onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the month “December, 2019”

29 Dec 2019

Another year of my heart and mind at peace

Ah. The week between Christmas and New Years is always a weird time. Everything seems to run together. It doesn’t seem to follow the usual routine. But one thing doesn’t change for me. And that is my food. And for that I am grateful.

Today I almost forgot to write this blog. Yesterday my husband and I drove the 10 hours from Oklahoma to the South Suburbs of Chicago. I need to go grocery shopping, because I usually do it on Saturday but couldn’t yesterday. I have food for the next couple of days so I may decide to cook later in the week. My routine is way way off.
But I still only eat 3 portion-controlled meals a day, every day. With no sugars, grains or starches. Even on my 10 hour drive I had my meals with me. 
I do not worry about gaining weight over the holidays. I do not worry about eating or drinking myself sick over the holidays. I don’t worry about my food or my body or my sanity at all over the holidays. That part is taken care of. 
I do still want to write about weight-loss and fat phobia and feminism. I want to really delve into my experience of the complex societal pressures and personal experiences  of being fat and a woman. But it is still swirling around my mind for me. So I will save it for another week. I will get to it some time next year. In the mean time, I am going to ring in yet another new year with my eating under control and my heart and mind at peace. 
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22 Dec 2019

Wishing you a Self-care Christmas

If you have been following my blog for a while, you know that I am not huge fan of holidays. This year was the first time I have participated in Thanksgiving in about 10 or so years. Thanksgiving is a food holiday and I don’t eat like that anymore. Never. Not for holidays. Not for any reason. And it was fine. But I’m not itching to do it again any time soon.

And while I do generally participate in Christmas, I don’t particularly care about it. I am not religious. I don’t have children. And I am rich enough to buy what I want when I want it. And I have modest enough tastes to not want that much, or that much that is particularly expensive. So presents are not high on my priority list. 
For me, many things changed when I got my eating under control. I loved Christmas as kid because I loved presents. And as an adult because I loved pecan pie and Christmas cookies. But as a grown up with my eating disorder taken care of, I really have to be in it for the relationships. 
I am not saying I won’t eat well. Today we are having guests over for lunch and I will eat delicious homemade Italian sausage that we made fresh yesterday! Yum! And I have broccoli cooked in butter and olive oil and hot sauce. Plus roasted peppers and Italian giardiniera. I will not be deprived. 
But I also won’t be numb. That is a good thing. A great thing. But relationships take energy. They take listening and being present and being available. And that can be exhausting. 
I know that in the world I occur as an extrovert. I am funny and charming. (And humble.) But all of that takes something. It stirs up feelings and drains my batteries. And without food or alcohol to dull a lot of those feelings, it can be overwhelming. I like to be quiet and alone. I like to do nothing and say nothing, a lot. 
I am very much looking forward to lunch today. I don’t want to imply that I am not. But it’s always worth it for me to note my limitations. I can’t get by on the sugar high of cookies and the caffeine high of coffee, like I once would have. Though I am probably going to be drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee. 
Getting my eating under control is still the best thing that ever happened to me. But it changed things for me. Not just food. It changed the way I live my life. It meant self-care, not just in my eating but in my lifestyle as a whole. Like knowing my limits and resting.
So Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Wishing you a week of peace, love and joy. From you to you. And from me to you. 
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15 Dec 2019

If you don’t like Lizzo, don’t look.

One thing about writing a blog that is so personal is that sometimes I need to stew on things for a while. I need to sort my feelings and my thoughts. A lot of things, as they relate to fatness or society’s view of fatness, can be particularly loaded for me.

I have some things brewing in my head that I have not gotten a handle on. Things that are so emotional for me that I don’t want to write about them this week. Things around what it means to *choose* to lose weight in a fat phobic society. And how it reflects on fatness to love having lost weight. To have zero regrets about not just having my eating under control, but to also be in a smaller, easier, more comfortable, and more socially acceptable body.

