onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the category “Personal Growth”

01 Apr 2017

When the most exciting thing to happen is that nothing exciting happened

One of the hardest things about writing a weekly blog about a specific topic is sometimes nothing interesting happens in a week. This past week was one of those weeks.

It’s not that nothing happened. At the mall I found a spring jacket I had been longingly imagining. My mouth is healing nicely from my pulled tooth last week. I did my writing and my jogging and my meditation. But the food and body image and eating disorder parts of my life were pretty much non-issues.

I guess the only thing I have to say about that is this is not the time to get complacent.

I am vigilant about my food boundaries all the time because easy weeks don’t mean I’m “fine” now. I don’t have a healthy relationship to food all of a sudden just because at this particular moment in time I don’t hate my body and I am happy and peaceful. It’s true that I almost never worry about eating foods that I am addicted to anymore. After over 11 years, the way I think about sugar and carbohydrates is certainly different. I do not desire them in any way. I do not think nice thoughts about them, or wish I could have them. I think of them as poison. 

But here is the point: It is not only that I am vigilant with my food boundaries because I think of those foods as poison, it is also the other way around. I think of sugar and carbohydrates as poison, because I am vigilant about my food boundaries. The two feed one another. They are a virtuous cycle. They are the opposite of how I used to use foods I am addicted to to mask how I hated myself, which made me fat and crazy and made me hate myself even more, which made me eat foods that I am addicted to.

For whatever reason, pity or discomfort or whatever, many people really want to believe that so many years with my food under control means I have proven that I am all better now. They think surely I can eat like a normal person now, after proving my willpower year after year. 

But I have to remember that I have a physical allergy to sugar, grains, and starch. That eating it sets up an unnatural craving for more of the same. I have to remember that one bite would set off a wild ride of physical, mental, and emotional turmoil, not to mention, most likely, a 150 pound weight gain in less than a year. That’s not an exaggeration. 12 or 13 years ago, before I gave up sugar, after I relapsed on a diet I was on, I gained 60 pounds in 3 months. That’s how I eat when I don’t keep strict boundaries.

Don’t be fooled by 11+ years of respite. The food addict in me is still there. She’s on a tight leash, but only because I am meticulous in my food life. 

But having said all that, it’s still nice to have a peaceful week where the most exciting thing to happen around my eating is that nothing happened around my eating. 

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25 Mar 2017

Making a new friend of an old enemy

You may know from last week’s post that I have had an infection in one of my gums. I went to the dentist on Monday and she told me that she thought it was the result of a broken wisdom tooth. So on Thursday I went to an oral surgeon and had that tooth pulled.

Now it is no secret to anyone that I am emotional. But when it comes to medical procedures of almost any kind, I freak the hell out. I always have. From the time I was a little kid. I can remember totally losing it in the doctor’s office at five, when they were going to prick my finger for my routine kindergarten checkup. Once, the phlebotomist at Planned Parenthood had two maintenance guys come talk to me about the heaters they were installing to distract me while she drew blood.

I cry and start to hyperventilate. As I have gotten older, I tend to rock, wring or rub my hands in an obsessive way and do deep breathing exercises. This usually keeps me from actually hyperventilating. It takes a lot just to keep the panic at bay.

There are things that I want to change about myself. I believe in changing. I believe in growing as a person and being better. And hell, I am good at that. I am really good at it. But I also believe that there are things that you have to learn to live with, that you just have to make friends with. For me, being sensitive to sugar, grains and starch, and not being able to “eat like a normal person” is one of those things. And freaking out about medical procedures is too.

It is humiliating to discover that you are a compulsive eater and a sugar addict. It takes something to stop being ashamed of not being able to control yourself when it comes to food and accept the truth of it. But as long as I fought against admitting that I am a food addict, I was never going to get any relief. I was just going to keep trying to get it right, keep trying to manage, keep trying to eat in moderation. And I was going to keep failing and falling deeper into misery.

Once I admitted that I had a problem with food and that I was incapable of eating like a regular person, I was able to really do something about it. Namely putting boundaries around when, how much, and what I ate. I was able to make it work. And I was able to stop fighting against myself. Fighting myself is just plain exhausting.

