onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the category “beauty”

03 Dec 2023

Retroactive love

Someone posted on social media the other day that they used to think they had a high pain tolerance, but then they realized they are just excellent at disassociating from their body.

That is how I got through a lot of the physical pain of being fat. And for me personally there was a lot of physical pain that came with my fatness. Foot pain. Back pain. Period pain.

Well right now, perimenopause is kicking my ass. I am not disassociated from my body anymore and my periods are as bad as they were when I was eating sugar compulsively. I have been in pain for the last few days. And none of the pain medication I have taken has worked well or for any prolonged amount of time. And I am reminded of what a gift it is to live the majority of my time in an easy body. 

I am grateful to be in communication with my body. I am grateful for a relationship with my body based on gratitude and grace. But more than that, I am thankful that I don’t have to live with pain every day. Because for as much as I take care of my body with nourishing food and water and gentle loving exercise, much of that is still luck. 

I used to think of and treat my body like my own enemy. It was fat and I blamed it for being fat. It was always hungry and that was shameful, so I blamed it for the uncontrollable need to eat. It was an easy target, so I blamed it for being the easiest joke in the room. It was the problem. It was the root of all my problems.

I gave up sugar to lose weight so I could get rid of the ugly body I hated and get a new, better body I didn’t think I deserved, so other people would stop being able to target me.

But giving up sugar let me get to know this body. The old body. The same one that I hated and pushed away so it would just work like a machine, even while in pain. I wanted to shame it into perfection, and instead I learned to like it and love it and be grateful for all of the ways it took care of me while I was hating it. To love it for being me. To love it retroactively, all of my iterations and presentations.

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22 Oct 2023

Daily amends to this spectacular body

There is a concept I learned years ago that has changed the way I see the world and people. That when we, as individuals, do wrong by someone, we have one of two options: 1) we can acknowledge it and make amends, or 2) we can refuse to see our part in it, but then we *must* make the other person the bad guy in order to justify our wrongdoing.

I did this to my body for most of my young life. And what it meant was that I started to believe that my body was wrong, broken, evil. I hated it for being fat. I hated it for being ugly. I hated it for letting everyone see my “problems” instead of them being invisible like other addictions. My addiction was written all over my body and it was (and for the most part still is) totally acceptable to judge me for it and let me know that the mere existence of my body was unpalatable.

I often think that if I had not gotten down to a socially acceptable size through crazy and unsustainable eating and exercising practices, and then unsuccessfully tried my hand (and toothbrush) at bulimia, I would have probably just been fat, and angry at life, the universe, and everything about it for the rest of my days.

Bulimia really lit a fire under my ass. I couldn’t look at myself and think I didn’t have a problem anymore. But I didn’t care about anything but not being fat.

Even getting my eating under control started as a punishment. Since throwing up was clearly “after school special level” messed up, I decided I was going to starve my body into thinness.

That was what I planned/expected when I put boundaries around my eating.

Except I don’t starve on my food plan. I eat so much food. Vast amounts of whole foods. And I learned early how to work the system. One apple could be, and is whenever possible, a 1+ pound apple. (This morning’s apple was 14 ounces.) I had an 11 pound honeydew this week that yielded over a pound and a half of melon every morning for breakfast for 4 days. On top of 4 ounces of bacon and eggs and whole milk in my coffee.

I treat my body with loving kindness now. From the way I eat to the way I work out to the amount of sleep I get. I don’t judge my body or my beauty or my health by the size of my pants. It’s a living amends to myself, and this amazing body that has gotten stronger, healthier, and more comfortable as I have aged. And ever more beautiful, not because of thinness, but because of genuine care. Perhaps this is what they mean by growing old gracefully?

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15 Oct 2023

You can take the fat out of the girl (but the damage was probably already done)

I was talking about this blog to some friends who do what I do with food. Many of them don’t read it, or didn’t know I wrote it. So I was telling them the name. But it was hard to hear or understand on the zoom call. So I said “It’s Once A Fat Girl, as in ‘once a fat girl, always a fat girl.’” And this bunch of women who have had their eating under control for years, some for 25 to 30 years, all nodded sagely.

My relationship to food and my body is the defining characteristic of my life, and the filter I see absolutely everything through. Even now, well over 17 years of having boundaries around my eating.

I come from a big (number of people), fat family. And because of that, I can see that even when I was not actually fat (yet), fatness was projected on me.

And then I really was fat.

