The great thing about impulsively destroying a sofa and impulsively building a bed is that it kept me distracted for pretty much the entire week. I had something to focus on. I was constantly doing something.

But my body isn’t able to keep up with that level of activity. Especially not when Wales is pretending it’s southern Spain again with this heat.

Eventually, the exhaustion sets in. I’ve been in pain for days, and I’ve been forced to sit with the quiet moments while I recover. Or, more accurately, not move too much because I might melt like the T-1000 from Terminator 2.

Quiet isn’t really the right word. Between the fans constantly humming and council estate summers turning into The Purge where everyone gets a bit bitey, there’s plenty of noise***. Yet somehow the noise in my own head is louder. The volume in there is more like a rock concert, except it’s a band playing songs you absolutely loathe on repeat. Honestly, it’s been making me feel a bit bitey.

It certainly hasn’t all been bad, but this post is my brain’s version of its greatest hits.

Might Still Be In That Place

The last time I wrote about my recovery, I said I was having a pysgoden wibli wobli (This is also the Welsh name for a jellyfish, although I much prefer its original name).

Then the heat arrived. I took a break from writing because, honestly, surviving the Welsh weather pretending to be southern Spain was taking up enough of my energy. By the time I came back, I was too busy impulsively demolishing furniture to mention any of it.

There were also a few anniversaries in June that I’d been trying to outrun.

For a while, destroying a sofa and building a bed did a surprisingly good job of distracting me. But eventually, all of those things I’d been avoiding caught up with me. All at once. It’s thrown me more than I’d like to admit.

I’ve also realised I keep getting stuck in exactly the same place. I work incredibly hard to gain weight, but there’s a psychological barrier around my old set weight. It isn’t about how I think I’ll look. In fact, I’d probably look almost exactly the same as I do now.

It’s something much stranger than that. It’s as if my brain has become superstitious about a number.

When I get close to it, it feels as though something TERRIBLE is going to happen. When I think about the last time I weighed that amount, I don’t think about the number itself – I think about everything that happened afterwards.

For years, it was a safe number. Then all of the BAD THINGS™ happened, and somewhere along the way my brain quietly decided it wasn’t safe anymore. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether my eating disorder has always been tied up with my OCD.

I work hard to gain weight. I get close to that number. My brain floods me with memories of all of the BAD THINGS™. I become frightened, overwhelmed, and before I really realise what’s happening, I start retreating by eating less and losing weight again.

The further away I am from that number, the safer I feel.

Logically, I know none of this really adds up. Most of the time it feels as though I’m watching myself react rather than choosing how to respond. I know the number itself didn’t cause any of those things to happen. Unfortunately, my mental illnesses have never cared much about logic.

If anything, knowing the logic sometimes makes things worse because I end up beating myself up for still feeling the exact opposite. I’ve been stuck in this cycle for months now, and that’s probably the hardest part.

This wobble has been different, though. I’ve found myself skipping food and throwing myself into projects like demolishing the sofa because staying busy makes it frighteningly easy to “forget” to eat.

It’s also lasted much longer than my usual wobbles.

Then Heatwave Two (of what is now apparently Heatwave Three) arrived and managed to make everything worse.

Anarchy In the UK

Something really weird happens whenever I’m sedentary. Actually, that’s not quite true. It also happens when I’m too hot. I get THE HUNGER.

It makes absolutely no sense to me because it happens every single time, no matter how healthy I am. My current theory is that it’s less biology and more British culture.

As soon as the sun appears, the entire country seems to sprint towards the nearest supermarket to buy enough food to survive an apocalypse. BBQ meat. Potato salad. Crackers. Sausage rolls. Deli meats. Basically anything from the M&S fridge aisle.

Then everyone assembles what I can only describe as a beige British summer tapas.

The funny thing is these picky plates are always described as “light meals”. Watching British TikTok lately, I haven’t seen one that contains a sensible amount of food. No, suddenly there’s a 2,500 calorie cheese and sausage roll board being called lunch.

It’s incredibly relatable because picky plates are somehow never satisfying. My brain just keeps asking:

“Yes… but where’s dinner?”