I have come to the point where I have decided to make friends with my medical panic. When I called to make the appointment with the oral surgeon, I told the receptionist that I would cry, that I am emotional. I said, “you might want to make a note of that in my file.”

The truth is that it makes other people deeply uncomfortable. I can’t tell you how many people in the office asked me if I wanted to postpone, come back another day and have them put me out for it. (Thank God I didn’t agree to that. My mother pointed out that if they put me out, they would have given me an IV!!! Just the thought of that gives me the chilly-willies! I’m still shuddering at the idea.)

I am sorry that my emotions make people uncomfortable, especially my irrational fears over medical procedures. But so do my food boundaries, and I am not willing to make other people’s comfort a priority over my own wellbeing.

So I am not going to be ashamed of the fact that I freak out before procedures. I need to make friends with it so I can deal with it. It’s one thing to be deathly afraid of being poked and prodded, but it is something else, something extra and totally unproductive, to be ashamed of that fear. I have decided I can do without the shame.

My shame, the idea that I shouldn’t be this way, is the kind of thing that makes me walk away. When I was younger, I absolutely would have walked away from every stitch, blood test, physical exam, and shot, if my mother had let me. I would have forgone all needles and drills and what not if they would have let me go to school without my shots and tests. But in my old(er) age, I have come to recognize that not having the procedure wasn’t going to get rid of the infected tooth. I wanted the results of the procedure. So I cried, and wrung my hands, and panicked, and did my very best to breathe. And I stayed, and opened my mouth, and kept still and quiet, and let the man do his work. And he was awesome!

The procedure was quick and easy. The oral surgeon, against the odds, got the infected tooth out in one piece. (I know because I asked him the odds and he said it was an 80% chance that he would have to drill it into pieces to get it out, and then stitch my mouth.) It literally took him longer to numb my mouth than it did for him to extract the tooth. And I have had minimal discomfort, completely manageable with over the counter pain relievers. And when the doctor called me that evening, I was eating dinner and I told him (while laughing) how I told everyone the story of how I freaked out and how he was awesome.

P.S. Did you get that? My oral surgeon personally called me that evening to ask how I was doing! As my husband said, “Now that’s small town living!”

 

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18 Mar 2017

The bare minimum, my bad attitude, and the realization that even flossing can’t save me entirely.

I am in a perfect storm of misery lately. I have an infection in one of my gums, and that means: 1) I feel sick from the infection. 2) It hurts to eat, which I must do 3 times a day, and which I usually love more than almost anything (husband not included), but which is currently being ruined by my pain. 3) I had to go through the tedium of finding out my insurance ID number, and finding a dentist in both my network and my area to treat me in the next few days rather than weeks. And 4) I had to make a dentist appointment while I deeply dislike and fear doctors and dentists in general.

I spent my first wedding anniversary moping around, dealing with the red tape of dentists’ offices and insurance companies, swishing my mouth with peroxide or salt water, and crying in frustration.

Here are some things I want to point out. I have not eaten sugar, grains, or starch for over 11 years. On most days, I brush after every meal, and always brush at least twice a day. I floss daily, often more than once. So this sort of pisses me off. I feel like I so don’t deserve this.

Here are some other things I would like to point out. I used to eat a diet almost entirely made of sugar, grains, and starch. I was not always a rigorous brusher, and never flossed until about 10 years ago. I only recently got insurance so I have not kept up with regular maintenance like cleaning and checkups for years. I don’t like to think about these things when I am slamming up against “the unfairness” of life.

Life has pain. If one is lucky enough to live any length of time, one will experience it. That I live a generally pain-free existence means I am lucky, not that I have done something to deserve it. Not even flossing.

People I know who also keep boundaries around their food would call this “A No Matter What.” Part of our lingo is to say that we don’t eat no matter what. (What we mean is that we don’t eat compulsively under any circumstances, because, of course, we do eat 3 meals a day within our boundaries.) So we use the term “no matter what” as a noun when we are describing those circumstances that could potentially throw us back into acting out our sugar addiction.

