seen, so that’s one of my January goals ticked off for another month! I’m really enjoying taking part in this project and would love to hear if you’ve set yourself any goals this month. If you would like to join me in a Happiness Project and happen to take any photos as part of it, please use #JensHappyProject so I can check out what you’ve all been up to!

Have you read The Happiness Project? Do you have any resolutions you’ve made for this month?

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Happiness Project - February Round Up

I was recently given a book by a friend called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and after hearing about it online and then flicking through the book I was inspired to do my own Happiness Project. If you haven’t heard of the book, it is basically about a lady who was tired of feeling run down and miserable all the time, so she decided to do something about it. She started off on a project that would span an entire year. Every month was assigned a theme, and within these themes she came up with a selection of goals to help her reach the happiness theme of that particular month. It’s a really inspiring and thought-provoking book, so I would really recommend giving it a read if you ever get the chance.

So, I decided that I am also fed up of feeling sad all the time. Having depression makes life incredibly difficult and, whilst I know I can’t cure myself, I can be more proactive in my choices, which in turn could lead to an improved state of mind. Conducting my own Happiness Project seemed like the perfect thing to start in 2015, so I started thinking about how I could do one for myself. I have decided to use the same monthly themes that are talked about in the book, because I feel I am able to come up with relevant goals for each of them, which are personal to me. Obviously no two happiness projects will be the same, because we all have individual challenges that cause us unhappiness and different things that make us feel happy. But I felt I could relate the themes to my own life and come up with a range of goals that cover all aspects of my life.

I thought I would make a series of posts, over the next year, so that you can experience my Happiness Project with me, and perhaps even join me and do a project of your own. I will do a post at the beginning of each month, detailing the monthly theme and the goals I am aiming towards, and then at the end of the month I will do a brief wrap-up about how I have got on over the last month and reflect on how the project is going.

So we have now come to the end of February and I thought I would have a quick chat to you about how I’ve got on with this months goals, which were as follows:

Send a random text to a friend who is struggling at least once a week

This is something that comes fairly naturally to me, as I’m a big texter! But I wanted to try and be the instigator, rather than just replying to texts already sent to me, so this month I have tried to be the one to send the first text to people a bit more and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. Obviously there is always room for improvement, but I’ve tried really hard to contact people I know are having a more difficult time, and it’s nice to know that I have hopefully brightened their day a little bit. It’s definitely something I want to continue over the next few months.

Do an RAOK at least once a month

Again, this is something I tend to do fairly regularly anyway, but I wanted to motivate myself to do it on a regular basis. For those of you that don’t know, RAOK stands for Random Act of Kindness, which basically does what it says on the tin! This month I managed my RAOK by making a happy scrapbook for a friend going through a difficult time. I really enjoyed making it, putting thought into what might make someone else happy, and it was lovely hearing from my friend when she received it. She told me she really liked it and that it really cheered her up, so I would say that is mission accomplished!

Every week write down two things I like about myself

I must admit this has been the most difficult task this month, but then I knew that would be the case. I’m just not very good at finding good things about myself! But I really have tried. A friend sent me this cute notebook and I decided that I would use it for this task, so every weekend I sat down and tried to think of two good things that I liked about myself. Some weeks I couldn’t think of any, but I tried not to put too much pressure on myself and just came back to it another day, and overall I’ve managed to write down a few things. I definitely want to try and keep this idea up because it’s really nice reading back through the notebook when you’re feeling low, and just think what it would be like to have a completely full notebook!

I’ve also had a go at keeping up with my other goals from January, which has been going fairly well, although I’m still yet to tidy out my wardrobe – I’ll get there one day!

So there we have it. Three different goals I’ve worked on this month. I’ve really enjoyed having some goals to focus my energy on and I’ve found doing it this way a lot more achievable than if I just set myself some general New Years resolutions. If you would like to take part in your own Happiness Project and happen to take any photos as part of it, please use #JensHappyProject so I can check out what you’ve all been up to!

Have you read The Happiness Project? Do you have any goals you’ve achieved this month?

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Let's Sock it to Eating Disorders

As some of you might already be aware, this week has been Eating Disorders Awareness Week. I’ve been having a think about what I could write about this year because I didn’t really just want to write out my story again like last year. A lot of stories that you read talk about being at a low weight, which can obviously be part of having an eating disorder, but it doesn’t have to be the case. So, I thought I would talk about what it feels like to have an eating disorder while being at a normal or higher weight.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been extremely underweight and physically compromised, but for the last couple of years I have maintained a healthy weight and have also gone into the overweight category. Yes, when I was underweight things were hard, but from the perspective of someone who has been both over and underweight, I actually feel that being at a normal weight is a hell of a lot harder. I just want to reiterate that this is only my opinion, and I’m sure you will find many people who don’t agree and say that being underweight is a lot harder. But this is just how it has been for me.

When I was underweight I felt very numb. I was using my eating disorder as a way of blocking out all the difficult thoughts and feelings that I didn’t want to experience. I spent my life consumed by thoughts of food, weight and body image, so I didn’t have the capacity to concern myself with anything else. It was hard. I’m not going to lie. These thoughts consumed every single moment of my life. Even when I was asleep I dreamed about food. I would wake up in sheer panic because I had dreamt I’d eaten a chocolate bar. I couldn’t even get away from my eating disorder by sleeping. It was exhausting, draining – food had become my whole life. I couldn’t work, socialise with other people or study because I was so focussed on my eating disorder. But to some extent that was acceptable. I was ill and people could see that. They didn’t expect me to do normal things because they could see how much I was suffering and that I desperately needed support and treatment.

