Kairos

There are two types of time: Chronos and kairos.

Chronos is the minutes, hours and days. The clock face, the routines the schedules. It is the time we all live in.

Kairos is metaphysical. It is God’s time. A moment, a destiny.  It is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘the opportune moment’.  It is kairos right now for a special announcement that I have to make.

I have launched a new website called Love Yourself Slim.

It is a self help blog around the subject of emotional eating, disordered eating, self esteem, body image issues and spirituality.
This website has been burning in my heart for a decade. I’ve been healing myself for 9 years, and I finally feel strong enough to know that what I have been doing has worked, but that I feel confident in teaching it to others too. I can say with assurance that the steps I have taken to rid myself of spiritual baggage are steps that anyone can take to learn to love themselves and if their problem is like mine- connected to eating, then they can use these steps to find peace with their bodies.

I am finally on my way to ‘slim’ after the biggest struggle I have ever faced. I’ve been overweight my whole adult life – since puberty, when my world was turned upside down. I wrote a blog post for the BritMums website about this battle, called “The hell of ‘comfort’ eating” and you can read all about it here and I have documented my weight loss journey on the JuggleMum blog in these posts: Weight loss – before and during; and Summer body made in winter.

I am still working away to get to my target weight and I know it will take time, but now I feel like I have got my head in the right place. I don’t just mean ‘fired up and motivated’ but I actually mean calm and collected. I no longer beat myself up for eating something off plan. I don’t engage in negative self talk and I don’t indulge in the ‘all or nothing’ mentality that is great whilst you are in the ‘all’ frame of mind, but everything collapses when you inevitably get to the opposite. These days I’m like a boat on the ocean, steering toward my destination and riding the waves up and down. Staying strong and calm in the choppy waters and gliding ahead when the going is good.

My struggles have allowed me to uncover my strength. I now feel powerful where once I was powerless. I did this on my own, trying one thing, then another. Believing one thing, then another, until I found a way that worked. A way of being that meant I could go through my life without this massive boulder on my back, weighing me down. Keeping a shameful secret that I couldn’t hack it and turning to food as my coping mechanism. I have been an emotional eater for 30 years and I am finally in a place where I feel a lot of the things that led me to this state have been healed. It has taken work, and I am currently writing a book to outline the exact things I did and how anyone can do it too if they want a DIY recovery. My new blog shares stories of what I have learned, contains interviews with other people who have had issues with their food or bodies, and is a place where readers can find chronicles to read where they may identify. There are no recipes, diet reviews or exercise plans – it is all about emotional fitness.

JuggleMum is my family lifestyle blog. I have been writing it since 2008 and have loved the way my writing has developed over the years and it has been the vehicle to teach me about web design, SEO, photography, social media and how to manage my blogging work. Through my blog I have met a whole new set of friends across the world, been introduced to topics that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise and watched with interest as this hobby that a few of us had 8 years ago to share our family stories and in my case – be my creative outlet, has turned into a big business that corporate companies and the traditional media are wanting a piece of. I will continue to write as JuggleMum as long as I am a juggling mum. I have a teenager and a pre-teen so there’s still some miles in the site yet! But Love Yourself Slim is my new chapter. I feel that I can reach more people and be of value and service by creating relevant content on that site. It is an acorn right now but it will grow and I hope you will join me for the ride.