Planning

Hi ladies,

I know y’all are probably sick of me mentioning the ‘plan’ word by now, but I seriously can’t emphasise the importance of tackling a pro-ana way of life, in this way.  The level of restriction and restraint we need to incorporate into our daily lives requires a huge amount of dedication and commitment and sometimes we can get so overwhelmed by the intensity of it all that we kind of come undone. I’ve been sharing my own little approach to my Ana lifestyle with a couple of ladies in my group this week and so I thought I might post my ideas here too so that anyone who needs to can perhaps glean some inspiration. 

As much as we might think we spend almost all of our day thinking about calories and food and the best way to shrink our asses, our thoughts as a whole are generally quite frenetic and non-specific. They're buzzing around in our minds at hundred miles a minute, along with all the other stuff we have to keep track of on a day by day basis, which can leave us a little fraught and overwhelmed by it all. 

Do you keep a journal/diary? If you do you might be familiar with a scenario a lot of journalers find themselves encountering every now and again: journaling block. Basically, it's when despite having the overwhelming urge to put pen to paper, vent, confess and spill forth all your innermost thoughts / feelings / fears / worries / hopes / dreams, when it comes to actually writing it all down, something seems to be getting in the way. There's something preventing you from connecting to your media and like a novelist who might get writers block, you just can't seem to be able to get anything down on paper. In instances like these, journalers use journaling prompts; writers use writing prompts. These can be anything from subject specific questions or queries, to random suggestions as to what you might like to write. The idea is that by honing in on once specific subject, you force your brain to focus. You take it out of the swirling, cacophony of craziness that we all have going around in our minds 24/7 and give it something to concentrate on. I know, it sounds like some weird, hokey, tree hugging, hippy crap, but trust me this really does work. (And no, in case you're wondering, I'm not selling anything or trying to get you to join any crazy scientologist-esque cult, I'm just passing on something I think my help you!) 

You see, you a lot of you Anas remind me of me. The way you use very descriptive prose when you write, and they way in which I can almost see how you would find yourself getting caught up in your writing at times and almost get carried away with it! It's exactly what I do. Why use four words, when you've got about 12 other ones, which are so much more elegant, eloquent, descriptive and mellifluous right?! :-) And if you are like me, then the one thing that will help you get yourself properly back on track, is planning. METICULOUS planning.

I'm talking about working out a schedule that will take you from the second you wake up to the moment you go to sleep at night. Does that sound crazy? Well, it might do but if you think about it, the thing that can cause the most issues for someone trying to lose weight, is your own mind. It will play tricks on you; it will tell you you're hungry, tell you to eat chocolate, tell you "just one won't hurt" and myriad other annoying little lies in order to get you to break your fast and fail at your diet. And the more time you have on your hands, the more likely you are to hear those little voices and end up finding yourself in the cookie jar. 

So, the best defense against this is a comprehensive plan/schedule of your day/week. 

Do you have some sort of spiral bound notebook? If not, then try and get a hold of one. Either that or a ring binder with a refill pad of lined paper and dividers. I like large, thick, chunky, spiral bound notebooks with narrow lined paper. Narrow lines because my handwriting looks smaller and neater and you fit more on the page; spiral bound because you can then stick photos, thinspo, food labels, receipts, scraps of paper into them and the spiral binding will allow the size of the contents to expand whilst remaining neat. And I always recommend using a real paper notebook and pens for your 'plan' journal (as opposed to something you create and maintain on a computer) for several reasons: firstly, computers may be fantastically convenient when it comes to being able to store a huge amount of information, typing it neatly and checking your spellings. That's great when you want to create a database or write a report or compile a CV. But it's not necessary for a private and personal journal. 

You need this journal to be something personal to you. It needs to be something you can carry around with you at all times and write in absolutely ANYWHERE. It needs to be completely convenient, easy to open and refer to and simple to update. It's going to be helping you run and record your life for the next few months so it needs to be able to go wherever you go and not rely upon a power source or the five minutes you might not have, to boot it up every so often. 

It also needs to be something you can connect with on a personal level and research has shown that journalers who use a real, analogue, paper and pen style of journal, find it easier to connect with their media, confide in it more easily and develop an intense symbiotic relationship with it. It's all very well being able to harness the online capabilities of weight and fitness trackers, converting all your progress into graphs and recording your calorie intake on a pie chart, but it's so....impersonal. You need something that you're going to find easy to use and impossible to do without. 