All of those things I mentioned at the beginning are “no matter whats” for me. I don’t want to eat. I want to skip meals because it hurts to eat them. I want to eat “comfort food” because I don’t feel well. I want to numb out rather than have to do the footwork to make an appointment with an appropriate dentist, because that kind of big-girl-panties stuff is always overwhelming and scary to me. And I really don’t want to go to the appointment I made in the first place because I am afraid. I am afraid of the pain and the cost and just generally having to come face to face with the truth about the state of my health.

That last one, having to face the truth about my body, is probably one of my all-time biggest struggles. I don’t like to look at uncomfortable realities, kind of ever, but especially about my body or my health. I mean, I weighed 300 pounds at one point. I was doing a lot of eye-covering and la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you-ing. I do make a point to live a relatively healthy lifestyle now. But I like going along in the predictable, and making changes and growing because I want to, not because I have been forced to. And that is not the way life goes.

I know that I am not alone. Plenty of people don’t choose to look at the reality of their health. There are people I know personally who have gone to the doctor to discover that at some point in the recent past, they had had a heart attack, and they “had not noticed.”

My guess is that they noticed, but when it passed and they weren’t dead, they figured no harm no foul. I understand. Not knowing can be much more comfortable than knowing.

So much of getting my eating under control was about facing reality. I used food, sugar especially, to avoid reality, often to the detriment of my welfare. If I was worried, I ate. If I was really worried, I ate until I passed out. Not a lot gets done when you are passed out in a food coma. Certainly not anything productive like paying bills, or working on a project, or finding a dentist. Not the kind of things that assuage worry by taking care of the problem, anyway.

The truth is that I am annoyed and cranky. I don’t feel well. I would love to tell you that I am keeping my spirits up and being grateful for all of the things I have, like insurance, and mostly good health, and a husband that I am crazy about, and a really happy life. But I’m not keeping my spirits up. I’m pissed. And I am doing the bare minimum to get through the days. There is no going above and beyond for me while I am feeling crappy. And I am cool with that.

Maybe someday I will be able to smile through pain and frustration. That’s certainly a worthwhile goal. But I am not there today, and I don’t want to make it seem like I am. Just like I believe in facing the reality of my health, I believe in facing, and showing, the reality of my experience. I don’t write this blog so that the people who read it (you) will think I’m special, or super-human, or admirable. I write this because it is an opportunity to tell my truth. Even the less attractive aspects.

So I am doing what needs to be done with a bad attitude. Because I need to take care of myself, but I don’t have to do it gracefully.

 

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11 Mar 2017

Live slow. Die whenever.

It was January of 2016 that I started a regular workout practice, right around the time I celebrated 10 years of having my eating under control. I had played around a little with jogging and bodyweight exercises the few weeks prior to that, but I have never been good at doing anything by playing around with it. I am always either in or out. My default is generally set to out. But I decided I wanted to be in.

Before that, I had primarily gotten around, and therefore gotten my daily exercise, by walking. In New York City, that was like breathing. I did it without thinking. Even if I took the subway, I had to walk there. There were stairs to get to the station. And even if there was an escalator, I was an impatient New Yorker. I took the stairs anyway because walking was faster than riding. And if the weather was nice, and I had the time, I didn’t bother with the subway. A 4 or 5-mile walk in the city on a nice day doesn’t feel like a workout with all of the people watching and window-shopping available. Exercise was a non-issue. It came built into my life.

But when I was working to get my driver’s license, and my (then) boyfriend and I were planning to buy a second car for me, it became clear that I was not going to be walking as a mode of transportation. And I was, it turns out, not getting any younger. I was 38 at the time, and I knew that it would only get harder to stay in shape as I got older. So I tried a light workout a few times in December of 2015, but I was only motivated for a few days. It was hard. I wasn’t good at it. I never really “wanted to” do it, even if I wanted to have done it.

So I did what I do. I made a commitment. I decided to jog 2 miles a day, 5 days a week, with 3 sets of 10 each of push-ups and crunches, and a 30 second plank. Basically 30-45 minutes of exercise 5 days a week.

Now this is a long, drawn-out setup to get to my point. I didn’t see results right away. I have made some progress in terms of my strength, and stamina. I have also possibly lost fat and gained muscle, though I am not good at gauging my physical size. But any and all progress I have made has been very, very slow. So slow, in fact, that I am only starting to recognize it as progress now, after over a year of consistent workouts.

