onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “beauty”

01 Dec 2012

I may *be* insane, but I’ll manage to not *act* insane. Good enough?

I have been an unholy wreck this week. Crying and anxiety. I’m restless. I want to claw my skin off. And the bulimic girl who lives in my head is disturbingly loud lately.

I weighed myself this morning. I always weigh myself on the first of the month. And only the first. The kinds of eating and body image disorders I have can make me obsess about the number on the scale. So in order to keep it in perspective, there is only one day that I step on the scale. And since my quit-smoking-weight-gain started, the week before weigh day has been overwhelming.

I gained another pound and a half this month. I weigh 157 lbs. That is 24 lbs heavier than I was on June 1st. I have been eating less and less and have still gained weight every month. (A friend said that sounded like its own special circle of hell. I’m pretty sure it is.) And I am so angry. And I feel so punished. And I am absolutely positive that I am going to be alone my whole life.

I don’t know how clearly I understood it myself, but looking back I can see that I quit smoking because I wanted to have a shot at love. I wanted to be able to be intimate with a man, which is hard when you have a fiery torch in your mouth and are exhaling a toxic smoke screen. But I wasn’t prepared to gain this much weight. And I am a former fat girl. The size of my body matters to me. I have spent years rigorously maintaining strict boundaries around my eating. Every day. No matter what. And that was supposed to keep me thin. It did keep me thin until six months ago. And I do not know how to love my body this size. And I don’t know what man would be interested in me this big. Because I think I am so ugly right now.

I’m telling you I hate my body. (I am writing this thinking You can’t post this, Kate! You’re supposed to be uplifting. Don’t tell them you hate your body! Don’t tell them anything is wrong. Just write something charming and spiritual. But obviously I am telling you. Because it’s honest and it’s my story.) And it occurred to me the other day that this emotional rough patch I have been going through is all about hating my body. And that the week before weigh day, how much I hate my body is all I can think about. And the other three weeks of the month I put it in a compartment and wonder why I am so sad and when I am going to feel better.

I have been making a lot of empty threats to God this week. And then sometimes just begging. Please make this stop. I am doing everything right. I’m doing everything I am supposed to do. I can’t take it any more. If it doesn’t stop I’m gonna…I’m gonna… something.

And boy does my bulimic girl want me to something. Laxatives, castor oil, throw up, starve. SOMETHING!

But the truth is I’m not gonna something. For some reason I realized when I put down sugar and stopped eating compulsively, that I had to stop hurting myself to spite difficult circumstances and situations. That circumstances and situations don’t care. That God isn’t an indulgent or exhausted parent who will give in if I throw a scary enough tantrum. And thankfully my boundaries aren’t just about not over eating. I may not under eat either. I may not purge or abuse laxatives. I may not honor my bulimic girl at all. I have boundaries around acting sane, even if I feel crazy. And God, I sure do feel crazy.

So maybe there’s an uplifting message after all. I have a commitment not to hurt my body, even if I hate it right now. I have a promise to keep my food boundaries, even if they are not keeping me as thin as I would like. (I mean, I hate having gained 24 lbs in six months, but I’m a 300 lb girl in a rented body. I pay rent on this body by keeping my food boundaries. If I were eating compulsively, I could have easily gained 24 lbs in two weeks. )

This is my prayer: Dear God. Please let me love myself and my body exactly as I am. Please let me know that I am beautiful as long as I am taking care of myself.

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22 Sep 2012

When you say womanly, you mean hot not fat, right?

