onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the month “February, 2020”

23 Feb 2020

Freedom isn’t free. And what would I do with a toaster?

Last week I waxed poetic about the amazing freedom that I get from putting boundaries around my eating. This week I want to talk about one of the less savory (though still really important) aspects of having my eating under control.
I feel all of my feelings. ALL of them!
And this week has been a difficult week for feelings. My husband and I not only live together, but we work together and we travel together. And we have both been under a ridiculous amount of stress. Tempers have been running high. We have been fighting about work. And we had an emotionally “frosty” drive home on Friday.
And then a person commented on a post of my blog last week saying, “Talk about deprivation!” And I was frustrated and angry. Because my post was all about how I am *not* deprived in the slightest. And I had to decide if I wanted to respond.
I didn’t. Because this blog is not about being “right.” And it’s not about getting people to do what I do. I’m not promoting an eating lifestyle. I am sharing my experience. I want to be a beacon. I hope I help someone who needs to hear that there is a solution to what they are suffering.
But it’s not like I get a toaster if I convince people to try my way of eating.
Also, what the hell would a person who doesn’t eat bread do with a toaster?
My point is that I felt all of those feelings this week. And more. I did a lot of crying. I did a lot of talking it out with trusted friends. But there was no escaping the reality of those feelings like there was when I was eating sugar and eating compulsively.
The thing about feelings that I learned early in putting boundaries around my eating was that you don’t get to pick and choose. It’s all or nothing. And even when you choose “nothing,” it’s not really nothing. Those feelings still live inside you. It’s just that they are twisted, and corrupted. When I finally put down sugar, I had to feel 28 years worth of feelings. 28 years worth of feelings that spent all of that time bouncing around the echo chamber of my sick, sad mind. And wow did that suck.
So now I have to feel them as they come, one at a time. But I also get to feel them as true, pure feelings. Not warped and amplified after years of pushing them down and in.
There is that saying: Freedom isn’t free. It’s usually meant to be political and patriotic. My experience is that it’s true spiritually as well.
I had to make sacrifices to get this freedom. I’m not talking about giving up cake. I am talking about giving up the numbness that accompanied my eating cake. It may not occur to you that there is a difference, but to me this is not a subtle distinction. It’s glaringly obvious to me.
So I am happy, joyous, and free. But in order to be that, I also have to be sad, frustrated, humiliated, angry, or any other feeling that comes upon me.

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16 Feb 2020

Something I cannot recommend enough

In the past months I have been shifting the way I frame things in this blog. I am talking less about weight loss and more about food. I don’t want to play into fat phobia with this blog. I want it to be about recovery, not judgment. About emotional and spiritual wellness, not physical size, or “health” or moral “shoulds.”

Because giving up man-made sugars, and most grains and starches, and weighing my food, is without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me. The fact that I am not “on a diet” is so important. I eat delicious, decadent meals. I enjoy every bite. I’m a weirdo about it too. I totally talk to my food. I clap excitedly when I am about to dig in. I do little dances in my seat when we have a particularly delicious meal. Like when my husband makes carnitas or when I make bacon lamb burgers. (No. No tortillas or buns. No. I do not miss them.)
I certainly chose my eating boundaries in order to lose weight when I started this journey 14 years ago. But what is it they say about the best laid plans? 
The truth is I did lose weight. And there was a period of time when I was skinny. But life had other plans for me. Plans I didn’t get a say in. If it had been up to me, I definitely would have stayed skinny. But it was not up to me. 
In some ways I am grateful for not staying skinny. Because it let me know how much of my choice to stick with my eating boundaries was based on my emotional and spiritual life. 
If skinniness were the only goal, I would have quit when my weight fluctuated, and I gained weight while eating less. If that were the point, I would have gone and looked for something else. Or I potentially would have said “screw this” and gone back to sugar. Because if I couldn’t “control” my weight with this “extreme” eating plan, I might as well let it all go and eat cake. (Spoiler alert: I did *not* say “screw this” and go eat cake. And thank the heavens!)
The gifts of my eating boundaries are about how I feel about myself. I like and love myself inside and out. Not because I am a certain size. Not because I fit into a specific, socially acceptable category of feminine beauty. But because I am free from cravings and compulsion. Because I have a clear head. Because I spent my life lying and sneaking and hiding food, and lying sneaking and hiding all sorts of other things as a result. But being deeply honest about my food allowed me to be deeply honest in all areas of my life. And that honesty is freedom. And because honoring my body by caring about what I put into it has allowed me to honor my body is so many other ways. To quit smoking. To exercise regularly as a practice. To drink water and limit caffeine, and floss daily. And to like and love what I see in the mirror. Even with all of the flabby parts, and the parts with stretch marks, and wrinkles and spots. All of it. And that complete love started with me getting control of my eating, which was out of control for so much of my life. 
And I have to tell you that I don’t know a lot of people who have that. And I don’t think a lot of us exist in the world. Not even women who are thinner and younger and live in more socially acceptable bodies than I do. I think even most of them still don’t have the kind of deep-rooted peace around their bodies that my chubby, middle-aged self does. 
So keeping my eating boundaries may have started out being about losing weight and being thin, but it is not that anymore. Now it is about extreme self-love. Loving all of myself exactly as it is. And that is something I cannot recommend enough. 
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09 Feb 2020

Nothing to prove. Not even to myself.

Toward the end of last year, my husband and I found a leak in our closet from our bathroom. And because of it, I had to throw away the majority of my clothes due to a serious mold infestation. And now that we are going on a trip to Florida next month, I realized I needed a summer wardrobe. 

When I quit sugar 14 years ago, I did not lose all of the weight that I would at first. It definitely went in phases. But eventually I was quite skinny. And in those years of thin to really skinny, I bought a lot of clothes. I bought a lot of really cute, eclectic, crazy, fashionable, fun clothes. And I looked amazing all the time.

