onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the month “February, 2017”

25 Feb 2017

Dear Pork Products, I love you but I need some space.

My husband sometimes teases me because when he is not around for dinner, I eat “like a four-year-old.” His words, not mine, though I totally agree. Obviously everything is within my food boundaries, but my food boundaries have a lot of room. I don’t have to eat a particularly healthy diet to be within my boundaries. So while I might eat, say, filet minion and sautéed broccoli when I am making dinner for the two of us, I eat homemade sugar-free frozen yogurt, and pork rinds when I am on my own. He calls it “chips and ice cream.” And over the past week my husband had to go out of town unexpectedly, and I spent more evenings alone than I usually do.

And I found that while I was loving my dinners when I was eating them, I was feeling kind of off, maybe even yucky, about them later. Not that I was physically ill. I wasn’t. I was feeling guilty, and I was worrying about my weight.

I believe that I have a physical allergy to sugars, grains, and starches. I believe that when I put those substances in my body, I set up a craving for more that not everyone experiences. That is what makes me an addict. But I believe that there are other aspects to being an addict that stem from, but are not, this physical allergy. And of course, after 28 years of putting those substances in my body, I acquired a handful of those other addiction-based consequences. Some are behavioral, like lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, blaming, and feeling entitled. And some of them are psychological, as in obsessive thinking about food or my weight, or my body-dysmorphia.

I have been able to keep an eye on, deal with, and transform the behavioral consequences by having kept my strict eating boundaries over the years. But the psychological ones live on in me in varying states of dormancy. I don’t think I will ever entirely rid myself of them.

Honestly, I don’t think an extra day or two of “chips and ice cream” had any real or noticeable affect on my body. After all, my boundaries are not just about food choices, but are also about when, and how much I eat. I have strict portion control, whether it’s my “legal junk food” or a pork chop and roasted cauliflower. Even though I might occasionally indulge in higher calorie options, I don’t binge. Ever.

But it still messed with my mind. And that is important to note, because part of having my eating under control is having the ability to see clearly the things that are making me unhappy or worried, and to do something about them. My point is that I may be “allowed” to eat “chips and ice cream” every day, but that comes with consequences that I am not a fan of.

This has happened to me many times in the past 11 years. I stopped eating sugar-free, calorie-free condiments. I stopped baking with soy flour or TVP as my base. I cut down on, and eventually gave up, soy nut butter. Even in the past six months, I started substituting an egg for 2 ounces of fatty meats like sausage, because it didn’t feel good that I was eating so much. I didn’t quit eating sausage, just like I am not entirely giving up pork rinds. I just cut back because it was making me sick in the head. I was thinking about my weight all the time.

I’ll be blunt. I haven’t noticed much of a change in my body in the months since I cut back on sausage. But it’s not about my body. It’s about how I feel about my body. And I feel better about my body when I don’t eat as much of certain foods.

Is it purely psychological? Maybe. But I have found that there are psychological things that are worth working through and getting over, and there are psychological things that are better to simply accept and adapt to. And frankly, limiting the amount of sausage or pork rinds I eat just makes more sense. I want to save the real spiritual work for my relationships with myself and others, not my relationship with pork products.

P.S. I still love you pork products.

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18 Feb 2017
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A nice reminder that I used to be kind of crazy, and now I’m kind of not

I started writing 3 handwritten pages every morning, just stream of consciousness. It is not a diary. It is not a story. It is simply meant to get thoughts trapped in my head out into the world by putting them on a page. It doesn’t have to be neat. It doesn’t have to make sense. It is simply another form of meditation.

It’s a practice that comes from a course/workbook called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I did this course from the workbook with a friend more than once when I was in my 20s. And I always hated the morning pages. I would buy the smallest notebook I could, and I would fight so hard against this particular practice. Sometimes I would just write, “I don’t want to do this” for the whole three pages. Sometimes I wrote, “I don’t [expletive] want to do this” for the whole three pages.

Now, I write them in a regular sized composition book, and the words just flow. They are not a burden. They are not difficult. I have thoughts. I get a chance to organize them every morning by getting them out in no particular order. Sometimes I write about my terrible handwriting. Sometimes I repeat the same banal observation several mornings in a row. It doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be read.

On an average day, I don’t think of my mind as a particularly calm place. I don’t necessarily take note of how different I am now compared to how I used to be. But taking on this practice of stream-of-consciousness writing to get my head clear has illustrated a few things for me. 1) In my youth, my thinking was constantly cluttered. 2) I did not want to get my thoughts out of my head then because I would have had to look at them, and I already knew I wasn’t going to like what I saw. And if I really didn’t like what I saw, I would have to (gasp!) do something about it. And 3) Since I got my eating under control, my inner life is completely different than it was when I was an active sugar addict and compulsive eater.

I was so filled with shame, fear, and dishonesty that I couldn’t even just write words for the sake of writing words. I was constantly second guessing myself, all while trying to project an air of having it all under control.

I am sure that part of the clarity that I have now is that I am not high on sugar all the time anymore. I sometimes wonder how I managed to learn as much as I did in school growing up. But so much more of it is beyond the chemical and physiological. It’s spiritual. Not in the sense of heaven and hell, or gods and demons, but in the sense of having a moral compass and the ability to follow it. It’s spiritual in the sense that I have peace, in my head and my heart, because I know what I believe to be the right thing to do, and I have the ability to do it, even when it’s hard or scary.