Yesterday I spent much of the day in bed. Crying. Because I hated my body.
Today, I put on a sexy dress and some knee-high boots and went into the city to meet some people. I didn’t hate my body so much today. I wasn’t in love with it, like I have been before. But I could see that to an outside observer, I am really lovely.
My dismorphia has been coming in waves. And I have just been trying to keep my head above water and not get swept away in the current.
I have been comparing myself to me a year ago. I keep thinking that being 12 lbs heavier than I was before I quit smoking means that I’m 12 points (units? notches?) uglier than I was then. But friends and strangers keep complimenting me. One of my neighbors actually asked if I had started working out because I look so good. So healthy. A friend of mine said that she could see that I had gained a bit of weight. But that she thought it made me look more beautiful. Less drawn. More womanly.
That’s the consensus. Healthy. Womanly. I am a sensuous woman. I like the idea of being round, soft and warm. It fits nicely with the kind of wife and partner I would like to be someday. Nurturing, loving, empowering. And I know that I am beautiful, and sexy. These are traits I learned to own when I got my food under control. Well nourished, well rested, with strong integrity and a good amount of genetic luck.
So why am I having such a hard time with my dismorphia lately? I think a lot of it is that I am not in control right now. And that scares me. I have no idea when the weight gain will stop. I have no idea how much more weight I could gain. I don’t know how long it could be before I feel happy and comfortable in my body again. 3 months? 6 months? A year? (Oh dear God, please don’t let it take a year!) I don’t get a say about my body right now. I am in free fall. And I am having a hard time trusting that this will end well.
Maybe it’s just because I spent my first 28 years in a body that I hated. I have a lot more experience thinking I am ugly than I do knowing that I am beautiful. I have been experiencing a lot of those same old feelings of body shame lately. I noticed today that when I am out in public, I have not been breathing. That I have been keeping my neck and shoulders rigid. I am waiting for someone to make a comment about my body. I’m waiting for someone to tell me I’m fat.
I, of course, am not at all fat. There is nothing unhealthy about my weight. At 145, I fall well within the normal range for a woman my height. (5′ 6.5″) My 12 lb weight gain comes from doing something very healthy. Quitting smoking. Plus all signs point to much of the weight being temporary. I have gone up one pants size. Now an 8 fits me comfortably. A 9 in juniors sizes. This is a normal size.
I wish I felt like a normal woman in a normal body. I wish I knew for certain that I would stay a normal size. I wish I had some idea of when the weight gain would stop and I would get some measure of control back. I wish I knew how long before I stopped being uncomfortable in my own skin.
I’ll be honest, if I had known that this was going to happen, I would not have quit smoking. But what’s done is done. I’m no fool. I can see that there is no turning back now. I’m already in it. At this point, the only way to the other side is through.
Here’s another thing. I have a reputation among certain people I know for being non-judgmental. The one who accepts herself, and therefore them. The person people can come to and tell their secrets and failures, without fear of being shamed. I am the woman who teaches people to love themselves by example. Because I learned to love myself. And here I am hating myself. Being ashamed of my body. And I feel like I am letting everyone down. Like I’m letting you down. And I am embarrassed to admit that. I want to be better than that. I want to be stronger than that. I thought I was made of better stuff…
And maybe the most difficult part of this whole experience is not knowing what the lesson is. Or if there is a lesson. Maybe I’m supposed to have some room for the self-hatred. To let it in so it can flow back out again. Maybe I need to stop resisting hating my body. Maybe I just need to hate it until I love it again. Not hurt it or abuse it. But hate it. Think it’s ugly and let that be ok.
Or maybe I should ignore it. Perhaps I need to stop caring about what I look like for a while. Stop looking in the mirror. Stop dressing to be cute. Stop worrying about whether or not men find me attractive. Because I do worry about it. Which is kind of ridiculous, since I have not been dating for a very long time now.
Or maybe the lesson here is that I just have to keep doing what I am doing. Longer. Just keep managing my self-hatred. Keep putting it down. Keep finding some way to love myself one day at a time.
And there is one more possibility that has occurred to me. And it’s that I have had this self-hatred for my whole life. And that I ate it. And when I stopped eating it, I smoked it. And now that I am not smoking it, all there is to do is feel it. And maybe if I feel it for as long as it takes, I will move through it. And I will be able to love my body because it is mine. Not because it used to be fat and unhealthy and now it is thin and healthy. And not because I managed to make it a shape that I think the world will find appealing. But simply because it is the only vehicle for the life that belongs to me. Because it is me. And I am worth loving.
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15 Sep 2012

Even the angry, destructive side of me likes sexy pants

I have multiple eating disorders, hence I have a whole cast of messed up characters that live in my head when it comes to food, eating, my body, and my emotional life.

I talk a lot about my fat girl. She’s relatively easy for me to talk about. She’s lived in my head for almost the longest. (The girl who is a burden has lived in my head the absolute longest. We’re not going there today…) And in many ways, I think my fat girl is the easiest for you to process and handle (unless you have an eating disorder of your own). She’s sad and a coward. She couldn’t stop eating. She hopes I’ll go back to being a coward so she can have her cake back. That’s about the extent of her. Don’t get me wrong. She’d kill me if she got the chance. But it would be a slow death. Diabetes and heart disease. Death by chocolate, if you will. Which I bet sounds great to you if it’s not actually a possibility for you like it is for me.

