onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the category “Relationships”

What else is catching up with me?

Life has felt like it has been speeding by lately. My entire year has been a whirlwind from the beginning. And here, before the official end of Summer, I (yes “we,” but “This isn’t about him”) have bought a condo, sold a house, paid off all debt and have moved. MOVED moved.

This may not sound particularly exotic if you know me from real life or my blog, and are aware that we move all the time. But that is different. A kind of home away from home. Those places are never meant to be permanent. The “home” is always the stuff in it that has been used in the last place and the last. It’s the sameness of dishes and utensils, sheets and towels (and each other) that make life on the road its own kind of home. 

But this is Home. “Capital H.” 

And it is entirely different. I moved from a two story suburban house with all the trimmings: attic space, a two car garage with a refrigerator in it, a shed with lawn tools, a lawn, a patio, patio furniture, a swing in my back yard and fancy trees in the front. Yes even a picket fence but ours was black.

And now I live in a 2 bed 2 bath high rise with a balcony, a doorman, elevators, a pool, and minimal storage. As I was forced to look at my life through new lenses, and I was forced to examine, yet again, my ever evolving priorities. 

This move is a huge culture shift. One that feels so right for me, and also changes so much about my day to day life. 

From the outside all this happened between the beginning of May and the end of August. And in terms of actions and logistics, yes. At least I sure did have my fair share of panic attacks in these past 4 months. But I don’t think changes like this happen in the moment. 

I have been changing. And for longer than four months. It’s just now my home caught up. 

I wonder what else is catching up to me.

Hip to the new style

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with time. I have had a pulled hip flexor so I couldn’t do my workout. 

And it gave me a chance to play with my schedule. I have had the same morning workout routine for many years. I want to break out of old patterns. Not because they are bad, but because I want to shake up my life and what better way to do that than to disrupt my routines. To do something different.

I am always looking for the next part of my life. Some new growth, a new understanding, new perspectives. I don’t love the experience of change. But I love having changed. Like a lot.

This willingness (however begrudgingly in the moment) to change is a direct result of having my eating under control. Not eating my drug foods forced me to look at reality. The reality of my integrity and my behavior. And with my hormones and emotions not being influenced by sugar and carbohydrates, it was hard to talk myself into continuing a temper tantrum and insisting on being dragged kicking and screaming. It was easier to be a grown up. Also less embarrassing.

The more time I spend with my sugar addiction arrested, the better I am at life. I am more peaceful, have a good sense of (not religious) faith, I know how to be a good friend, and a good community member. And the more I understand what I care about, the better I can use my time going forward into a new life.

Loving all the places I live

By the end of the month, my home buying and selling saga will be done and I am so overjoyed! I love my new home. I am so happy to have our old home sold to a family that loves it. (I designed that kitchen with so much loving intention!) I am so relieved to not have a mortgage anymore before the end of the year. I am so glad that it didn’t take months and months to find a buyer and have to deal with stagings and showings and two tax bills.

I have a home beyond my wildest dreams. I already had a life beyond my wildest dreams.

That was a promise I was made by people who were already putting boundaries around their eating 20 years ago when I started. They said “weigh and measure your food and your life will get better.” “Stop putting drug foods in your body and you will change your life.”

And I changed my life. Not just my body, which did change, but my very experience. How I felt about myself. How I thought about myself. How I talked to myself. And therefore how I felt about the world.

The foods I am addicted to and abstain from DO things to my body. To my hormones. To my brain. More than just nourishment, they affect my moods and my pain receptors, and my anxiety levels. 

And I have never been so clear about it as since I stopped. I am a 49 year old woman, and I love my skin. I love my body. I love to do my workout. And I love myself enough to rest it when I need to. This vessel is the only one I exist in. And it’s my job to understand that that was not a mistake, it is a gift. 

There is so much the same about loving the body I am in and the home that I am in. I had to love my body *before* I could change it. (Well, change it for the better…I tried bulimia but it was hard…do not recommend.) I had to love the home I was already in before I could get a new dream home. There is something to the idea that gratitude is key to abundance. To be able to change the filter in your brain to see the gifts and the joy and the winks from the Universe. 