So my current hypothesis is that my body has been conditioned to see sunshine and immediately assume it’s Christmas.

Unfortunately, my eating disorder decided this was the perfect time to fight me. Instead of helping, my body spent the entire heatwave wondering where its cheese and ham muffins had gone.

Trying to track my food during all of this felt completely pointless. I’ve written before about how important tracking is for me because I simply can’t eat intuitively, but Heatwave Brain had other ideas.

Then I decided to analyse the damage. One random day I tracked everything I’d eaten. Twenty grams of fat.

Twenty.

Were my cravings for fat? Absolutely NOT.

I wanted milk. More chicken breast. More quark. More salad. More carbohydrates in various forms. Ice lollies. Almost none of those cravings would have solved the actual problem. Twenty grams isn’t “low fat.” It’s very low fat. It’s absolutely ridiculous and NOT healthy at all.

I genuinely don’t know how I managed it. I even thought I was eating loads because I’d had a spoonful of peanut butter and Biscoff biscuits. Apparently my body thinks I need a RIDICULOUS amount of carbohydrates despite barely moving, and absolutely no fat whatsoever.

The protein cravings are new, though. However, if I’d actually eaten everything my body wanted, I’d probably have ended up over 200g of protein in a day. Someone please explain to my appetite that we are not simultaneously training for a powerlifting competition and running a marathon.

All Mixed Up

The heat also caused another problem. I could barely stand up.

Every time I did, I’d end up with a massive headache and feel like I was about to pass out. Add in hot flushes, night sweats and medication that can make overheating worse, and suddenly exercising in a 36°C flat stopped feeling sensible. It started feeling legitimately dangerous.

So I couldn’t do my strength training. When the second heatwave finally ended, I thought I’d get straight back to it. Instead, I spent four hours demolishing furniture, building my son’s bed, and generally pretending I was a removal company.

By the end of that week I was operating at approximately minus seven hundred spoons. With my conditions, I can only physically do strength training twice a week when I’m doing very little else. And before I’d even recovered…

…another heatwave arrived.

It was incredibly frustrating because strength training had been helping me so much.

All of this fed back into itself. I ate more because I was constantly hungry despite barely moving. That frightened me. As soon as the weather cooled down, I reacted by eating less while suddenly doing far more activity.

Now it’s hot again. Everything is chaos.

Once this heatwave finally ends, I know exactly what I need to do. Start tracking my food properly again. Pick up the dumbbells. Get back into my routine. Strength training helps me eat enough – not because I’m “earning” food. Although I’ve never really understood that idea. If I do more activity, I need more energy. That’s just maths.

I absolutely hate this weather. Perimenopause is already giving me hot flushes and night sweats. Adding an actual heatwave on top feels like someone looked at my symptoms and thought,

“You know what this needs?”

“MORE HEAT.”

Actually, there’s one thing I hate even more. The news and weather presenters still insist on calling it a “heatwave”. At what point does it stop being a heatwave and just become… summer? This is the THIRD heatwave. If every July is now hitting 30°C, then 30°C isn’t really a heatwave anymore. It’s just a Thursday.

Where’s Your Head At

I think I’ve realised I need therapy for the BAD THINGS™. I’ve spent a long time trying to outrun them by keeping busy, and it turns out furniture demolition is only a temporary solution.

Unfortunately, that’s not something I can simply decide to fix tomorrow. That’s very much in the NHS’s hands.

The rest of it, though? That I can do something about.

As soon as the sun stops pretending to be a deadly laser, I’m looking forward to getting back into my routine. Tracking my food. Picking up the dumbbells. Having some structure again. I don’t think I realised quite how much those little routines were holding me together until all of them disappeared at once.

Thankfully, it wasn’t all bad.

Some genuinely GOOD THINGS™ happened too. If you’ve been subjected to my recent Instagram spam, you probably already know what I’m talking about.

Those deserve their own post.

Right now, though, I just needed to get all of this out of my head first.

***As I was writing this, several men rode motorcycles down the footpath outside my flat, which really wasn’t helping my argument that council estate summers are perfectly civilised.