Non-polish! A health story and a weight loss milestone.

*ESSAY ALERT :p*

The last few years have been difficult for me, to say the least. At 16 my health and mood started going downhill, and I was eventually diagnosed with mild depression, which was re-evaluated as severe depression only a few months later (yes, it got a lot worse very quickly and it was a very dark period of my life), and on top of all of that I was diagnosed with CFS/ME (chronic, debilitating, pretty much life-ruining fatigue). Needless to say, I was stuck in my room for a lot of the last two years of school. Thankfully I pulled through at least somewhat and ended up getting into Cambridge; my first year was pretty awful health- and mood-wise, but my second year started getting better. Last summer, I found out I was gluten intolerant, and discovered myself through trial and error that sugary and starchy foods made me feel like crap in general AND often aggravated my chronic fatigue, setting me up for a day or two of feeling so mentally and physically tired that I couldn't do anything. So I cut most of these out (bye-bye, favourite foods: pizza, bread, lasagne, chips/fries, chocolate (well, I cut down a lot, but won't cut that one out completely :p...funny that the foods that taste the best were giving me so much havoc!), swapping cereal for omelettes, sandwiches for salad with lean meat, and swapping out potatoes at dinner for another serving of different vegetables. A nice side effect of not feeling so damn fatigued all the time was the ability to actually exercise sometimes (bear in mind two years ago I often could not walk a few hundred metres to go to the library at uni), which I am so happy about :) it's still a constant struggle, but I've been doing pretty well and have managed to lose 40 lbs (actually 43 :p)...it's amazing how much ME can make you put on, and coupled with trying to eat my depression away and eating things that I was actually intolerant of, I had gained a lot since starting uni. Now? Almost the same weight I was at 16, and I was only 5'9" then (5'10.5" now)!

(more after the cut)