But there is also a bulimic girl who lives in my head. And she’s the scary one. The one that is the most dangerous. And damaging. The kinds of things I was doing to myself because of my bulimic girl scared me into quitting sugar entirely. She is the reason I keep such strict boundaries around my food. She would rather see me dead than fat. She is angry and obsessive and cruel. And she’s excessively vain. Not a healthy, see-how-I-take-care-of-myself kind of vanity. A seven deadly sins kind of vanity. She has no peace and no love. Nothing is ever ever good enough for her. Especially not me.

My bulimic girl has a tag line. A particular thought. Get it out. Actually it’s more like Get it out. Getitoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitout Get. It. OUT! NOW! (And this is said through clenched teeth.)

It was this thinking that had me abuse laxatives, drink castor oil, run 14 miles a day and eventually make myself throw up my food. My bulimic girl was full of hair-brained schemes to deal with the aftermath of my fat girl and her binge eating. If it were humorous, it might be a version of The Odd Couple. A grotesque murderous version…

Since I quit smoking 3 months ago, I keep gaining weight. I have gained 12 lbs since June 1st. It has been hard for me to deal with. (This may be my understatement of the year.) I put on a pair of jeans the other day, and they were tight. This was especially embarrassing and sad for me. In February, they were comically big. They had to be held up by a belt and sagged around my butt. I wore them to babysit when I expected to get dirty. Feeling these jeans pressed up against me was incredibly uncomfortable. Emotionally. Because it was a reminder that I feel incredibly fat. And I know there is nothing for me to do about it. It is not about calories. When I first quit smoking, I didn’t change my eating at all and I gained 3 lbs. The next month, I ate lighter than usual, (more salad, less cooking in butter) and I gained 4 more lbs. So it is not that I have been doing it wrong. It is not something I can control. My body is changing. I don’t get a say.
Guess who hates this? Any thoughts? My bulimic girl. This is killing her. She insists that there must be something I can do. At least don’t get fried onions this week. At least chill out on the full fat yogurt. At least walk a couple more miles a day. Do SOMETHING! Do you WANT to be this fat? GET IT OUT!
So my fat girl wants to give up and eat cake (not like she’s popped up this week – she just always wants to give up and eat cake), and my bulimic girl wants to resist and starve me. I decided not to give up or resist. I decided to accept. My body is what it is. Right now. And I don’t know for how long. And I don’t get a say. There is nothing for me to do.
But that is not true. There was one thing for me to do. And I did it. I went out and bought bigger pants. I bought pants I feel sexy in. Because maybe the hardest part of this weight gain is that I have been feeling incredibly unsexy. And sexy has been a very important part of my life for years now. It is a part of my personality. It is one of the things that I love about myself and my life.
And buying sexy pants that fit my body the way it is right now has shut my bulimic girl up. For now. I’m sure she’ll be back. Just like my fat girl, and my burden, and my good girl. But today, because I have my eating under control, none of them get to run my life.
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16 Mar 2012
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I can see you rolling your eyes at me…

When I was growing up fat, I wanted to be beautiful. (I can understand that to some people, size and beauty do not have anything to do with each other. But I never felt beautiful when I was fat. Nor was I ever treated like I was beautiful.) I thought that being beautiful would solve most, if not all, of my problems. But then, I thought that my problems arose from outside of myself. I thought God, and the world had done me wrong. God by giving me a broken body. The world by judging me for having that body.

When I got control of the food, I became beautiful. I’m pretty, by genetic luck. I sleep well and regularly. I’m present and aware because I’m not high on sugar anymore. I have a nice figure because I eat well, walk a lot, and again, got genetically lucky. Plus I’m confident, which makes me sexy. Basically, I got what I always wanted. And you know what? I still have most of the problems I had when I was eating compulsively. I’m just not fat or crazy anymore. And now I have a whole new problem. Unwanted attention.

This morning I was walking to the train on my way to work. A man coming toward me had been ogling me for a whole block. When he got to me, he literally said, “Damn, I would fuck the shit out of you.” I literally said “blehhhhhgh!” I kept walking. But I was upset. It made me feel gross. And unsafe. It was attention because I’m beautiful and sexy. And I didn’t want it.