When I first started doing push ups, I could not get very close to the floor, even though I do them on my knees. The truth is, I was barely moving in either an up or down direction. If someone had been watching me, it would have been deeply humiliating. Hell, it was a little humiliating doing them alone in my home while my husband was at work. But I did them anyway. I could only start where I was.

I only recently noticed that I was able to move up and down with ease, and get my face to the floor and back up again. Now that I have the arm strength to do them on my knees, I have started making my third set of 10 push ups the regular plank kind. Not all three sets. Just the last one for now. Because I don’t have to be in a rush to see results. And just like before, when I do them, my arms are barely moving. It may take me another year to have the strength to get my face all the way to the floor and back up with regular pushups. But ultimately, no matter how slow the progress goes, it’s progress. If I didn’t do them because I wasn’t seeing results quickly enough, there would simply no longer be any results to see.

We live in a results based world. And I don’t think that’s all bad. What I think is a problem is wanting results now. The problem is choosing instant gratification over long-term gratification.

I never really understood the story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare wasn’t slower, he was a jerk. If he hadn’t been trying to show off, and publicly shame the tortoise, he would have won the race easily. So that story always occurred to me as bullshit. Slow and steady does not win a race against an opponent who is fast and steady. But I have a different point of view now. I am not certain that everyone has it in them to be both fast and steady. I know that some do. That is what makes them athletes. I honor that. But I am not an athlete. And that’s just fine. So now I think of it this way: it is not that I am the tortoise and someone else is the hare; I am both the tortoise and the hare. The hare in me wants to show off, get results, hear people tell me I’m so fast, I look great. But the hare in me does not do things in a sustainable manner. The hare in me doesn’t know how to deal with obstacles, or how to persevere through failures and difficulties. The hare in me wants results all day all the time. The hare in me is like the people who lose weight on “reality” television by exercising daily the way other people go to work. It might make for dramatic TV to take on 40-50 hours a week of strenuous exercise, but it will almost certainly only get you short-term results. And if I am honest and thinking clearly, I don’t want short-term results.

The same could be said for the ways that I tried to lose weight before I gave up sugar and got my eating under control. I always wanted to lose weight fast. I wanted to be skinny. Now. I would, when my food-addicted, compulsive-eating self could manage it, eat way below my calorie limit, sometimes to the point of starving myself. I was not very good at starving myself, but I could manage it when I was seeing results. Losing weight quickly got me high, and that made it possible for me to limit my food intake for the sake of even more results. But bodies are not huge fans of this way of losing weight, and any hiccup in my quest for an ever-decreasing waistline left me disillusioned and often led to me giving up, or at least cheating on my diet for a day, week, or month. And that’s not even taking my exercise bulimia into consideration.

Enter the tortoise. The tortoise in me is just putting one foot in front of the other. My tortoise may technically be enrolled in the race, but she is not competing. She just made a commitment to start at point A and move to point B. She’ll get there in her own time.

The results I gain when I am slow and steady may take a lot more time to manifest, but they also usually last. Because the steps I take are small enough to take every day. And they are small enough that the inevitable “one step back” is also just a bitty baby step. So instead of focusing on results, I focus on the practice itself. I focus on the commitment to take the action, consistently and without expectation.

So it may not be particularly exciting to practice being the tortoise, but it is pretty inspiring. And ultimately deeply satisfying.

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04 Mar 2017

If I were good at it, I wouldn’t need boundaries in the first place.

The other day I was standing next to my husband when he looked at me and said, “skinny.” It was not a judgment (good or bad) so much as a mildly interesting observation.

Before we go on, I want to say that this was particularly unusual. I was not in any way offended or upset, but my husband does not generally talk about my weight at all unless I ask him directly, and that is, I believe, as it should be. As long as my eating disorders are under control, there is nothing helpful about another person monitoring the size of my ass. It is absolutely nobody’s business but my own. And I have spent a lot of time and effort keeping my eating and body image disorders at bay, so the people I seek that kind of input from are people who, like me, have a history of compulsive eating and food addiction and who, also like me, keep boundaries around their eating.