You might think that being fat in a fat family would mean the family could see the beauty in fatness. But that was not the case. The “pretty” girls were the few thin ones. (Ok, but in retrospect, I was a stunner!)

Also, I was fat in the 80s and 90s when fewer people were fat. I was one of 2 or 3 fat girls in the schools I went to. 

Existing in a fat body took up at least a third of my brain space at all times. And if I was in a “danger zone” of humiliation, (a group of attractive people near by, a group of mean boys or girls, a wardrobe malfunction, an event where eating was expected, sharing seats when your butt hangs over your allotment) it was taking up way more space than that. And it was all terrifying, terrorizing, and exhausting. 

I was once in a conversation on social media where fat people and people with the experience of being fat talked about the fat shaming moments in movies and TV shows we saw growing up that still haunted us. And we all had them. So many of us had the same ones. The casual cruelty towards fat people is ongoing. (Fat Thor, anyone?)

I am grateful for the totality of my experiences. If I had not gotten my eating under control, I never could have begun to separate the fat hatred that I internalized from the real and debilitating addiction to drug foods that I needed to deal with. I was so desperate not to be fat I was willing to give up sugar entirely. And that turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. But why did I have to be desperate to just get a modicum of respect?

Having my drug foods down and having a clear head let me really wrap my mind around how I did not deserve the fat hatred I had been receiving every day all the time. And it let me see how I was also contributing to it, by hating myself. By blaming myself for not being able to stop eating. By showing the people who shamed me that I was properly ashamed. 

The longer I have my drug foods down, the more authentically me I become. And the more me I am, the more capacity I have to see all of the ways I unfairly judged myself, and the better I can love the people in my life exactly where and who and how they are.

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01 Oct 2023

Apologies to my fiercest protector

My mom and I sometimes refer to a study she read about once where they asked men and women what scared them most about the opposite sex. And men said they were afraid women would laugh at them. And women were afraid men would murder them. 

I bring this up because I am afraid of men. No, I am not afraid of all men all the time. But I generally fear men as a group. (Duh.) And when I think about my body, I know that much (no, not all, but a lot) of my fatness when I was younger was a fortress to keep me safe from men. Because, in general, men don’t want to be associated with fat women. 

I have written about my “fortress of fat” before. And how, when I got thin and conventionally beautiful, I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for dealing with unwanted attention, so I built a “fortress of bitch” to keep myself feeling safe.

I have been losing a lot of weight very quickly in the past 6 months. In April I was a U.S. size 14 and now I am a U.S. size 8. There are a few relatively obvious reasons for this. I started a new cardio workout on a mini stepper, as opposed to jogging. Plus I got put on a maintenance inhaler for asthma and can breathe all the time now, including while I exercise. 

Plus, I initially started to gain weight 11+ years ago when I quit smoking. So perhaps it has been long enough that my body/hormones have done some healing. 

But something else occurred to me this week. Yes I gained weight when I quit smoking. But I gained more when I started working in construction. Now I have not worked in construction for 2 years. And I know that I never want to work in construction again.

And the weight is just melting off? 

I am not eating less to lose this weight. I am eating heavier and fattier to keep myself from getting hungry. I am not working out more than I was. I was jogging 30 minutes and now I am stepping 30 minutes. 

But I don’t have to navigate men right now. I don’t have to be productive and professional but also feminine and friendly enough make them comfortable. I don’t have to have my work judged against the ego of a man. I don’t have to worry about my attractiveness (either way) to men who have a say in how much money I make or how I am treated or how I am referred to, either in company or when I leave the room.

My weight has always fluctuated, even after quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating. And even once I took my drug foods out of the equation, I have never been able to “eat lighter” into a particular sized body. I was no longer fat once I got my eating under control. But I wasn’t necessarily skinny either. Even when I ate “light,” eliminating things like bacon and pork rinds and eating more raw veggies and less starchy vegetables cooked in fat, I couldn’t make myself lose weight. So I stopped trying.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my body chose to protect me from that kind of attention and association in my daily work life. Whether or not it was “necessary,” it clearly was necessary. For my own sake.

And it reminds me that I owe my body the living amends of giving it good food and loving care, for the ways I treated it like it was my shameful problem, and not my fiercest protector.

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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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25 Jun 2023

The perfect body

This week I had to do a mid-week grocery run. And there is a discount department store right next to that grocery store. So I went in to get myself some workout pants that fit. And I figured while I was there, I should try on some real actual pants with things like buttons and zippers and figure out what size I actually am at the moment. 

