onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “bodies”

25 Feb 2024

Apparently, you don’t know what you’re missing

When I first got my eating under control, I lived in a bit of a fog for about a year and a half. I wore pajamas everywhere. I left my house in the middle of the night to drink diet soda and read manga in those pajamas in the bar down the street so I didn’t eat compulsively. I don’t remember a lot of that time. 

But then I got clear headed. And I realized that for the first time since I was 5 years old, I was very conventionally attractive. That was both the good news and the bad news.

When I say I was conventionally attractive, I mean I was hot. I mean that the kinds of things that happened to beautiful women in movies happened to me. 

Once, my mom was visiting me in New York City. We were getting into a cab, and as it was pulling away, a guy jumped in front of it so he could get my number. I remember my mom looking at me kind of funny and asking me if that kind of thing happened to me a lot. And me saying…well, kind of.

But when I think about that me, that 30 something girl who felt 16 again only actually excited to be here, I can see I really was like a 16 year old girl. I had to learn how to navigate the world differently. I had to get a crash course in having social currency.

I was completely unprepared for the differences in the way I was treated. Good, bad and heartbreaking. Completely insecure about my new place in the world. When you are fat, even though it’s a terrible one, the world has a place picked out for you. Completely unsure of who I wanted to be now that it felt like I could be anyone. And I tried on a bunch of new clothes and personalities. 

But the thing is, that 15+ years later, at 46, what I am is authentically me. Or the most authentically me I have ever been. I feel so much more confident, beautiful, sexy, sure, secure, and comfortable. That was 15+ years of making amends, changing behaviors and setting boundaries, loving myself and learning to love others as they were. And yet, nobody has rushed into traffic to get my phone number in many years. Which seems a shame really. I mean, I’m married, so I would refuse anyway, but I’m way more appealing now than I was teetering on my hot girl fawn legs.

I’m not saying I’m not a beautiful woman. I am. I know it. I enjoy it. But beauty without youth is not as in demand. And frankly, that’s a relief. But also, a pity. You clearly don’t know what you’re missing.

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18 Feb 2024

It was always sink or swim anyway

I had a fun little bout of body dysmorphia this week after our nephew’s wedding. 

I had posted pictures of myself on social media hoping people would tell me I was pretty. And then people told me I was pretty! 

And then I started to wonder if I was really pretty. And then my face started to look like just a bunch of shapes. And I started asking my best friend if I was really pretty or if it was just a face. Is it my hair that makes me pretty? Do I not look like myself in makeup? Am I only pretty with makeup? Am I only pretty without it?

And I wasn’t asking her to reassure me. I really didn’t know. I really wanted to know.

And she said, honey, this is just another side of your dysmorphia. 

Oh. Right. That.

So I changed the channel for myself. Am I pretty? I don’t know or care. It’s not my business today. 

It’s not my business today.

This has been happening too as I both get a smaller body while building muscles and changing my shape. When I focus on my body changes, I start to focus on my body. And I stop being able to see my body. Suddenly it is a bunch of shapes. Am I changing or is it all in my head? And what does it mean? About me?

(Spoiler alert: It doesn’t mean anything about me. It’s the result of the exercises I do consistently.)

I’m 46. I’m happily and lovingly married. I have my sugar addiction under control. But some of these issues, food and eating and body too, are only ever dormant. Never really dead.

I have learned to ride the waves. It still sucks. Sometimes I fall off. But it’s only ever been sink or swim anyway. It’s just that now I know how to swim.

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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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29 Oct 2023

Gross sack of meat grace

When I was fat, I used to relate to my body as if it were not really me. Like it was the loaner car the dealer gave me while my real one was in the shop. In my mind I was my mind. I was my thoughts and feelings and words. I loved being my words! But I hated my body and I didn’t like to think about it. I tried to both disassociate, and dissociate myself from it.

But when I got my eating under control, I could not do that anymore. I could not get numb enough without my drug foods to not experience my body. It was right there. And it was yelling at me that it was me and I was it. So I had to change the way I dealt with it, thought about it, talked about it, talked *to* it, treated it.

When I was in my early thirties, I danced with a modern company in Brooklyn. And one day one of my fellow dancers, also 30ish at the time sighed and lamented “remember when you were 16 and your body was perfect and the world was yours?” And I laughed because no. At 16 I was worried about who was climbing the stairs behind me and how big they thought my ass was. (And not in a good way, like now.)

But one advantage I think I got from having my story be my story, is that I know how to deal with a changing body with grace. And I have the lived experience of getting better, not worse, with age. I am not talking about my weight. Since I put boundaries around my eating, I have been chubby and I have been skinny, but I have still consistently been getting fitter, stronger, and more physically attractive (at least to myself!)

