Hello you lovely lot. It’s been a while, huh? You may have noticed (or not) that I haven’t done a blog post for Not Plant Based in a few months, and the time has now come for me to explain why.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Not Plant Based has saved my life. Partly in the sense of allowing me to stop neglecting my body and recover physically from the effects of having an eating disorder for many years, but mostly because Not Plant Based has given me a voice and the freedom to just be myself, free from ridicule and self-doubt.
If you’re a loyal reader of our blog, you’ll know all about my struggles with food. You’ll know how I was tormented by bulimia and binge eating disorder throughout the majority of my teenage years. I’m not going to go into the details of my story now, as it’s already written on this blog multiple times, but I am going to use it – and my wanting to move on from it – to explain why I’ve finally decided to part ways with my blog-baby, Not Plant Based.
This blog over the past three years has been beyond a space for me to vent my life’s annoyances and mental health woes. It’s been my therapy, my chance to stamp on the loneliness I felt throughout the majority of my life and it gave me a purpose. I always felt useless before Not Plant Based. Like I had potential, but nothing to direct it into, and I lived day to day focusing on the number on the scales because that was the only tangible thing I felt I could manipulate and really make a change to. I’ve never been extrovert, or loud, or the most popular, or the one all the boys fancied in school, but this blog made me realise that I don’t need to be. That I can be strong and funny and real and there’ll be people within the depths of the web who will be able to relate to me and even thank me for being myself. That is a gift I will cherish for the rest of my life.
As I write this, I feel as though I am a little rusty, so please be gentle in the comments. After we wrote our book, I found myself slowing up on writing; something I’ve always up until that point found really easy to do. I began to find our commitment to weekly blog posts a chore, and the thought of trying to squeeze another article out of my mental health story began to make me anxious. I thought that maybe I was just exhausted (I mean, I wrote a book, that’s a lot of words!) but as time went on I realised that actually I have been recovered from an eating disorder for a couple of years now, and the reason why the words were running thin was simply because I’d said all I needed to say. I feel that the book was the perfect end to a pretty brutal chapter in my life, and my heart was telling me it was time for the next. It becomes very difficult to talk about negative moments in your life when you are expected to and when you can hardly remember how it was back then (my eating disorder began 10 years ago).
When I set Not Plant Based up back in 2016, before I even met Eve, alone in my room in London in a house share situation I loathed, I had no idea what it would become. I had no idea it would literally transform the lives of hundreds of people. I had no idea we’d get daily messages from people thanking us because we have been the reason they decided to seek help for their eating disorder, or because we were the first people they could admit to that they had a problem, or because we were the reason they just ate their first slice of cake in years. I had no idea I’d be on the fucking cover of a magazine! Or I’d achieve my life dream at only 25 of having a book published in Waterstones. I had no idea I’d travel across the UK visiting beautiful places and speaking to crowds at Cambridge Union, Edinburgh Book Festival and many, many more venues. All I had dreamed of from Not Plant Based was that I would be able to resolve my own issues with food and be able to live a happy life with a bag of chips in my hand and grease on my chin. I can hand on my heart say I have now reached that point.
I am well aware that there are many people not as lucky as me, and I’m not saying I’ll never experience mental health problems or another eating disorder in the future, but I am happy for now to move on knowing that I have contributed to a space in the scary internet where people can find help for their issues and grow closer to their own recovery. For now, from me, it is goodbye (from Not Plant Based…I haven’t died yet).
So where do I go now?
Fuck knows I guess is the truest thing I can say. I’m currently training to be a personal trainer, as through my recovery I’ve reignited a love of exercise and moving around. You can find me on my personal Instagram account and a fitness one I recently set up (TW: Please note that this is a fitness account, so if fitness posts are triggering for you you might not want to follow) if you’re keen for a stalk. I have no idea where I’ll end up in the future, and honestly I’m happy not knowing. All I know is that I want to write and love and eat and live my life proud of all I have done and excited for what’s around the corner.
I’d like to finish my last post with a thank you. Thank you to Eve for being a legend; I wish you all the best with Not Plant Based in the future and I’m excited to watch what you do with it and all the people you’ll continue to help. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive of Not Plant Based from the very beginning. Thank you for not laughing at me when I said I wanted to start a blog in a world where every article was telling me blogs were becoming obsolete. Thank you for laughing at my shitty jokes and thank you for being my internet friends when I felt like I had no one. You are the reason that these have been the best three years of my life and you are the reason I feel like myself for the very first time.