onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the month “July, 2023”

30 Jul 2023
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Coming around again (as long as I am not dead yet)

In my life, both before and after I got my eating under control, my weight has fluctuated. I have lost a significant amount of weight a few times. And a thing that happens every time is I have to figure out what to do about clothes. 

Over the past 4 months I have been losing a lot of weight relatively quickly. Right now, the only things that really fit me are some workout clothes and a pair of linen pants that I bought recently, and a handful of dresses I already had with elastic waist and/or top bands.

I don’t want to buy more clothes right now. I don’t want to spend the money until my body and I find some equilibrium and I can be relatively sure that they will fit me for more than a couple of weeks.

But also, it’s not fun to get dressed in clothes that don’t fit anymore. Even if they don’t fit because I am getting smaller. 

I loved my body in a U.S. size 14. I felt beautiful. I felt sexy and womanly and wonderful. I wasn’t self-conscious or embarrassed. I loved my food,  and my eating was under control. And I love clothes. So I had a lot of clothes that I loved that fit me. 

This weight loss was not planned and it is not really important to me. But it does have these very real consequences. And they can take up a ridiculous amount of space in my head. I can worry about the money and the timing. About whether I should get rid of my size 14s, or keep them in case I need them again in the future. About where to shop and what I want. About how to teach my Amazon account that I am no longer the size it thinks I am, so it can stop recommending everything too big. All while knowing that I am not even going to do anything about it for now anyway.

When I was eating compulsively, whether I was fat or not, I was constantly thinking about my body. CONSTANTLY! It was a program running in the background all the time. But since I got my eating under control, when my weight is stable, I don’t think about my body almost at all. All of my “body crazy“ goes dormant and I just sort of float through life content to be in my vessel. 

But when my body is changing it is on my mind almost as much as before. It’s not as traumatic, and not as dramatic, but it’s there and it’s intense. 

In my life I have a handful of recurring lessons. Things that I have to tackle and retackle, growing a little at a time. And one of them is learning to have a loving relationship with my body. So this too shall pass. And then come around again. And I suppose as long as I am not dead yet, around yet again.

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23 Jul 2023

The slow crawl to spectacular

I saw a pulmonologist this week and it could not have gone better.

A little over 2 months ago, I got sent for a lung function test. Afterwards, a doctor called me and told me that my lungs were fine and to stop taking the medication I had been taking. And I was upset. Because my lungs were very clearly not fine.

It was more of the same thing that I had always felt about doctors growing up. That nobody was listening to me. That the relationship was about power and submission. And that I was always the small one expected to submit. They were the doctors. They knew everything. I knew nothing.

But I was feeling panicked and crazy and scared. And I called a friend crying and she told me that she had to learn to advocate for herself with doctors. That it was a skill. And that I should figure out what I want for myself. Which is so not how I have ever thought about doctors.

So first, I took the doctor’s advice, knowing I already had a pulmonologist appointment, and I stopped taking the medication. And then I started taking notes on my lung function every day in my journal. And how often I had to take a different medication (fast acting instead of long lasting.) And then I psyched myself up to duke it out with this pulmonologist to get back on the medication that had been helping. Because no matter what that test said, there was something wrong!

But I walked in and he looked at my test results – the same ones from months ago when they told me my lungs were great – and he said I have a very specific kind of asthma. That the tests look great because I seem to be at the highest level of lung function, but that it’s misleading because actually, there is too much air in my lungs. I am getting air trapped in there and then breathing more air on top of it. And then he asked me how I felt being on the original medication and I told him “spectacular.” So he put me back on it. I didn’t even have to make the request. 

But wait. There’s more! He then told me that this particular kind of asthma often goes away on its own and that we will revisit it in 6 months, but there is a good chance that this too shall pass. 

Then he said I could take a blood test and they could see if I had certain markers for asthma. But I told him that I have a really hard time with blood tests and that if it was necessary I would but I would rather not. And he told me that it was not necessary at this point. So we wouldn’t do it.

Before I got my eating under control, life happened to me all the time. I was powerless. I was just dragged along. And I didn’t even realize that there was another way.

When I put boundaries around my eating, I got clarity. I got responsibility. I got the ability to ask for help. To learn a new way to do things. 

But also, I just want to note that it took 16 years of having my eating under control plus a health condition to actually go to the doctor. And the help and guidance of loved ones to begin to understand how to navigate that world. So I’m not saying it’s quick, I’m just saying it’s a slow crawl to “spectacular.”

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16 Jul 2023

Less bacon…but still a life beyond my wildest dreams

I was talking to a friend this morning who does what I do with food, and we were talking about how when we were eating compulsively we could never listen to our bodies because we were stuffing them too full with food for them to really tell us anything.