But then this week, while I was trying to sort out these very personal feelings, about some very personal choices, I ended up hearing Joe Rogan and Michelle Wolf talk about Lizzo on his podcast and I was reminded again how being fat is vilified in this society. And how the argument for vilifying it is that it *isn’t* vilified, or at least not enough. 

Lizzo, of course, is a fat, black rap artist who has had a year very much in the spotlight. She regularly dresses provocatively, dances in sexy and suggestive ways, and enjoys herself and her body. She has fat, black backup dancers who also dress and dance provocatively and enjoy themselves and their bodies. In other words, she is unapologetically fat and black and encourages fat blackness. And while this clearly speaks to a lot of people, as her popularity suggests, there is a lot of backlash.

On his podcast, Joe Rogan asks (in all seriousness, which would make me laugh if it weren’t so angering) why Lizzo is allowed to show her butt, while thin women (women *he* would actually want to see) are not allowed to. I would like to know where this magical land where Mr. Rogan resides is, that loves it when fat women show off their bodies and doesn’t like it when thin women do. Because I want to go there and be worshipped as the goddess that I am! 

This idea that thin women are not loved and admired for being thin is ridiculous. It’s blatantly false. Look at any tv show, magazine ad, calendar, literally anything depicting women, and tell me that half-naked to naked thin women are looked at with scorn. How many people have been upset by Victoria’s Secret fashion shows with skinny women’s butts on display. 

And then Joe Rogan made the comparison of Lizzo showing her butt to a baboon showing its butt. I wonder if he has ever made the same comparison when a thin woman has shown her butt. Is he comparing Victoria’s Secret models to animals? I’m going to guess not.

And the other thing that makes me angry is this idea of “confidence” as a code word when dealing with the discussion of fat bodies. Confidence, when used in this context, really means “nobody actually wants to see that so you must be confident if you’re going to show it anyway.”

And that seems to be the general through line. Certain groups (I’m looking at you straight men) have decided that what they want to see, or at least what they claim they want to see, is the most important thing. That they are the valid voice of truth and beauty. But the actual truth is that lots of people want to see that. All sorts of people. 

So here is the thing for me. When I was fat, there were lots of straight men who were attracted to me. Lots of classically good looking, thin men. And they pretended they weren’t in public, and treated me like shit, because they were embarrassed to be attracted to me. So I am going to guess that there are a lot of straight men who are attracted to Lizzo. Not by her “confidence,” but by her actual body. The one she’s using to dance and sing and be joyful.

And here’s another thing. Straight men are not the only people whose attraction counts. Many of the people who are attracted to Lizzo are going to be women. Lesbians count. They have opinions and tastes. They have money to buy the things that are being sold. And many are going to be straight women who have been told that they are not sexy. But they look at Lizzo and they think she’s sexy. So they can maybe start to look at their own sexiness. They count too. 

Here’s the deal. Everyone counts. And just like I do when I see underwear models that I find too skinny, too filled with silicone and botox, and too plastic, Joe Rogan, and all of the dudes who don’t want to see, and all of the women who are shocked and appalled, can turn it off, change the channel, not look.

I am still unpacking a lot of thoughts and feelings about where I fit in a fat phobic society when I go to great lengths to both have my eating under control, and keep my weight at a place that is comfortable for me. But do not tell me that thin women have somehow gotten a raw deal because one fat black woman is unapologetically loving her fatness. I will not be buying what you are selling.  

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08 Dec 2019

Self-care is a virtue. Thinness is a state of being.

When I realized that I was a sugar addict, I got to understand that being fat isn’t a moral issue. And that what I eat isn’t a moral issue. And that was a great relief to me. 