I feel (I probably really am) stronger at 46 than even at 30, dancing on stage and throwing around and catching the smaller girls. I think I get better with age because I am constantly learning to be more myself. To settle further down into my most authentic self, and settle ever more comfortably into this fascinating machine/gross sack of meat.

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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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08 Oct 2023

No intuition. Just a routine and some friends.

I love my routine. But on Friday I got food poisoning for seemingly the first time ever. (I literally just said something about never having had it a month ago. And clearly forgot to knock wood.) So normally Saturday is the day I grocery shop, but I was resting yesterday. So now I have to go today, along with all of my other Sunday errands. And I don’t wanna!!!! 

Last night I went to bed without cleaning the kitchen, knowing this morning I would have to wash some dishes before I could eat breakfast. Ugh. And it meant I didn’t have enough fresh milk for my breakfast coffee so I had to use part of my portion from a box of milk I keep on hand. And it meant I didn’t have any grape tomatoes (my favorite dinner salad) so I had to have an orange pepper instead. That turned out great though because the pepper was perfect and sweet. 

But for as much as I hate a break in routine, and I really really hate it, I have learned from getting my eating under control that I need to take care of myself first.

For the most part, my routine is self care. It’s how I make sure I do all of the things I do for my mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. It’s how I make sure I get my workout and my water and my sleep and my meals and my meds and my errands taken care of.

But I am very bad at knowing what is good for me. I am very bad at listening to my body. Because it *always* wants to eat. And it *never* wants to workout or drink water or sleep. So I do the self care I do by routine. But that means I sometimes have to listen to other people when they tell me to take it easy.

And just like there is someone in my life who mentors me with my eating boundaries, I am the mentor of other people. And one came to me last week and said she was not feeling well, but she hoped her body would “snap back” the next day. And I could hear for her what I cannot hear for myself. That “snap back” was a judgement of the worth of her body based on its usefulness.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I felt compelled to tell a mentee that her body deserves gentle treatment and attention, and then, with loving urging from another friend, I was forced to take my own advice days later. 

But I did. And I am grateful. And once I get back from the store today, I can get back to rotting on my couch with a cozy fall audiobook, and some knitting.

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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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20 Aug 2023

Can’t get my body out of my head

For all of 2022 I was either sick or injured. And so far, for all of 2023 my body has been shifting and changing.

I started walking stairs for exercise late last year because it was a workout I could do even when I was having trouble breathing. I would go slower for longer than if I were jogging, but I was still getting my heart rate up and sweating.

And then I got my breathing taken care of. And it turns out that a high energy workout on stairs will build your butt muscles. Quickly. And since then, I have been absolutely loving my workout. I am not miserable and gasping for air. I am loving the way my body is changing, and the shape my exercises are creating. And I naturally get faster the more weight I lose and lighter I am, which increases the number of steps I can take in my 30 minute workout, which again increases my muscle.

But the other thing is that currently I am just this side of obsessed with my body. And I don’t love that. It’s great to love my body. But I am an addict. And my love can go real bad, real quick.

In April, when I got my mini-stepper, I got weird about results. One day I could see them, the next they were all in my head. (They were never all in my head. My head is just a weird funhouse.) And in going about my day, I was stopping what I was doing to go look at my butt in the mirror. A lot.

Then I had a thought. That I should do one of those “picture a day” things, to track my progress.

Friends, I want to be less obsessed with my body, not more. And I realized that I do not want to do that to myself. Take a bajillion pictures of my butt to scrutinize and analyze and evaluate and judge. Not because I don’t adore my new butt. I do! I am absolutely in love with it in a way that I never could have been if I didn’t really work for it. But because I don’t want to “romance” my body obsession.

When people first start to do what I do with food, they have to change their language, in their minds and in their mouths. We have to stop saying chocolate is our “favorite” and start remembering that it is poison to us. And when the people I am responsible for mentoring start thinking longingly about sugar and carb “drug foods,” I tell them they have to learn to “change the channel.” To stop thinking what they are thinking and think something else. To stop “romancing” the food in their heads. Because it’s not a love affair. At the very least it’s an abusive relationship.


When I “romance” my body obsession, I start to think of all of the ways I could possibly get myself a “better” body. By which I mean a “thinner” body. Because when I obsess I am not obsessing about my health. Or my stamina. Or my flexibility. Or my strength. I am obsessing about my weight.

I am still very much in my head about my body. And I think that for as long as the changes continue to be noticeable in the mirror, I will continue to be more focused on my body than is comfortable. 

But I know from experience that this is temporary. That eventually things change. They even out or calm down or become irrelevant. And I know that I have been obsessed with my body before, many times for many reasons. Weight gain. Weight loss. The shape of some part or another. I am, after all, a sugar addict with eating and body image disorders. So I trust that this will pass. And I can have some room for my body obsession. And some room for my body to be its very lovely 46-year-old self.

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16 Jul 2023

Less bacon…but still a life beyond my wildest dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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