onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “body dysmorphic disorder”

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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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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11 Jun 2023
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When Rational Kate isn’t invited to the party

I have a lot of messed up body image issues. But they are usually dormant because I have my eating under control.

If we consider 26 the age at which our brains are done developing, then I was either fat or bulimic for my formative years. And that had an effect on the way I think about my body.

My eyes are broken. I can’t “eyeball” my food. If I’m hungry, 4 ounces of meat looks tiny. If I’m not hungry it looks like a mountain. 

The same is true for my body. When I first got my eating under control and started getting physically smaller, I would startle when I walked past a window and saw my own reflection. I once saw a picture of myself where my face was obscured and I literally asked someone who it was. Because I could not imagine that the thighs on the woman in the picture could be my thighs.

And right now I am having a sort of body-dysmorphic episode. (It’s fine. I’m fine.)

For about two months I have been doing a more intense exercise routine where I do 30 minutes of cardio on my mini stepper 5 days a week, instead of a 2 mile jog. I have been losing weight. My butt is noticeably perkier, and my clothes are noticeably looser. But for the past week or two, I have been flitting in and out of these weird little thought pockets where I “can’t see the results.” Times when I think the changes in my butt are all in my head. Times when I think all the bacon I am eating is making me fat.

Rational Kate knows that all of this is ridiculous. I can literally feel the difference in my butt when I sit down. I can feel my workout pants getting bigger every time I pull them on. But if having my eating under control has taught me anything (and it has taught me so many things) it’s that rational Kate doesn’t always get invited to the party. 

The answer of course is that there is no answer. The answer is to not make any rash decisions about my food or my body for the moment. It’s to keep doing what I am doing and the crazy will eventually go dormant again. And eventually it will come back again. The answer is to make friends with the dysmorphia, without letting it make any plans.

I don’t have to listen to the crazy because I have my food taken care of. All of my calm(ish) indifference to a very emotional part of my life experience (being fat in our culture sucks if you did not know) is possible because I have boundaries around my eating and a supportive community who wants me to be my most authentic self.

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12 Feb 2023

Working to think the thoughts I want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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05 May 2019

I don’t want to feel broken even after the broken part got fixed

I have been struggling with how I feel about a recent(ish) weight again. I feel like this happens once a year or so, in the past 4 years. I gain weight. For no discernible reason. I do not change the way I eat, at least not it in any major way. I just gain weight. Eventually I lose it. (At least that has been the case so far.) And then I gain it back months later. And then lose it again. Back and forth, over and over.

When my gram was sick in the hospital before she died, I lost a lot of weight in a few months. I definitely was not trying. I just dropped weight. I got down to about 131-133 pounds. That’s skinny for me. I was still pretty curvy, but definitely skinny. And from about April of 2010 to about August of 2012 I stayed basically the same weight. I stayed skinny regardless of what I ate. I ate a lot of bacon. I ate a lot of fried foods. I had to add a second piece of fruit to my day to keep from losing even more weight. And I just stayed skinny. 
But ever since I quit smoking, my weight has fluctuated wildly. A huge gain in the months following the weight loss. 3 years of maintaining that higher weight. Then I lost it in just a couple of months. Never all the way back down to my skinniest, but back into my size 6 jeans. Then a gain and a loss and a gain and a loss. Again and again.
A friend who has thyroid problems recommended I get mine checked. It’s not a terrible idea. But living on the road makes it a bit of a pain. Though we have great insurance and I could find a doctor anywhere. 
But the problem is also that I don’t like doctors. Having grown up fat, I don’t trust them to listen to me, to respect me, to look at me with anything except what seems to be a disdain for my lack of willpower. I was told for a long time that everything that was wrong with me was that I was fat. And that I could do something about it if I would only pull myself up by my bootstraps, or whatever. 
It’s hard for me to take doctors seriously when they all had opinions about me, but none of them could actually help. They sent me to nutritionists who told me to eat in moderation. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t just stick to a diet. They were frustrated and angry with me. For not being good enough. It’s hard for me not to feel like they were the ones who weren’t good enough. That they were the ones who failed me. That they shamed me for my disease, when they didn’t actually understand the disease. And kept forcing on me a “cure” that wasn’t.
But that’s unfair. Kind of, anyway. Because I don’t know if I would have been able to give up sugar if that had been the recommended treatment. I don’t know if 12 or 16 or 23-year-old Kate would have been available for that. Thank God 28-year-old Kate was. That took care of the eating. And most of the weight.
I don’t want to worry about my weight. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to care about it. I don’t want to be ruled by how much gravity is exerted on my body. I want to take care of it to the best of my ability, and just have that be enough. I want to nourish it and hydrate it and move it with love.
I probably should find out if my thyroid is not working properly. I should probably brave the doctor and find out if there is something wrong with my hormones, something that could be corrected. For that love of my body. Not to squish it into a socially acceptable size and shape. 
But that said, even if I do get my thyroid checked and it turns out that I am not running at 100%, I don’t want to care about my size. I don’t want to judge myself for the size of my butt or my belly or my thighs. I don’t want to feel like I am sick or broken because I am not skinny anymore. Especially when the thing that was most sick and broken about myself, my eating, my addiction to sugar and carbohydrates , is taken care of, with commitment and honor and love, 3 times a day. No matter what.
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11 Nov 2018

I need to worry about the kitchen scale, not the bathroom scale

In the past 12 1/2 years, since I gave up sugar, my weight has fluctuated many times. Sometimes by a lot. When my beloved grandmother was dying, I lost 20 lbs, eating exactly the same as I had been. When I quit smoking I gained 30, eating significantly less than I had been at my thinnest. When I was eating sugar and carbs, I was morbidly obese. But since I have given them up, I have been in regular sizes, but not one regular size. 