Take your time finding the perfect journal first. Head out into town, hit the stationery shops or have a look online. I'm forever scouring eBay for random journals and I've got about 20 stashed away for future use! The important thing is you find something you love, something you'll like the look of, enjoy writing in and feel connected to. On top of that get yourself a few different pens of different colours, and any tape or glue you might need to affix items inside. Once you've got your journal, its time to start accounting for every waking second of your life. Reading through the many emails, posts and comments of y’all, I can see that when some of you first started to develop Ana-esque behaviours and habits, the recording and calculating side of it came really easily. That's good. That shows  that your analytical mind works well counting and planning - two things you're going to have to do a lot of! 

First of all, I would draw up a timetable. Like the one's you would get on the back of academic planners at school/college. Break up your entire day into half hour slots. If you work or you're at school, pencil in the hours that takes up first. You'll work on coping strategies to use during those times later. What you're left with should be anything from a couple of free hours in the morning before you leave, to up to seven hours of free time to yourself, once you get home, with perhaps an hour for lunch and the occasional 10-15 minute break am and pm. 

Then decide what time of day you will have breakfast, lunch, dinner. I'm not saying you have to actually eat during those times, but you may live with family or friends or with a partner who will expect you to observe those times. Also, even if you are tackling these so-called 'mealtimes' alone, you want to be able to plan for them in advance. So pencil those times in too. Next, set yourself a time to get up at every day. This is going to require some discipline, but by starting your day with a strictly adhered to plan will reinforce your own self discipline and set you up for the rest of the day. Try to plan to get up a little earlier than you would like. So if you're used to getting up at 7.00am, plan to rise at 6.30am every day. Not only will you be giving yourself and your metabolism an extra half hour a day to fire up and burn off calories, but you'll be giving yourself a window of time in which to go about writing a morning entry in your journal. 

I don't know how you'll want to work it out yourself, but I like to have my journal sectioned off: schedule at the front, pages of supplements to be taken, exercise routines, lists of music or books to check out and then finally the journal part itself. Every morning, when you wake up, I want you to set out your mission statement for the day. Take a few minutes to describe what the day looks like, how you're feeling, what you dreamt about, your mood and what you have to do that day. Set out the number of calories you are going to eat that day, the exercise you are going to take that day and any rewards for good behaviour you are going to work towards achieving. Later on in the day, right before you go to bed, write a quick summary of how the day went. How many calories you actually consumed, how much exercise you actually did, any extra stuff you did and whether or not you allowed yourself a 'reward' for what you achieved. 

Getting into the habit of morning and evening entries will help you to start the day with focus, remain accountable throughout the day, and take stock of everything later on. It will help you to see patterns emerge in your eating habits. You'll notice when you find yourself feeling more energetic, more tired, hungrier, suffering more cravings, moody, elevated etc. When you see how you react to certain days, you can also plan for those in advance. It forces you to connect with your Ana lifestyle choice and helps keep you on course. 

You'll also need to work out some food menu plans. I like to have about 10 possible diet plans on hand. I try to mix things up a bit and have a slightly higher number of calories on some days to avoid going into starvation mode, but for the most part keep as low as possible. I have menu plans ranging from 400 cals a day to 800 cals a day and they all have a number. It's easiest for me to say, start off on the first day of the month with menu plan number 1. The second day will have menu number 2 and so on until the tenth day when I will eat menu plan number 10. On the eleventh day I go back to the start and have menu plan number 1 again and so on and so forth. 

There might be an occasional element of choice incorporated into some days (maybe a choice of fruit, flavour of cup a soup, option of certain herbal tea, type of low cal cereal bar etc....it's not essential, but you might feel better if you have a small element of personal choice available to you. Some people work better when they don't have to think about it at all. It's up to you and what works for you. By knowing in advance what you're going to have to eat (and of course, making sure that you shop for these items and have them on hand) you will take away the 'danger zone' thinking where even the merest consideration as to what you 'could' 'might' or 'should' have to eat, throws you into a weird spiral of cravings and longings and ultimate disappointment. 

Make the decisions far in advance and then put it out of your mind. Eat only when you're scheduled to and even then see if you can leave a little bit behind (there's a bit of a psychological advantage to be gained by forcing yourself to always leave a small amount of every meal behind. By not giving in to your basic human desire for food and not succumbing to hunger, you're exerting control. Do this at every meal and you're not only strengthening your own resolve, but to the casual observer you look a lot less like some starving, famished ED-head when you 'easily' eat 'just' enough, but don't feel the need to clear your plate. 