Restoring my weight was hard. Forcing yourself to eat when every single part of you is telling you it’s wrong is a massive struggle. But to some extent it didn’t really feel real. I spent every weekday in hospital with other people in similar situations to me. All we focussed on was our eating disorders. Eating in the hospital didn’t feel quite so hard (although it definitely wasn’t easy) because we were being told that that was what we had to do. It was like being given permission to eat, and I shifted the responsibility off my shoulders and onto my treatment team. I could also justify eating to some extent because I was being told I was underweight, so therefore I could allow myself to eat because I could convince myself that my body needed it.

I vividly remember hitting my target weight. I already knew I’d hit it before I stepped on those scales, but seeing that number really threw me. I stormed out of the room, ran downstairs and outside and just cried. Reaching that number, to me, meant I was fat again. Looking in the mirror I could see my body expanding in front of me. Then what made it even worse was having to sit up for lunch. I was fat, so why did I have to still eat? I’d done what they wanted me to do; there was nothing they could tell me now to convince me that I needed to continue to eat. This was when things got really hard. I didn’t look ill anymore, so people assumed that I was better. What they don’t realise is that weight restoration is only the very beginning of recovery. The real recovery can only start to happen when you’re at your target weight.

I was still weighing myself regularly, restricting and compensating, making myself sick when I felt I’d eaten too much or eaten the wrong thing. But no-one could see that and the turmoil I was going through in my head. Unfortunately, fairly soon after reaching my target weight I was discharged from the day hospital. Something that I have never really understood is the fact that, at hospital they place so much focus on the fact that your eating disorder is not about weight, yet when you reach your target weight you suddenly lose all this support. This reinforces the idea that the only way to get the support you so desperately need is to be underweight. Saying that though, I have friends who are seriously underweight who are now being denied help, so it doesn’t always work like that.

Losing the support of the eating disorder team sent me into a downward spiral. I was making myself sick a few times a day and my self-harming went downhill rapidly. I took several overdoses because I just couldn’t cope with all of these thoughts and feelings that had come flooding back after reaching my healthy weight. I couldn’t focus on losing weight anymore, or obsess over calories and food as much as I had been, so the floodgates opened and all the reasons that had led me to develop an eating disorder in the first place were there again, but 10 times worse. I started to hate the eating disorder team for what they had done to me – they made me fat and made me feel all these horrible, horrible feelings again, but had abandoned me to deal with things on my own.

Something I really struggled with was comments from other people. Being told you’re looking healthier, happier or well is just translated by your eating disorder so all you hear is people telling you you’ve got fat. I’ve even had people make comments about the fact I’ve put on weight, which obviously reinforced my awful thoughts about the weight gain. I’ve now been discharged from my eating disorder team for 18 months, and I can honestly say it hasn’t got any easier. I might look happy and healthy, but inside I feel incredibly broken. It’s an incredibly lonely place to be, looking fine from the outside but falling apart inside. I was actually referred back to the eating disorder team recently because I admitted I was struggling and desperately needed some help, but they turned me away, saying I had been given more than enough help and that, because my weight is normal, I don’t meet the criteria to qualify for help any more. It was a massive kick in the teeth. Asking for help is hard enough, but then to be told you’re basically too fat to have an eating disorder is devastating. If there’s one thing I would like people to take away from this post, it’s that weight is purely a symptom of an eating disorder. You can have an eating disorder at any weight, and your weight does not determine how deserving you are when it comes to recovery. Everyone deserves to be helped and to recover, regardless of their weight and other symptoms. Eating Disorders can be beaten with the right help, and we need to fight together to get people the help and support they deserve.

Has anything I’ve written about spoken to you? Do you have any experience of eating disorders that you’d like to share?

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Sunday Spotlight - 1st March 2015

In my life this week…

Sock it to Eating Disorders

This week has been Eating Disorders Awareness Week. If you’re a regular reader you will know that I have a lot of personal experience with eating disorders, so I decided that this year I wanted to do something fun to raise money for Beat and also awareness of eating disorders. Beat have a slogan, which is ‘Sock it to Eating Disorders’ so I decided to try and get as many people as possible to post a funky sock selfie on social media and donate via my JustGiving page here. I’m absolutely bowled over by people’s generosity and so far we’ve raised an amazing £160 for Beat. If you’d like to join in, then all you have to do is post a sock selfie on social media with the hashtag #jensocksittoeatingdisorders so I can see your sock selfie, and if you’d like to donate anything to Beat, just do it via my page.

Tilt Table Test

Earlier this week I had an appointment with my Cardiology consultant, who wasn’t very happy that I’ve been waiting 6 months to have a tilt table test. He said he would refer me up to St George’s in London, but then a couple of days later I got a phone call from my local hospital, asking me if I could get to an appointment at 7.30am on Saturday morning – someone had obviously had a word with them! OK, so 7.30am on a Saturday morning wasn’t ideal, but I went nonetheless and had my test. Basically, for those that haven’t heard of a tilt table test, you are wired up to a load of machines and strapped to a special bed. Your blood pressure and heart rate are then monitored while you lie down for 10 minutes, before the bed if titled up to a 70-degree angle and they continue to record your observations. My resting heart rate was around 90bpm, and when they stood me up it went up to 170bpm (average should be about 60bpm!) so the consultant doing the test confirmed that I have something called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (or POTS for short). I’ve got to go back and see my usual consultant to discuss how the condition can be managed, as apparently it’s not particularly easy to treat.

Crown and Glory Hair band

You’ll probably know from my previous unboxing post that I’m a big fan of the brand Crown and Glory. On Friday I decided to wear one of my new hair bands – this burgundy number covered in little white hearts, and I got so many compliments about it. It made me feel really girly and definitely cheered up an otherwise boring and dull day. I’m excited for my next Glitterati box to come this month now!

What has grabbed your attention this week? I love hearing about people’s new discoveries and you may end up sharing something that makes it onto my list next week!

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