It’s strange to think about my biggest struggle with living a healthy lifestyle, because I suppose, I’ve never ever had a healthy lifestyle. I suppose when I was a baby or a toddler then maybe I was healthy but since I’ve been eating solid food I’ve had serious issues with food that I’m only just coming to terms with. In short, I can’t eat lots of different types of foods including all meat, all fish, all fruit, all veg and many other things. Clearly, this is seriously restrictive. Surprisingly though, it didn’t appear to have a major impact on my health. It was my social life that it really interfered with, in particular, eating out or at friends houses. I simply couldn’t eat normally, and often, after trying to force myself to eat something I didn’t like, I would vomit. So it was a choice of being rude, being seen as fussy or vomiting at the table. None of them were particularly appealing options. Many people, including my parents, labelled me as fussy. It was more than that. This wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t me just disliking certain foods. I seriously had a problem in which I couldn’t eat certain foods, and if I tried I would most of the time vomit. Around age 15 I became aware of how appalling my diet was. Luckily, I had had no real problems because of it, although I was often ‘up’ and ‘down’ due to sugar rushes from the junk food I ate instead of healthy foods. Although I became more aware of the problems I suffered, I couldn’t see a way to change. It is only over the last year I have really been trying to change my diet. I now suffer with binging, purging, starving and restricting but one day I hope to be healthy. I am slowly incorporating new foods into my diet and over the past year I have introduced quorn, spinach, eggs, soup, and brown/granary bread into my diet. These are the main milestones I have reached and they have helped me be able to eat with friends, at their houses, at my house and at restaurants. It seems silly, only having four new foods, but these foods have changed my life and shown me that I can slowly introduce new foods into my diet. It might be very small steps but it is a step nonetheless and I’m proud of myself for attempting to change. I am lucky to have certain supportive friends and many inspirations, in real life and online, who help me realise how beneficial a healthy diet may be. I sometimes feel so lucky. I have problems with diet but I could be in a much worse condition. After eating such an unbalanced and unvaried diet for so long, many other people would have suffered serious health issues. I, luckily, have not. I feel so lucky because of that, and I feel I owe it to myself, to continue improving my health and looking after my body, even if it does sometimes feel like one step forward, two steps back, as long as I am moving, I am getting somewhere!!