I bought size medium workout clothes and figured out that I am currently a U.S. size 10 in pants, down from a U.S. size 14.

I have so many very complicated feelings about this.

This weight loss is, at least in part, the result of the workout I am doing. And one of the reasons I am doing it is because I love the effect it is having on my butt. I have never before had a butt, and now I do. And I really really love it. I can see the difference in the mirror and feel it when I sit down. And now that I am enjoying having a butt, I have a different feeling about pants in general as a clothing option. 

But I have spent the last 11 or 12 years trying to dismantle the ingrained idea that thinner is better. And yet, when I see the “M” or the “10,” I have a huge reaction. My brain sends out all sorts of happy messages! Skinny! Pretty! Good Girl! And then it gets excited about how much thinner I could get. Could I be an 8? A 6??? Could I be a SMALL?!?!?  And then it follows up with a burst of fear! How will we keep it going? How can we speed it up? What if it stops?

And in a blink, staying a size 10 is the worst possible thing that could happen to me. 

So what I have decided to remember is that as long as I am keeping my eating boundaries, I am in exactly the right body I am supposed to be in. That whether I am a 6 or a 16, as long as I am weighing my food and abstaining from sugars and simple carbohydrates, I am in the perfect body for me and my life.

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21 May 2023

Enjoying my butt and my bacon

I have been losing weight over the past few months. And quickly. And I don’t know exactly why. But I suppose I have an idea. I have started a more vigorous step workout. And I can breathe easily. But the truth is my weight has fluctuated significantly since I got my eating under control. And I don’t always know why.

Recently I had to get rid of my size XL yoga pants. They were too big to stay up. And I am starting to shrink out of my size L yoga pants. And I am super hungry so I am eating really greasy, fatty proteins. Lots of bacon. Lots of pork rinds. Lots of full fat Greek yogurt. Even that has not slowed down the weight loss.

Plus, I have been starving after my workout, so I have pushed it back to right before lunch, so I can eat immediately afterwards.

I am really loving the changes in my body. I am watching my shape transform in ways that make me happy. And it’s not about thinness, or getting smaller. In fact the point is to get a bigger butt. (I have never had a butt. Just hips.)

But I have a complicated relationship with my body. I need to keep an eye on my thinking. I don’t want to end up in “diet head.” I don’t want to get obsessed with working out. I don’t want to love losing weight so much that I lose my mind. I have lost my mind over weight loss before. Yes, I was thin. But also crazy. 

I spoke about this with a trusted friend who does what I do with food. She hates that I am hungry. So do I. One of the best things about my food boundaries is that I don’t have to be hungry. But this is a choice. I could go back to jogging instead of my step machine. I could take a break from working out all together. (I don’t have any plans to do that right now.) I could do a million different things to get different results. But for now I am just going to keep on the same path. Enjoy my butt and my bacon and maybe buy myself some new pants.

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14 May 2023

Isn’t it ironic?

I have been thinking about writing about the weight loss drug, Ozempic, for a while. There are so many things about it that I have thoughts, but maybe more importantly, feelings about.



So first, I want to say that I don’t want it. Even if I could get it, I would not take it. I have a solution to my eating problem. And I have learned to separate my weight from my eating problem. It would not do me much good to be thin and obsessed with food. The obsession is the problem. My guess is a pill can’t fix that. And also, I have no proof that it would work better for me than my eating boundaries. And I am not interested in messing with a 17 year proven solution.



Second, weight loss drugs have been around a long time. And yet, individually, none of them are still around. I am personally old enough to remember Fen-Phen. And I am old enough to remember the commercials in the subsequent years claiming that if you had heart problems from it, you might be entitled to financial compensation. Plenty of women who have the same eating boundaries that I have remember being prescribed amphetamines by doctors when they were younger. Plus downers so they could sleep at night.

Third, you need to take it for life. Which actually  makes sense to me. I mean, I have to do what I do for life. But a lot of things can go wrong with something like that. The drug could be taken off the market. It has already become prohibitively expensive for most people. 

But I guess the thing for me that makes it all the more frustrating is that while it really may help people who have diseases like diabetes, it is mostly being used by celebrities and various rich people to stay skinny and cultivate “a look.” A friend of mine was even on it for a while and lost a lot of weight. But then he was no longer big enough to “qualify” for it, and his prescription was taken away. But like I said, you have to take it for life for it to work.

