I was thinking today about trust, how if you don't trust someone you hold them tight but if you trust them your grasp is looser.

Like say you are in a relationship with someone who had a history of cheating on you. So if they ring and say they are working back late, you pounce. You want to know the wheres and whys and the proof. Even physically you tighten up. Your jaw clenches and your fist balls.

Or maybe you have child who says they are going to a friend's house after school but you find out that really they have been going down the creek sniffing glue. You tighten things up real fast - instead of freedom to roam, you want to know where they are every minute of the day.

But, when you trust someone, the opposite is true. You don't mind your lover spending time talking to an attractive woman at a party because you know it's because he's interested in what she's saying, not her cleavage. You don't mind your child staying out late because you know they are doing the right thing. The rules become looser.

You can leave a lover, dump a friend. If the situation becomes untenable, you can even kick your kid out of home (or send them to military school). Unless you are a siamese twin, you can always remove someone from your life if the situation is bad enough. Mostly we don't though, do we? We forgive, even if we don't forget. We hope that those pleas of 'never again' are sincere. But the option is always there.

It isn't so easy when you can't trust yourself. When you are the one that constantly lets you down. And this, I think is the crux of my worries over the past few weeks. I feel like I can't trust myself. I have a bad history with me.

I huddle like a wife on Friday night, keeping her man's dinner warm just so she can throw it at him as he walks in the door with the hangdog expression on his face and another woman's lipstick on his collar.

So many times there have been the whispered promises in the morning... this time it will be different, this time I mean it. This time I'll live on a salada biscuit and a lettuce leaf. This time I'll do aerobics and weights and jog twenty miles. Every single day.

So many times I've ignored the signs from the past and believed. A history of sloth and greed.

So many times I've been let down. As the bright glow of mornings light fades into afternoon, the resolutions crumble like the residue of a Tim Tam. And a little part of me, the part that wants this more than anything, dies just a little.

I need to rebuild the relationship with me. I need to gain trust. At the moment, if I have a legitimate reason to miss gym for one day, I don't loosen the strings. I don't trust that it is a normal bump in the road. Instead I tighten up. I get stressed and anxious, thinking it's all over. I've let myself down yet again. Even though I've made remarkable progess over the past 6 months, I've lost 16 kilograms and got my health under control and exercised with regularity and got rid of a swag of bad habits, I still don't believe its going to last. One chocolate bar could be the start of the end. One pizza, one block of cheese.

If I can make that leap of faith, to really believe that this change is permanent, then I can start to loosen up. And that is what I need at the moment.