Over the past couple of months I have been losing weight quickly. And since I only eat 3 weighed and measured meals a day, I was eating a lot of high fat proteins like bacon and pork rinds to satisfy my hunger. It allowed me to feed myself enough calories to stave off the gnawing stomach pains. And that really helped. Until last week. When it became clear that my body didn’t need that much fat every day anymore. And it didn’t want it anymore either. 

Over the past few days I started eating more leaner proteins with my meals along with my fatty ones. I am still me and I will always eat bacon. But in smaller quantities for now. 

It’s a miracle that I can hear what my body has to say. That I knew to eat heavier, and now I know to dial it back. That my body is an ever changing vessel and it needs different things at different times and that if I pay attention, it will make it clear to me what it needs. And that I am not shoving it full of so much junk that I have numbed myself and smothered anything it had to tell me.

When I keep simple sugars and carbs out of my body, I keep a clear head, which lets me listen to my body and my life and make choices accordingly. And because of that I have a life that I could never have imagined before I got my eating under control. Truly a life beyond my wildest dreams.

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09 Jul 2023

Ready to be of service

I have been reminded this week that if nothing changes then nothing changes. It’s a saying I heard a lot when I first got my eating under control. If I don’t do anything different, I won’t get different results or a different life. 

I spent much of my young life wishing things were different than they were, especially my body. I wanted to be thin and I was not. But also, I wanted to be thin, while I simultaneously wanted to eat whatever I wanted. And I wanted both of those things to be true at the same time. And any time I did lose weight, I was eating smaller quantities of the same foods, until I was thin enough, or just not invested enough anymore, to go back to eating the way I wanted to. Which led to me being fat and hating my body again.

But this was true for lots of aspects of my life. I used to be late a lot. If it should take me 20 minutes to get to work, I would leave the house 20 minutes before work. And I would only make it on time about 2/3 of the time. And even if I said I would try to be better, I didn’t really *do* anything different. I just got angrier at traffic or the subway or my job. Like the “trying” was just wishing harder to be on time.

But I eventually got my eating under control because I changed the way I ate. I stopped eating simple sugars and carbohydrates. I started weighing my food. I only ate 3 meals a day with nothing in between. And I only changed because other people had gone before me and told me that if I did what they did, I could have what they had. A body and a life that were different in their joy and freedom than I had ever experienced before. And they were right. I ate differently, I thought differently, I lived differently and I got a different life.

And lately I’ve been changing again because, again, I have been making changes. I have been going to the doctor after 20 years of avoiding it, and I am taking care of my health. I have changed my workout, so my body is changing. And I signed up for The Craft Yarn Council’s Certified Instructors Program to get certified to teach crochet. So I’m acquiring new skills and techniques and learning how to make my passion for making into a shareable product. 

And all of these changes, that already feel pretty big on their own, are combining to make me feel like maybe I am on the precipice of something even bigger. Perhaps something new and exciting that I haven’t even considered before. 

I don’t know what happens next. But I am kind of thrilled. I am ready to be surprised! I am ready to be tickled! But maybe most importantly I am ready to be of service.

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02 Jul 2023

I’ll cry instead

I am a crier. I have always been a crier. And for most of my life it was a source of shame. It was not ok o cry. I was supposed to be strong. I was too sensitive. I was wrong, and I needed to stop crying. But I could not. I have never been able to just stop crying. It has never been a thing that I could just have a handle on. Never.

But in the past 17 years I have had to cry less and less. The longer I have my eating under control, I less I need to cry. I am generally much less unhappy. And generally have much less stress. For myriad reasons. Plenty of them things like meditation and exercise. But also getting myself into fewer bad situations because I’m not lying and cheating. I don’t act like an addict anymore.

But I actually love to cry in safe situations. More than love it. It’s probably one of my favorite things in the world. I am obsessed with novels. And I realized years ago that I am much more likely to give a book 5 stars if it makes me cry. Especially a particularly emotional and cathartic sobbing. (My poor sensitive husband. I always make sure he knows that it’s the book, just the book! But he still doesn’t actually like to see the crying.)

And then I read an article this week that said that crying is the nervous system’s way of regulating after “fight or flight.” And that it sends out all of these really good feeling brain chemicals to calm you down. And that all made a *lot* of sense to me. And shifted the way I think about certain things.

It gave me an inkling as to why I have never been able to get control of it. It made me recognize that I was sent into that fight or flight response a lot for most of my early life. Easily and regularly. And that probably for exactly that reason, I was kind of addicted to the chemicals of crying. Also, that I generally do it less now that my eating is under control because it’s much rarer for me to be in a position to go into fight or flight mode. And it makes a lot of sense to me that I still want to be getting all the brain chemical rewards without the actual danger.

I made friends with my crying a long time ago. People hate it. I know that. But I had two choices. Hate myself for not being able to control it, or get a sense of humor about it. I choose the humor. And the safety of novels.

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