So here’s to the next unexpected gift from being this grateful for my new home! 

Goodbye to my amazing kitchen! I hope you make the next family as happy!!!

I have made my bed. I have yet to lie in it. 

This weekend I made my first and last IKEA purchase. On Saturday we picked up some pieces of furniture. When we got it home, we started to put one together, a bed, and it was clear that one piece was drilled wrong. And the options for replacing it were more inconvenient than literally fixing it ourselves. I mean drill bits. I mean saw dust. 

So it took two days and another 100+ dollars. To build a bed. 

Nothing that was supposed to get done for the move this weekend got done except that. 

I don’t eat over being frustrated. I don’t eat over my plans going awry. I don’t eat over broken furniture. 

And I have a modicum of control over my nervous system because of it. I was not that stressed. I am not saying I was happy, but we could laugh. We could do one thing at a time and problem solve. (It doesn’t hurt that my husband is a construction worker and I am a crafter. We are used to that kind of thinking.)

And I prefer to trust that we were exactly where we were supposed to be. But also, we will never forgive this bed or IKEA. Sweden as a whole I withhold judgment on for the time being.

I have made my bed. I have yet to lie in it. 

I’ve been down that path. It sucked…

I heard recently that there is link between telling girls they are fat and them becoming fat. Not girls who were already big or trending toward weight gain. Girls across the body spectrum were 60% more likely to become fat if they were told they were fat as children. And NOT because of their diet. It is through a cortisol path. Hormones. That the shame of being told this *literally* instructs the body to store energy as fat. 

It is a self fulfilling prophecy that we blame the girls/women for.

I actually had heard about this many years ago from Gary Taubes, who wrote The Case Against Sugar. He said that “calories in calories out” isn’t true because some foods affect our hormones, and fat storage is essentially a job for hormones. He also noted that sugar, especially processed sugar, affects our hormones as much as it nourishes. This of course made perfect sense to me. Because after I stopped eating compulsively and quit sugar and grains, and I lost a lot of weight, those calories never added up. I ate SO MUCH FOOD! High calorie and decadent. And I was a skinny!

And then I quit smoking and gained 30 pounds eating less and lower calorie. Quantifiably less. (Remember, I weigh all of my food.) And the answer was that smoking also affects your hormones. 

We have used weight as a moral issue for decades; centuries. By insisting it’s the actions of the individual alone that create fatness, without any understanding of why or how our bodies work. And we have brought it into being by shaming girls, any girl.

There is an uptick in anti-fat sentiment that promotes disordered eating right now. There is woman who posted a few months ago that if you weigh more than 160 pounds you don’t have the right to give her attitude. Ma’am, if I’m going to give you attitude, your opinion about my body is irrelevant to me. My attitude isn’t based on the holy vessel of another being. For you, it would be because you’re an ass. 

(Also HOW BIG DOES THIS WOMAN THINK 160 POUNDS IS???? And any height? Like if she’s 6’ does that count? Where did she get this number? Is she 157????)

Then I saw a MAN get on the internet to say that size 14 is plus sized. Bitc- ahem, Sir! You are not part of this conversation. This is for women to decide where to shop. Not for you to morally dehumanize and degrade the majority of post-pubescent women. If your ideal partner had body is of a teen girl…well, there’s a term for that….

So here is your reminder that weight is not an indicator of health. That you cannot see what a person eats by the size or shape of their body. And that EVEN IF THEY ARE UNHEALTHY people still have the right to exist in peace and love in their beautiful fat bodies. 

No stoop for you

My threshold for settling or pivoting or accommodating is rapidly diminishing. 

A couple of weeks ago, I reached out to some painters and only one guy got back to me. And then he proceeded to be out of contact for a week. By the time he got back to me, I still didn’t have a painter. But I knew my painter wasn’t him. (I have since gotten my apartment painted by someone else and I love it!)