And when I quit smoking 7 and a half years ago, I gained 30+ pounds. And since then, my weight has fluctuated. Sometimes I have been thin, sometimes not so much. And in that time I bought a lot of clothes. To fill in any gaps in my “skinny” wardrobe. 

At first not being skinny anymore was devastating. Now it’s just life. 

So a lot of my clothes didn’t fit the same way they did before. Some didn’t fit at all and got given away. Some fit better the more I filled them out. Some fit less well. But there were a lot of them. And they were stylish. And I enjoyed looking in my closet for something fun and funky to wear.

And then they were moldy.

But I have to admit there is something so freeing about getting rid of all of those old clothes. Because I am different. I bought so many of them when I was single. When I was a New York City girl. When I had different hobbies and different goals. And frankly, when I was more willing to be uncomfortable for beauty.

There were very few things it hurt me to throw away when we went through that moldy closet. (Though that Black House White Market long cardigan with the granny square cuffs and collar hurt like a bitch to get rid of.) Because they were for a woman with a different shaped body, and a different shaped life. 

It was nice to be able to make new choices and choose different styles in this past month or so. I am less likely to want my skirts particularly short or my heels particularly high. I am leaning toward more classic styles with a funky twist, as opposed to really funky stuff. (Though, to my husband’s dismay, I still love all things strapless. He calls them tube tops and they are not his favorite. But I have a really spectacular neck and shoulders. And luckily, he doesn’t have to wear them.)

But I guess this is the point for me. When those clothes were in my closet, I felt in some ways like I had to live up to them. They were purchased because I could fit into whatever style I wanted. I could be wild and daring and not be given the side eye or be shamed, as happened a lot to me when I was fat. I am not saying I wore clothes I didn’t love. I loved them! They excited me. I felt beautiful and gorgeous and stylish in them. But they were also a point I had to prove and a statement I had to make. 

Now, I have a different statement I want to make. That my 42 and a half year-old body is totally perfect. It’s beautiful and healthy and I can dress it however I want. And I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Not even myself.

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02 Feb 2020

Two roads diverge, and I took the one less traveled by

I have been thinking a lot lately about fat acceptance and addiction. How they intersect, and where they diverge. 

As a person who grew up fat in a fat phobic society, I have a lot of experience with the shame and humiliation that comes from not being able to control so many things, especially my eating, the size of my body, and the way I was treated. I was miserable growing up because of all of those things. 
I am addicted to sugar and carbohydrates. Certainly man-made ones. But also some natural ones. I don’t eat honey, or maple syrup, or agave nectar. Yes they are natural. But they are pure sugar, and I am an addict.  I don’t eat potatoes. I don’t even eat sweet potatoes. When people think it’s “over the top” that I don’t eat sweet potatoes, which are also natural, I remind myself that there was a time when I was binge eating sweet potatoes. Sometimes 5 or 6 at a time. Sometimes cooking 2 at once thinking surely that would satisfy me, only to put 2 more in the oven immediately because I was not satisfied. And then again. 
Perhaps once upon a time, if I had never become an addict in the first place, I would have been able to eat sweet potatoes with impunity. But that ship sailed long ago. And now I cannot eat them without diving back into food hell. Because for me, eating sugar and carbohydrates is hell. It is filled with lies, betrayals, paralysis, shame, desperation, and all manner of self-loathing. It’s not just a sweet potato to me. It is the door to my worst self.
When people talk about the moral neutrality of food, I have mixed feelings. Not for the people eating it. But for the people making it. Because corporations know what they are doing when they make addictive foods. They have hired scientists. They are doing it on purpose. They are *designing* foods to be addictive. Because a food company could not continually increase profit if we only ate food for nourishment. Money dictates that we, consumers, need to eat as a hobby, as a distraction, as time-waster.
Fat people get the shaming, but we can see the results in other ways. A 17-year-old boy is permanently blind because he only ate chips and French fries. And nobody took it particularly seriously because he “wasn’t fat.” 
I know that not everyone who is fat is a food addict. I know that not everyone who is thin is not. 
I have heard people in fat communities talk about “sugar truthers.” It’s a kind of mocking term, meant to bring to mind conspiracy theorists and tin-foil-hat-wearers. The idea that sugar is a drug is ridiculous to a lot of people. 
Or that if it is a drug, so what? I even saw one person say that even though sugar was like heroin in the brain, love was like cocaine in the brain, and nobody wanted people to give up love. 
Except we would expect them to give up cocaine. And heroin. And if you spend enough time in 12 step rooms, you know that some people need to deal with their addiction to love too. Or at least to unhealthy and obsessive relationships that occur like love. 
I sometimes hear about eating disorder programs giving people sugar and junk food, telling them not to be afraid of the cupcake. That in moderation, a cupcake is just a little treat. 
I, personally, need to be afraid of the cupcake. Not because it will jump down my throat of its own accord. But because if I choose it once, I will lose my ability to choose. Because I am physically incapable of moderation. That is what addiction is. And whether the people in those programs are skinny or fat or somewhere in between, if they are sugar addicts, then they have also lost the capacity for moderation, and that program is probably harming them, not helping them. 
So what scares me is that sometimes it looks to me like the food industry has exactly the people it is using and harming carrying its banners! 
“There is no such thing as bad food!”
But for some of us, there is. For *me* there is. There are foods that make me miserable and crazy. 
I am not against harm reduction. I wish the best for everyone, whatever that “best” looks like. But I am grateful that I got abstinence, personally. Because I am free. Because I am deeply content. Because I love my life. And I don’t believe I could have that with my addiction in my life. 
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