When I was fat, I had a lot of mixed up thoughts and feelings about fatness and about myself. I thought that I was “broken” and my body was “substandard.” I thought that I was morally deficient and that if I were “good enough” I wouldn’t be fat. I thought that having a fat body was a sign (and a neon one at that) that basically said “this girl is unworthy.”
But then I started to understand that there were foods that I had a reaction to. Foods that, once I put them in my body, set up a craving for more. Not a craving. A CRAVING! A desperate need. I felt like I might die if I didn’t eat more. And I would live in deep pain until I did eat more. So I ate more. And was fat, and I hated being fat. And I hated not being able to stop eating. And I was overwhelmed with shame *all of the time!* There was literally not a waking moment that I wasn’t aware of how “wrong” I was.
For all of the non-weight related benefits of having my eating under control, when I gave up simple sugars and carbohydrates, and put boundaries around my eating, I did it to lose weight; to not be fat. And it worked. It was not easy, but it was simple. And in the beginning, I had a few years of being skinny. And they were lovely. I enjoyed them. It was fun to not only not worry about my body, but to have it admired. (OK, sometimes I really did not like the attention, but often I did.) 
Over the years (13 years, 11 months and one week, give or take) my weight has fluctuated. I have not been skinny like I was for a while there for the past 7 or so years. But the definition of fat in the US has also changed in the past several years.
See, fat Kate would have wished desperately to be the size I am now. A straight size L. Sometimes XL depending on the cut. (I have a big butt.) And the world that fat Kate lived in would have said that L or XL wasn’t fat. But in the world today, “fat” keeps getting smaller and smaller, while real human bodies keep getting bigger and bigger. And thinness is being seen more and more as a moral issue. Thin people (women) are “good” and anyone (any woman) who is not thin is now fat, and also “bad.“ And who qualifies as thin keeps getting more and more exclusive. And harder to achieve. 
I am very happy in my body, which can climb stairs with ease (a very real anxiety for my fat self) and jog 2 miles 5 days a week (it would not have even been an option for fat Kate to be anxious about.) I am happy naked and in my clothes. I am happy because I am not a slave to food. And in not being a slave to food, I can also not be a slave to public opinion, or cultural standards. I do what I do. I stay in my lane and mind my own business. And I don’t have to worry about who thinks what about my body. *I* think it’s a miracle!
I want to continue to devalue thinness in my world and in my thinking. I value my eating boundaries, not for keeping me “socially acceptable,” but for keeping me free of food obsession, for keeping me active, for keeping my comfortable in my body and in my skin, for letting me not be constantly thinking about what other people are thinking of my body.
I want to continue to dismantle the ways I have internalized “thinness as a virtue.” I also want to note that when I was skinny, besides having my eating under control, I was a pack-a-day-smoker. Since I quit, I have never gotten back to being as skinny as I was then. So part of my thinness was due to abusing my body. Hardly virtuous. I want to be virtuous by caring for my body with good food, good exercise, good sleep, good hydration. I want to remember always that self-care is a virtue. One I want to cultivate. Thinness is a state of being, and it has zero moral implications or ramifications. 
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01 Dec 2019

Sometimes, just sometimes, food is not the point.

Today is going to be quick because I was already supposed to be in Oklahoma yesterday, but we didn’t leave. Because we don’t really want to leave our beautiful house! So I am eating breakfast and prepping for a 10 hour drive. All of my food for the day (and tomorrow just in case) is cooked and in Tupperware. And I am enjoying one last meal (for now) at my dining room table that I love so much.

Friday night we had people over. Friends who are family and family who are friends. It was a great night with lots of laughs. And I didn’t eat what everyone else did. 
My husband and our friends’ son made everyone food I can’t eat. The main dish had rice in it. And then they made potatoes on the side. So I ate one of my “junk food” dinners. Mostly Pork rinds dipped in salsa, and sausage. Nobody cared. When you’ve been doing something for over a decade, the people who have known you for a while run out of questions.
My husband was happy to make something he thought would be delicious for our guests. And at this point, the eating part of being with people is not important to me. 
If I want to really savor my eating experience, which I do sometimes, I want to eat alone. But on Friday, I wanted to laugh with our friends. To hear their stories and tell my own. I still love to eat, but the eating is not the joy of get-togethers for me anymore. It’s the relationships that I can be in and available for, because my eating is under control. 
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