Then I needed someone to do a repair on the house we are selling. Since my husband and I live on the road in a different town, I had my sister-in-law let a handyman from a service in and ask him to call me so I could get explain exactly what the job entailed. He never called. He wrote up an estimate of “what he would do if it were his house.” 

At first I blamed myself for not traveling all the way there to talk to him in person. My sister-in-law then called me apologizing telling me she tried to get him to call me. That she wrote my number down and handed it to him.

That was when it occurred to me that there were two 40 something women apologizing for not making it possible for this man to do his job. A job he easily could have done if he had just followed directions. The first step was just to call me.

Needless to say, I didn’t even look at the estimate. If I can’t trust someone to listen I should not give them the job. I texted them that I would not be using them. 

But this was scary! Because this company is so well respected in our suburb. These are the 5 star people. So who am I to say they are not for me?

Anyway I have a different guy coming tomorrow to start taking out my bathroom sink and wall. 

Even my husband has felt this change. We were looking at air fresheners the other day, and he picked one and said, if we don’t like it we can change it. So I said ok. But then we got like 5 steps and I said to myself, Kate, you hate that brand and you most definitely don’t like “Ocean” scented stuff.  So I said sorry. Nope. Can’t do it. 

I want to be clear that I am very good at going with the flow. And marriage has taught me that I only need to have an opinion when I really have an opinion. If my husband had picked something tropical, which is not my favorite, but is lovely and is one we can both agree on, I could have not had an opinion. I wouldn’t need to say that I would prefer something more floral. It would have been fine and I would been content.

But I hate ocean. Why does it smell like the worst of the 90s???

I don’t need to settle for something that is just going to make me unhappy. I don’t need to be annoyed when I can just opt out. 

Resentment is poison for me. And it almost always happens because I knew better and I didn’t listen to myself. 

20 years of weighing my food and abstaining from my drug foods, like processed sugar and carbohydrates, has taught me to be my most authentic self. Every day I don’t eat compulsively, or eat to get high, is a day I have a clearer path to my truest heart. 

So every time I see that clear path and choose something else to please someone else, I get resentful. 

The truth is I have always been resentful. It’s just that having my eating under control lets me see that it’s not actually anyone else’s fault. That my resentment is a lack of responsibility. 

I take responsibility every time I say “no, that’s not for me.” And I end up getting what I want with out a bunch of extra steps.

No FO cause I’m not MO

I am alone in my new condo eating a delicious lunch while my husband and his family are eating at a restaurant a few miles away and I am exactly where I want to be. No FOMO here. In fact, it would have been the other way around. If I were there I would be wishing I could have my crunchy cheese and my spicy pickles.

I used to love to go out to eat. But now, it is more likely that I will eat better at home than at a restaurant. Because having great vegetables is not a high priority at most restaurants.

So when I was told the place my husband’s family were planning on eating, I looked up the menu and it was clear I was not going to be able to order directly off the menu there. And when that is the case, it generally means I’m not going to *enjoy* any meal there. If I have to get it made specially, it will probably be plain. It will be steamed and boiled. It will be something cobbled together. And not include spicy pickles.

Instead I ate a super delicious meal that I made that was filling and flavorful and I knew I would like. 

Also, I love to be alone with my food. To eat by myself is a great joy for me. I hope everyone else is having just as nice a meal as I am! 

I can’t have my cake and condo too

As I get close to the end of my home saga, and everything changes, little by little until it’s one giant completed new chapter, I am so grateful that I am not shoving food in my face. Because this whole experience has been and continues to be *uncomfortable!*

If I were eating sugar and eating compulsively, I would be an absolute wreck. This whole process may have gotten done. But it would have come with costly mistakes, important things falling through the cracks, and my very bad attitude making everything worse and more difficult and frustrating and scary. 

And I would have been miserable. And even when the whole thing was done, it would have been filled with shameful memories of ways I behaved. 

And all that time I would hate myself. Eating compulsively makes me hate myself.