I lived my life in pain and suffering for so many years, because of my addiction to food and the addictive behaviors of lying cheating and stealing that went along with that. The reason I don’t usually think about it is probably because peace and self-love are my new normal. (Sort of new anyway – 11 years is not an eternity, but it’s not a drop in the bucket either. P.S. The human traits of resilience and adaptability are truly mind-blowing.) But this ability at this point in my life to write my morning pages with ease and grace has been a powerful reminder that I live a transformed life. It is evidence that I have changed, not only outwardly, having lost weight and maintained that weight loss, but also in the ways I think and feel. It is a reminder that I have peace, personal inner peace, even when it feels like everything around me is crazy.

 

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11 Feb 2017

A short little post about no matter what

I have been running around all day and have just finished cooking and packing my lunch for tomorrow and I have 45 minutes until I eat dinner, and then go with my husband to dinner with a friend. I, of course, will just have a diet soda or an herbal tea, since I will already have eaten dinner. I have more errands in the morning before a 6 hour drive in the afternoon. And I just realized I didn’t write a blog. And wow do I not want to. I want to plead “special circumstances!” 

Obviously here I am. So it’s getting done. And I am grateful to know somewhere inside me that it will get done, because I have made choices and commitments. But a lot of times I grumble about it in my head.

I don’t want to do things. Kinda ever. I don’t want to wake up and jog before dawn. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to go to the store. I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to be with people. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to eat. Wait. Strike that one. But just that one.

But you know, I always love doing those other things when I do them. Even my jog, which I dread every night because it is sometimes painful, is often not painful at all. And can be fun. And painful or easy, I always feel good about myself when it’s done. But I go to bed at night assuming tomorrow’s jog will be a painful one and dreading it. It’s the same with writing. Sometimes it’s hard, and I’m bad at it. And sometimes it’s good and it’s fun. Often it’s fun. But I sit down to it like it’s a chore.

I stopped eating sugar, and put boundaries around my eating because doing things based on whether or not I wanted to was killing me, physically and spiritually. So I was willing to try anything, even having no such thing as “special circumstances.” And because I’m an addict, when I made that choice I got a taste of what it meant to choose pain, temporary pain, but still pain, in the hope of a more sustainable pleasure. I’m saying withdrawal is a bitch. But of course it was worth it. And it made me think that other painful things might be worth doing too. Other bothersome things. Other annoying things. They also might be worth doing no matter what.

So here I am with a short little post about no matter what, and it’s dinner time. And having done it, even under “special circumstances” makes me feel good about myself. 

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04 Feb 2017
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My cache flow problem (or I’m not really a hoarder. Mostly)

I have a tendency to keep a lot of food in my home. Way more than I need. Not in a wasteful way. In fact, I have such strict portion control that I throw away very little food. I basically know how much fresh produce, dairy, and meat I will eat, and I buy an appropriate amount. (Okay, maybe a little more if it’s cheap and can be frozen.) I don’t make a lot of impulse buys at the grocery store. If I do, it’s probably for my husband. And it’s usually chocolate peanut butter cups, so I know they will get eaten.

It makes me feel safe to have an excess of the non-perishable staples I eat. The few times I was under some sort of severe weather watch, and people were rushing out to stock up on basics, I was already stocked. But I especially tend to overbuy when I am feeling emotionally vulnerable, when I am scared, or when my life is chaotic and unpredictable.

Let’s just say that in the past 3 months or so, I have acquired a lot of food. But now, I have to get ready to leave this apartment and it is time to use up that overabundance of food. And it makes me a little uncomfortable.

Part of the reason I think I hoard food (sort of hoard…it’s not spilling out of my cabinets or anything) is that it makes me feel like even if everything goes wrong, I can keep my food boundaries. And that is the most important thing in my life.

At 30, I ended up homeless for a few months. I slept on people’s couches and used their kitchens, and just sort of dealt with being homeless. It was a weird thing to ask people to help me, and also make a point that if they were willing to do it, they could not touch my food. The “good girl” inside me thought this was ridiculous. In my head I could hear my grandmother (the less nice one) telling me that beggars couldn’t be choosers. And there I was literally begging. I could hear her asking me who I thought I was. Telling me I was awful big for my britches. But repeatedly, I swallowed my pride twice, once to ask for a couch to sleep on, and once to ask that my food be left alone. And people were amazing. They were generous, gracious, supportive and loving. Nobody seemed to think twice about my having caveats.

And one of the most important things about this story is that those food boundaries were exactly what kept me sane in one of the most stressful times of my life. I was worried all the time about my future, and how I would make enough money and find a new home. So the one thing that made me calm, the thing that was predictable and unchanging, was my food boundaries. It was something I didn’t have to make decisions about. It was an area of my life that was not up in the air. It kept me grounded. It was a foundation for my life and a sanctuary from my anxiety. So having more than I need is like tending to that sanctuary.

But there is also reality. Like the reality that I am not going to cart an excess of frozen butter, Italian sausage, and pork tenderloin 1100 miles over three days.

What is important for me to remember is that keeping my boundaries is a choice that I make new every day. It doesn’t matter how much food I have on hand at any given moment. It is a matter of what I am willing to do to keep my boundaries in any and all circumstances. I don’t rely on that excess. I simply enjoy it.

So the next few weeks will be an exercise in moderation and frugality. The goal will be to buy less and use what I have so it doesn’t get wasted. But I will tell you this, I am still going to be traveling with a few cans, bottles, and jars, because even reality has a little wiggle room for a neurotic girl like me.

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