So my husband said I looked skinny, but I have not been feeling skinny at all. In fact I have been feeling a little fat. And sometimes, very fat. I am not saying that I have been tormented by my weight. But if you asked me if I were on the higher end of my weight or the lower, I would guess higher.

But when I look at the evidence, he’s right. I may actually be the smallest that he has ever seen me. The size of the pants I wear and how they fit me indicates that I am relatively small for me.

Even at my thinnest, in fact, even when I have been underweight, I have never really been what Western Culture would call “skinny.” Even when my collarbones look like they might cut you if you get too close to me, I still have wide hips and round thighs and big calves. My thighs always rub together, no matter what my weight is. (Thank God I was a grownup with my eating disorders under control before the Internet became a place where having a thigh gap and the pictures to prove it was a thing.) You can call it curvy, or zaftig, or say I’m an endomorph, but I have never been the kind of skinny that graces runways. (I use the term “graces” loosely.)

It took a long time and hard look at reality to come to this understanding about my body, and to love it exactly as it is. As a culture, we particularly celebrate one kind of feminine beauty: that of the ectomorph. We honor the women who naturally don’t carry a lot of fat on their bodies. Perhaps you have seen the Zara ad that says “Love your curves,” and noticed that the two women in the photo did not have any to speak of. Were they beautiful? Absolutely. Are they real women (albeit young women) with real bodies? Hell yes they are! (Though I am not actually sure how real those two models happen to be. I tried to find if the image was Photoshopped, and could not find anything about it.) I am not shaming the models in the ad. Skinny women are real women, just like muscular, and chubby, and overweight, and zaftig women are real too. This is not about what each of us happens to be born. It is about what each of us are told we “should be,” without anyone ever telling us that there are things we “can’t be.” I cannot walk from Kentucky to Hawaii. It is not possible. And I cannot be “supermodel skinny.” I was not made that way.

But nobody told me that. Ever, really. I had to figure it out for myself, by having sane and functional eating practices, and doing all of the healthy things I could do, like drinking water and getting enough sleep and exercise, and then taking a serious look at the reality of my body.

The beauty, fashion, fitness, and diet industries didn’t want me to know that I don’t have it in me to be that skinny. Because if I knew, they couldn’t get me to buy their latest cream, shake, workout app subscription, prepared food service, or whatever it is they happen to be selling at the moment with the promise that if I am “good enough,” work hard enough, pay enough money, I will end up with the body of my favorite underwear model. (No. I don’t have a favorite underwear model.)

I don’t believe in vilifying skinny women. But I don’t believe they are the only incarnations of beauty in the world, as I have been told for as long as I have been alive. When my husband looked at me and said, “skinny,” he did not do so in triumph because he finally found me attractive. For him, my beauty is not about my weight. In fact, I wish I had as much love for my body at any size as he does. It was merely an observation on his part. And it served as a reminder to me that even after all of the work, and all of the commitment, and all of the times I kept my food boundaries, even though it was hard or inconvenient, my head is pretty messed up when it comes to the way I think about and view my body. And that what I see in the mirror, or think I look like, is not necessarily reality.

Even now that I have taken inventory and checked myself against the specific frame of reference of my clothes and how they fit, I still don’t feel very thin. Knowing that I am, perhaps, the thinnest I have been in 4 years doesn’t make me “feel” any thinner. It doesn’t make me “know” that I am relatively small.

The last thing I want to say about this is that even though my body image disorders are irrational, and knowing that doesn’t change the way I think and feel, knowing does help me take healthy actions. And it is in our actions that we impact ourselves, our world, and the people around us. I don’t have to feel “skinny enough” to keep my commitments to eat enough nutritious food and exercise moderately, rather than starve myself and exercise to exhaustion and injury. I don’t have to listen to my fears and my “feelings.” I just have to keep my boundaries. After all, that is literally what they are there for. If I already always made healthy decisions, boundaries would be redundant.

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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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28 Jan 2017

Alas, reality doesn’t care what I think

I’m an addict in the middle of playing the waiting game. If you are an addict, you know that this is not the most comfortable place to be. In fact, the jaws of Hell might be more comfortable. The jury is still out.