The truth is that I love the way I look now. I look in the mirror (most days) and think I’m gorgeous! I love the way I feel now. I love loving my body. I love loving myself in general. I deal with food the way I do for myself. And that’s good. Because what happened to me this morning is exactly the kind of thing that would make me eat a chocolate cake if I did it for anyone else.

Living inside a fortress of fat made me invisible for most of my life. It meant that I didn’t have to know how to reject boys, and eventually men. They were the ones doing the rejecting. I didn’t really understand that girls/women were being liked and pursued by guys they had no interest in. And if you had explained it to me then, I probably would have scoffed at such a “problem”. Oh, poor baby! Too many men like you. Boo hoo. I didn’t know that fat made me feel protected until the fat went away and I was left vulnerable. Yes, being overlooked made me lonely. But there was a safety in that loneliness. No, I wasn’t getting attention from men I was interested in. But I didn’t have strangers making lewd comments about or at me at 8 in the morning either. I didn’t have strange men touch me when I walked down the street. (Yes. That happens to me now. Yes. I throw an unholy fit and publicly shame them. Grab my ass, and you’ll think twice before you do it to another woman. Just so you know.)

I know other women like me. Women who got control of their food, lost a lot of weight, and found out that they were beautiful. Some of them, like me, found strategies for dealing with this unwanted attention. We found a reason to keep the food at bay that had nothing to do with society or people outside of ourselves. But some of them couldn’t handle it. They would rather eat themselves to death. They would rather be eternally lonely. They would rather have the misery of fat and insanity, than the fear of unwanted attention.

For me, it is fear. Fear of not having my person, my body, and my life respected. And it’s a different kind of disrespect than I had for most of my life. Until I was in my late 20s, I was at best, ignored. At worst, humiliated for being unattractive. I am grateful now to be attractive to men I am attracted to. That part is fantastic! But before I got a handle on my eating, it had never occurred to me that if I were attractive in general, all sorts of men would be attracted to me. The ones I liked as well as the ones I didn’t.

With respectful men, it’s both easier and harder to deal with. Easier because I don’t feel threatened. Harder, because I don’t like rejecting people. Especially when they have been genuine and vulnerable. Especially if they’re nice guys. But I had to learn how to say no gently and sweetly. And I did learn how. Because the truth is, attention from any man I am not interested in is unwanted for me. I am not the kind of girl who likes attention for attention’s sake. I got used to being left alone. I had to learn how to be a beautiful woman in the world. And like most things that have to do with male-female relationships, I did not get my education growing up. I got a crash course around 30.

The other thing I don’t like about rejecting men is that there is a shamed fat girl living inside me. And she doesn’t think she’s good enough to reject anybody. She’s got a whole lot of who-do-you-think-you-are going on. It’s sometimes hard for me to remember that I’m not a fat, lying cheater anymore. That I’m kind of a catch now. And there’s also the irrational panic of scarcity. If I reject this one, maybe another one will never come along.  Though rational Kate thinks If you’re not interested, you’re not. You would still not be interested in this one, even if nobody else ever did come along. (I’ll say it helps that I like somebody at the moment. It keeps me from worrying about who is coming along.)

Maybe you’re reading this and scoffing, like I would have. Boo hoo. You’re beautiful now. Life is so hard. But I want to say that this is an actual issue for me. It’s something that I have to deal with day-to-day. Without cake. It’s something that fills me with anxiety. But every time I find myself getting attention I don’t want, that makes me uncomfortable, I have to choose it. I have to accept that it’s a part of my new life. It’s the trade-off. Because being beautiful is merely the byproduct of having a handle on my food. Which I do because it makes me happy. Beauty is the side effect of loving my life.

But here’s where it balances out. When I have my food under control, I can deal with life. I can find peace inside myself. I can get through a difficult situation. I can deal with an uncomfortable feeling. I can manage feeling unsafe. It’s not that I hate being beautiful. Like I said, parts of it are fabulous. I just don’t like everything that comes with it. And it sure as hell is not the magical answer to all my troubles I thought it would be when I was eating compulsively. What I love is being sane and capable. And being able to deal with whatever comes my way. And having the ability to say, “No. You cannot have my number. You cannot walk with me. But I’m flattered. Have a nice day.”

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