I don’t hate fatness. And I could be fat and happy. By some standards, I AM fat and I am certainly happy. But I cannot eat compulsively, eat drug foods, eat addictively and be happy. So if I were to let myself eat the way I used to, while I stuffed cake in my mouth I would simultaneously feel better (high/numb) and worse (ashamed) and I would hate myself the entire time. 

It’s not the body. It’s the eating. 

So IF I had the kind of life where I manifested my dream home while I was eating compulsively (doubtful) I still would have been filled with dread. I still would have been filled with bad energy! 

As we get closer to selling our house, and moving exclusively to our smaller condo, I get scared all over again. About space. About downsizing. My body panicks pretty regularly. And if I were in the food, I would be filled with regrets. 

But I am not! I am clear headed, capable, even tempered, genuinely excited and joyful! I know that 80% of the hard part is done. And while I have not enjoyed every moment of the process, all in all it has been a time of wonder. A dream come true. 

(Oh, and also I have been giving away as much stuff as I can when I have a moment. So you know…taking action helps.) 

“Are we playing Whiny Babies?” -Emily Henry

I was having a hard time coming up with a topic today because the main thing taking up my brain space is embarrassing to admit. Whiny. Cranky. Unenlightened. Bad vibes. 

Here’s the thing. I feel personally disrespected by a thing that happened recently. But when I look at it, in context of the situation, I have no right to expect literally anything. It is not for me, it is not about me. So I just backed out of a small event. And normally that would be totally cool. I usually appreciate that not everything is for me. 

So why am I still thinking about it? On a loop? I really don’t know. But I am not over it. I am still offended.

One of the things I know, partially because I am old, and partially because I am a spiritual seeker, is that ideas are nothing without hands. The most brilliant concept still needs a body to make it come true. Faith without works is dead. And there is no faith and are no works without tribulations.

So I can be over here on this side of my screen writing about a life beyond my wildest dreams, and talking about good vibes and the power of our minds, which I believe in wholeheartedly. But it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know I am also petty and judgmental and can’t let go of a minor slight. (It really is so minor. I’m an absolute whiny baby.) 

I guess this means that there is something that I need to look at, change, figure out. Because I firmly believe this is a gift and a lesson. A sign. Or why would I still be thinking about it?

And it has to be about me, because I honestly don’t have a relationship with the person I’m upset with. And I literally may never see some of the people again in my life. 

But I believe emotions are sign posts. And while I was eating all of my be feelings, I couldn’t read any of directions. But now, 20 years of feelings later, I can feel them, analyze and evaluate them, and then get to work. 

At least on par with my wildest dreams

Over the past few weeks, since we started the process of buying our new condo, it occurred to me that at 48 years and eleven months old, my childhood dreams are all coming true. 

I love my body, I am a decade married to the childhood crush of my life who I lost touch with for 20 years, and now I am going to be traveling the country but coming home to a high rise South Loop Chicago apartment with amazing city views, and some of the best public transportation in the world. 

And all of that has me 1) recognizing how powerful I am. And 2) realizing that I don’t know what I want for the future.

I have been asking myself what I want to create for myself, who I want to be, and what that would look like. And frankly I am coming up blank. 

And not just coming up blank. Blocked. It feels like hitting a different kind of glass ceiling. Self imposed, and at least a little opaque. A frosted glass ceiling if you will.

So I have been looking. For directions on how to unblock my creativity. For physical actions I can take to shift my thinking. For solutions, both practical and woowoo.

Because if there is one thing I have learned about my life since I have had my eating under control, it is that if I seek, I will find. Maybe not what I expected, but something as good or better than I asked for.

So I am out here seeking. What I want to put out into space. How to be more authentically myself. How to be of service in the best way for me. How to hold my own joy and peace and also bring joy and peace to the people around me. What my next right move would be. 

I trust that as long as I keep my drug foods out of my body and live my most authentic life, that I will continue to have a life beyond my wildest dreams. Or at least on par. 

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