My husband has gotten word that his next job is lined up, and we know where (at least we are as sure as we can be – it’s construction after all), but we don’t yet have any information on when we will move. At first we expected it to be in the next 3 weeks, but it may turn out to be closer to 5 weeks. And it is the nature of his business that any job is subject to change. Investors pull out, companies go bankrupt, the market shifts. We do expect him to end up on this particular job, and we do expect to be moving soon, but the details are not set.

So I am packing and cleaning, getting everything as compact as possible so that at a moment’s notice we can load up a moving truck and get back on the road.

This is not how I live my daily life. I am a preparer. I like lists. I like schedules and quality information. I like to have a plan and a contingency plan. Or two.

When I was younger and eating compulsively, I was a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda gal. It was easy. I wasn’t ever expecting to be responsible for my actions anyway, so it didn’t matter if I knew how things would turn out. They would turn out fine because someone would swoop in and save me. I am not saying I was this way maliciously. I wasn’t meaning to use or abuse anyone. It was just that I could only handle so much of life. I was bad at living. I was easily overwhelmed. I shut down at the first sign of difficulty or pain. I had zero coping strategies that did not include getting high on sugar and just not thinking about, or dealing with, the problem.

When I first got my eating under control, I had to start dealing with all of my feelings. And if I couldn’t get high and forget my problems, it became clear that the only real way to deal with my problems was to solve the ones I had. And as for the problems I didn’t have yet, it seemed best to head them off at the pass. To streamline my life, my actions, and my relationships so that as much as possible was predictable, convenient, and clean.

And I have to admit that that way of living was particularly helpful when I was just starting to be responsible for myself. But there is something that I learned (very, very slowly) while I was keeping my strict food boundaries: the moments that move me, the experiences that make the biggest impact, the really juicy life-nuggets, happen in the unforeseen, unwieldy mess.

For most of my life, I never wanted to commit to anything because I didn’t want to have to readjust when things inevitably changed. But now I believe that self-respect and pride lie in making the commitment, even knowing that circumstances will eventually change. There is peace for me in fully committing to something, until it is time to readjust, and then changing, and fully committing anew.

So here I am, knowing that a big change is coming, but not knowing when, and not having the option of specific planning. The only thing I can do is get everything as close to ready as is possible, and then trust that it will all work out exactly as it is supposed to. (And I will admit that I keep my fingers crossed that the way it is “supposed to work out” is in line with how “I would like it to work out”.)

Maybe that’s the other part of it. Recognizing that how life is “supposed to” work out might not look like how “I want” it to. Let’s say, for example, that the apartment that I want to rent gets snatched up in the time between my talking to the nice lady at the apartment complex and the time I get a concrete moving date. I can be angry, but there is no use for it. I can be sad, but it won’t help.

What I need to do if something like this happens, of course, is acknowledge it, accept it, and take action to find a new apartment. And to trust that how it worked out is, indeed, how it was supposed to. My experience of reality has nothing to do with reality. Feeling that reality is “frustrating” or “not fair” does not change the facts of the situation. So I need to adjust to life as it is, not as I want it to be. And when I pick myself up, brush myself off, put on the big girl panties and do something about the way it is, I have a reference for the magnitude of my resilience. I have a sense of my own power. I have life.

The longer I have my eating under control, the better I get at life. And the better I get at life, the more I realize that it is all about the place where planning and flexibility meet. It’s about both preparation and non-attachment.

The opportunity to live on the road with my husband has been a blessing and a joy. I would not give it up for convenience or predictability. After all, life has a way of happening, unpredictably, whether you want it to or not. Living like a recluse wouldn’t guarantee me predictability, it would only make me ill equipped to deal with the curve balls I would eventually get thrown.

I have loved living all over the country, meeting new people, enjoying the different cultures and experiences. And moving comes with that. Packing and waiting and going with the flow are all part of that package deal. So I am sitting in the discomfort of waiting to find out what happens next. And when it’s time to do the next thing, I will meet life head-on. And I will meet life on its own terms, with uncertainties, and delays and all, because there is really no other way to meet life.

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