1kg lighter, but apart from that... NORMAL!!!

Sitting in bars eating ice cream and drinking beer, going back to the hotel with M, having a "deep conversation", falling asleep, being woken up by J, N and P crashing loudly into the room later on with some of the girls, everyone going down to the girls' room on the floor below, some of the boys smoking on the balcony (not Ben!), irate teacher striding down the corridor, knocking on the door and giving them a massive telling off while standing there in his underpants... And that was just one night. Ben might have returned 1kg lighter due to bad meal planning (not his fault), but apart from that... NORMAL!!!


This, as you can imagine, is music to my ears.

Not once, it appears, did Ben feel left out of the crowd or disorientated from everything that was going on. He got stuck in and had a fabulous - if exhausting and pretty sleep-deprived - time in Krakow.

The meal planning was terrible. The meals in the cheap hotel (breakfast and dinner) were inedible from what I hear, and this is a genuine, non ED-fuelled impression. So they all went into town and did what teenagers normally do i.e. mess around eating this and that, double ice-creams, some pretzels, chocolate, sandwiches, beer, that kind of thing.

Ben did eat a proper meal on Thursday lunchtime when some of them went to an Italian restaurant. And the previous night when they went bowling and the rest of them ate nothing in particular, Ben bought something from MacDonald's because he knew he had to eat. And Ben who rarely drinks alcohol had another beer.

So it didn't surprise me when the scales showed a 1kg loss. We are already working on that, so don't worry... ("It's good in a way, Ben, because it's showed you just HOW EASY it is for you to lose weight in a couple of days if you don't eat properly. I know it wasn't your fault and I know you did your best to eat what you should; but it shows how quickly you could lose weight if you were sick at any time or if there's any other reason why you can't eat in the usual way.")

But what's so brilliant about these few days in Poland is that Ben was more NORMAL than he's been for three years. Remember it's now exactly THREE YEARS since the anorexia first began to show itself, during the summer vacation of 2009 - the summer when Ben's exercising and "healthy eating" went extreme and he completely cut himself off from his friends, an isolation that was to last for years.

So this trip to Poland makes me happy.

I only wish he'd remembered to take some photos with the camera I loaned him for the trip!