Meet Laurie
Creator and Author of
Wife, Mother, Grandmother
Ladies, please drop what you're doing and read about this incredible ladies journey to the wonderful place she is today. No spoilers but trust me when i say she's has seen the extreme end of lacking Body confidence. Read on to hear about Laurie's journey
Hi Everyone
It’s my
greatest pleasure to be here today sharing with you my journey (and
it’s been a long journey) Gaining confidence and body positivity
and learning to like, sometimes love myself a little.
Readers often
think that because we share our photographs online sharing our
passion for fashion and beauty that we are full of confidence and
have a huge ego, when that is often not the case!
There are so many
things that I would like to change about my body. Being taller would
be top of the list. Alas not a lot can be done about that, and you
will always find me in heels! But do let me tell you that I have
learned through the years that trying different styles, I feel
comfortable being titchy me.
The thing is about being a shorty is that even half a pound can make
a difference and I do eat quite healthily.
Arms. I hate
mine, I have tried weights, different types of exercise all to no
avail. So, most times I wear a cap or short sleeve rather than no
sleeve. It looks passable and I’m happy with that. It’s just
trial and error finding resolutions if you can’t fix your problems.
Let me tell you
about a journey I travelled from the age of Eighteen.
Even back then in
the early eighties the pressure was there to have the perfect figure.
OK, not anywhere near the amount of social media pressure that there
is now, but you didn’t even have the fuller or should I say average
sized female model back then. The skinnier the better in the media’s
eye.
I feel sorry for
the young girls of today. The pressure for them is huge. My daughter
posted this on Instagram and I thought it really struck a good
statement
Anyway, back to
my story!
When I was
Eighteen, I was really on the heavy side. One day a family member
came for a visit and commented on how large I had gotten. I can still
remember that moment clear as day. Totally upset, I vowed to starve
myself until I was the perfect size.
And that’s what
I did. Starve myself. I won’t go into all the details of how I hid
it from my parents. I would be writing a book if I told you the whole
story. But after about six months of barley eating anything the
weight started to fall off. The compliments started rolling in and I
felt amazing. What happened next you ask? I wanted to carry on
feeling amazing and for the comments to continue rolling in, so I
carried on starving myself, thinking that a decent meal would make me
look huge again!
I can’t tell
you when the point of no return began. I often think about this, but
for the life of me I can’t remember. The whole starving myself
disaster completely took hold of me.
To shorten the
story, I ended up hiding myself in baggier clothes to hide my wasting
away frame. I knew and that’s all that mattered at the time. My
little bird like skeletal body now weighed 5 stone 9lb. I ended up
collapsing and of course my parents inevitably found out. They helped
so much to try and get me to recover, but I still had a lot of days
struggling with just trying to eat. I just thought they wanted their
“fat” daughter back and decided to become Bulimic instead.
Terrible huh?
My turnaround for
me came when one day I was having to take so many laxatives the pains
in my stomach were just too much to bare. Just like that lightbulb
had lit up to start my Anorexia another lightbulb lit up for me to
stop.
But that’s not
the end. And a lot of the time I did still eat like a little bird,
but I started to get ill. From my stupidity of not eating for so long
I totally broke my immune system and started to get allergies. Foods
that I had eaten all my life I could no longer eat. I have spent many
years I’m 54 now and still each year I have to see different
specialist about my allergies that grew and grew and grew! Touch
wood, it’s been two years since my last new edition which was
Aspartame.
I got my payback!
Now I can’t bloody eat anything! I got what I wished for basically.
Something I have to live with for the rest of my life all because I
was a silly girl trying to be what the media say’s we should be.
If I could eat
all the pies I would. And I’d be sticking my fingers up to anyone
that was to judge me! There are so many things that I would do
differently if I could, but getting on to the body positivity, you’ve
just got to let go and learn to love yourself. Eat healthily,
exercise a little, learn what accentuates your good bits and hides
your bad bits. I now have my own fat rolls and flabby arms, but I’ve
just learned to do the above. I make do the best I can and I love
myself more now in my fifties than at any other time in my life. I
too did the MandCo body positivity challenge with Rachel a while
back. Sticking my fingers up to society and telling the world that
I’m loving my time in my fifties and not scared to show off my
body. (It was hard but very liberating!)
It’s funny
because I have never written about my time of being anorexic on my
blog! When Rachel kindly asked for my input, it just seemed right.
Sorry Rachel!
I may not have
the perfect body, but I have learned to love it.
Thank you so much
Rachel for having this time on your blog. I will leave my media links
below, just in case they want to visit an over 50 woman trying to
make the most of herself!
Find me at:
RTH: Laurie please don't apologise, the more we talk about these things the more we enlighten ladies on the journeys we all go through daily and how we should learn to love ourselves just the way we are.
Thank you for talking about your extremely personal journey. Its been a privilege to have you here and i think i can speak on behalf of everyone when i say, Laurie, you look absolutely gorgeous!!