Now you might have a partner (boy/girl friend) in your life who you need to spend time with. I know you can't be expected to slot seeing that person into one particular time every day with no flexibility. Not only will it not be convenient, but you're in danger of scaring them off as they think you're a nutty control-freak OR that you don't care enough about them to be available more often or with any degree of spontaneity. 

Instead, you should arrange your evenings into blocks of time. Say from 7pm - 12pm. These blocks are to be filled with varying activities, such as exercise, online blogging, thinspo collecting, watching uTube vids, reading (books like Wasted or Thin) and downloading music. Any of these can be swapped around when you need to incorporate time with your partner or friends or family into your day. Just make sure you still get your exercise and your journaling and your plans for the following day done too. 

You need to be spending quite a bit of time researching whilst being Ana. You should be setting aside blocks of a couple of hours a couple of times a week, trawling the internet for resources to help bolster your mission. You should hit places like Amazon and get hold of as many books as possible that have Ana themes to them. Amazon is great because you can pick up 2nd hand copies of books in great condition, from their Marketplace sellers, for as little as 1 cent / 1p (not including p&p). You'll all be more aware of other online bookstores close to you, but I use Amazon for their price and selection. By getting a hold of as many books as possible, you're making sure you always have something you can take with you that will keep your mind focused and that you might learn a thing or two from. We can all learn from each other and some of these books can be just the help we need to get our backsides in gear. 

You should also be checking out supplements from health food stores and sports nutritionists. Whether it's vitamins & minerals to make sure your skin, hair, teeth, nails and bones are in good condition, or if you're using diet pills like Maximum Lipotropics, Ephedrine, Phentermine or whatever, do your research. Find out what works. See where you can get hold of it. Scour other blogs for tips and tricks. Keep them in your journal planner. Use them too. Factor them into your daily schedule. 

Hunt through health food shops and supermarkets and specialist stores for more inventive, original and unusual very low calorie foodstuffs. Hoodia lollies, miso soup, Quorn bits, flavoured water...find them, buy them and work them into your plan. Are you creative? Maybe you can put together a thinspo video for uTube. If like me you're crap at that sort of stuff, just hunt through online channels to find all the good pro-Ana videos and programmes about eating disorders there are out there. Bookmark them and have them close to hand on your computer at all time so you know where to go to refer to the properly inspiring stuff when you most need it. 

When you know you're feeling low and craving bad stuff, sometimes it might just take a quick peek at that ‘Thin’ documentary on HBO. I also like some of the Dr Phil's. There's one called ‘Scary Skinny’ or something and there's a girl called Nicole and her teenage cousin on it. They're both slim and look lovely and their bone structure is awesome. They're great thinspo. Its also good to have reverse thinspo to hand too. (See that previous blog post for more info). Sometimes it takes a picture of someone and how awful they look to make you stop yourself reaching for that chip! 

It might also help you if you have parts of your body that you really hate. Take photos of these bits. Print them off and put them in your planner. Refer back to them whenever you're feeling a bit 'bleh'. You can also take it so that in a few months time you can take another and see the difference. Just keep sticking them in your plan. And that's what you need to be doing. 

I've really only touched on the basics of how you make the plan work for you, but you get the picture. Basically, it's all about taking away those moments of decision / indecision from day to day life that can often go one way or the other. You start the day feeling ok but when faced with the choice of rice cakes or donuts, well....sometimes the damn rings are in your mouth before you've even had chance to mentally add up the calories! 

No. What you're doing is making sure that all those decisions have been made well in advance and all you're doing is following instructions. It really does work and can be quite liberating to not have to think about what you're going to have to eat. Get all your daily menu plans worked out in advance. Then work through them one after the other and then when you've had them all, start again. Get your whole day planned out in advance so you know where you're going to be and what you're going to be doing at all times. Have little activities that you can have on stand by to fill in your time whenever something falls through. Keep your body and your mind occupied and you're less likely to stray. 

And remember to write in your journal every morning and evening. Start you day with a opening statement and state how you think your day will go. End your day the same way with an entry to encompass your feelings as to how the day went. Record everything. Write it all down. List all the things you see that you like, list all the books you want to read, list all supplements you want to take, snip out excerpts from magazines, clip thinspo pics and stick them in too. STICK EVERYTHING IN THERE! 

As you can see, the idea is to be accountable for every aspect of your life. Plan everything, record everything and accept responsibility for everything. Understand that everything you do, eat, drink is a choice and when you plan for those choices and make them in advance, you're much more likely to make better choices and stick to them too. So what do you say? 

Are you up for getting with the 'plan'??