I suppose ultimately it’s all tied up for me in the fact that we have scientists making junk food addictive on purpose, we have a “fitness” industry telling us that if we would only work hard enough (and buy the right products) we could, and should, look like a magazine cover model, we have a culture that hates and vilifies fatness as a personal and moral failing, and when we do come up with a possible medical solution, wealthy people commandeer all of it to fit into a smaller size for their social media accounts.

I’m just going to be over here reading ingredients and weighing out my food. Ironic, but honestly, seems so much simpler than taking a pill every day.

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12 Feb 2023

Working to think the thoughts I want

A few weeks ago I posted about getting specific physical results from a new workout and how that can put me right back into eating disorder and body dysmorphia brain, a side effect of my sugar addiction. How it made me want to ramp up my workout to get more results faster. And how I work to quiet that voice.

Well I don’t know about you, but sometimes I like to “browser window” shop, as in look at clothes on line and then just close the tab and not buy them. But if you shop on line (and you’re any good at it) you probably know that the best way to shop is by measurements and not clothing size. Sizes differ greatly across companies, not to mention countries.

So I took my measurements. And my clothing-related measurements (bust, waist & hips) are the same as they were the last time I measured, before this new workout routine. So my size is the same. And I realized that I was so disappointed.

I can see a marked difference in the shape of my body. I can feel the difference in the way my legs fit together when I cross them. I can see a difference in the shape of my butt. I can see a difference in how much more stamina I have. 

But I had been thinking and hoping and *expecting* to be a smaller size. And I cared. Even though I don’t want to care. Even though I have spent years actively trying to disconnect the size of my body from my worth, and trying to keep my focus on my food addiction and not my weight. There is still a part of me that lights up at the idea of smaller, thinner, skinnier, a lower numbered size.

When I think about all of the ways being fat made me a joke, a punchline, a mark, a safe target growing up (and even now – fat Thor anyone?) I can see that I have 45 years of conditioning to get over to not be ashamed. That some of these thoughts are over 40 years old, and they were the way my very young brain processed the world and learned to protect itself. 

I am still going to continue to dismantle these thoughts. I am still going to love my body for all of the ways that it serves me, and pick apart the judgment I have for it not always fitting into the beauty standard. But I want to acknowledge that even knowing that I don’t respect the way we deal with beauty in Western culture, I am still subject to it. And I have to work *every day* at living the life I want and thinking the thoughts I want.

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07 Aug 2022

More fulfilling than weight loss

I have lost weight recently. I don’t weigh myself and I have not for years, but I do, in fact, wear clothes. And it is clear to me that things are significantly looser. Dresses that used to be formfitting now hang on me. And I have not (knowingly) done anything to facilitate that.

I have a theory about why. I have recently started taking an OTC medication for acid reflux. (Remember when I said a few weeks ago that I have been sick for months? Well my mother-in-law, who worked for a GI doctor for over 20 years, told me my persistent wet cough was acid reflux. And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t right!) And this weight loss coincides pretty closely with my starting the medicine. 

But the truth is, I don’t know what affects my weight. And the other truth is, I never have. 

Obviously when I gave up simple sugar and carbohydrates, that had a huge impact on my weight. I ate significantly less because I was not craving my drug foods, and therefore eating much less.  I was also eating much less of processed, high calorie/low nutrient foods. And I was managing my portions by weighing my food. But even since getting my eating under control, my weight has still fluctuated wildly. (Not hundreds of pounds, but as much as 30 or more.) And my eating has not changed that much. And even when I took specific actions and changed my foods, and my quantities of food, I could not get my body to “behave.” Gaining weight eating less, losing weight eating more. I could never get my weight to work like a math equation. I have never been able to predict my weight, or manage it, by food choices. And I have stopped trying. 

I don’t want to care about my weight. I don’t want to even think about my weight. But I live in a world and a society that cares very much about weight. So that is a struggle. And the first 28 years of my life revolved entirely around my weight. My shame over my weight. The humiliation of other people openly judging my weight. Those are hard things to forget. And those are things that shaped the way I thought and felt and interacted during my formative years.

Sometimes it has felt like those formative ways of being are “just the way I am.” Set in stone and unchangeable. But I have noticed that giving up my drug foods and changing my lifestyle has been an opportunity to change thought and behavior patterns that I thought were just “me.” It turns out, I can change me. Way more easily than I can change my weight. And way more fulfilling as well.

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