I have gained weight again recently. And I have not changed my eating or my exercise regime in any way. For you regular readers I will also add that I have not had soy nuts in months now. I am still in my size 8 pants, but now, just barely. And it’s difficult and uncomfortable. Physically and emotionally.
You would think that a woman who weighed 300 lbs and wore a size 28, would not fret over potentially having to buy a pair of size 10 pants. But you would be wrong. I still have all sorts of fears about my weight. And all sorts of body image disorders. I have a pretty serious case of dysmorphophobia. If I look at my thighs and butt and belly in the mirror lately, I see a hugely fat woman. My eyes are broken. And while my body image problem is often dormant, when I gain weight of any kind, even small amounts, it can flare up pretty seriously.
I do not look at women around me who are a size 10 and see fat women. But when it comes to myself, I am pretty sick in the head.
But there is ultimately only one thing to do about it for myself. And that is keep my food boundaries. Keep doing what I am doing. Don’t let body struggles interfere with my food issues. They are related. But they are by no means the same. And “going on a diet” isn’t going to help me. It never did before. It would be ridiculous to think that it would now.
The truth is, I could eat lighter if I wanted to. But that is another experience of mine. Since giving up sugar and carbohydrates, eating all salads and lean proteins doesn’t necessarily facilitate weight loss. And I have to love my food. I must. It’s why I can do it for over a dozen years. Because I am not on a diet. And I never have been.
At this point, the second best thing I can do for myself, after keeping my strict boundaries around my eating, is not worry about my weight. If I eventually need to buy a new pair of pants, so be it. If I naturally lose the weight I gained, which has happened to me in the past, well that’s great too.
I am here to take care of my food problem. My morbid obesity used to be a manifestation of that problem. Now, my dismorphophobia is a holdover from that time. But my weight is not a problem. At least not anywhere but my own head. And as long as I continue to consistently and unfailingly use my kitchen scale, I don’t need to worry about the bathroom scale.
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13 May 2018

Don’t quit quitting just because your doctor is an arrogant ass.

I was talking to my mom this week and she told me a story that made me angry. She had a friend who quit smoking, gained 30 pounds, was put on a strict diet by her doctor, and didn’t lose the weight. So they sent her to a psychologist (maybe a psychiatrist, I am not positive) with the implication that she was lying about what she was eating, and that is why she was not losing the weight.

I cannot say how this makes me burn, how it fills me with rage. When I quit smoking almost 6 years ago, I also gained 30 pounds. And because I have body dysmorphic disorder, it took a real toll on my mental health. So I started scouring the Internet.

Now, in general, don’t do this. The internet can be a dark, crazy-making place. But I am really glad I did. Oh, I was not at first. Because the first thing that I found was a lot of sites like Web MD telling me that people only gain 2-10 pounds, and mostly because they eat more to make up for not smoking.

Then I went on forums where I found a bunch of traumatized people asking why they gained 20-40 pounds after quitting smoking, and a bunch of trolls telling them it was because they were making up for their “oral fixation” with food. And often fat shaming them. (And it felt like they were fat shaming me. As if I haven’t gotten enough of that BS in one lifetime.)

I read a lot of things along the lines of.

Stop eating so much and exercise. Quitting smoking doesn’t affect your weight. There is no scientific evidence that says that quitting smoking makes you gain weight.

But by the time I quit smoking, I had already had my eating under control for 6 years. I had already been strictly controlling my portions. And my quantities on some foods were cut in half. I was not eating more. I was eating less. And I knew it. It was quantifiable. And I was keeping track like I always had. Plus I had started walking more. While I had been generally walking 3-5 miles a day in my daily life in the city, I then added 8 mile walks 2 or 3 times a week.

What eventually helped me was when I found forums for fitness buffs. These were filled with people who, like me, were already tracking their food and exercise routines. They already knew what they were eating and how much fuel they were burning.

What they had to say was not pleasant. And I did not want to believe it. But in the end, it turned out to be true for me. They generally gained 26-40 pounds. And their bodies and metabolisms didn’t go back to normal for about 3 years.

I quit smoking in June of 2012. Between June and December of that year, I gained 30 pounds. I went from a US size 6 to a US size 10, I stayed a 10 for 3 years, and then in June of 2015, pretty suddenly, I was a size 6 again.

There is also an article in Time from 2017 (5 years *after* I quit smoking) that says that one French study showed that while a quarter of participants gained less than 3 pounds or even lost weight, a quarter of participants gained more than 17 pounds.

When people, especially doctors, say that there is no evidence that quitting smoking causes weight gain, I remember those fitness forums. I hope more studies like the French study are done about smoking cessation and weight gain. Because gaining weight when you quit smoking is basically understood to be the norm. But blaming the people who quit for being gluttons also seems to be the norm. And I, personally, have had enough of that crap. It’s already hard to quit. And blaming people for something they have no control over makes us feel crazy! I was committed to quitting, no matter what. And I had a food regimen in place that kept me grounded. But I promise you, if I hadn’t, I would have said “screw this” and just started smoking again. Because I am vain. And because society judges us on what we look like, more than how healthy we are. In fact, society equates thin with healthy. It does not ask if that person is a smoker.

I am not sorry I quit. But only because I got through those awful 3 years and got my body, the one I am comfortable in, back. So if you have quit smoking and gained more weight than is comfortable, and you feel crazy because you know you are not overeating, I have been there. And this, too, shall pass. You are not crazy. You are not a glutton or a liar. Your body will stabilize again. Don’t quit quitting!

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27 May 2017
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Catwalk vs Boardwalk, or how I don’t think twice about wearing my bikini in public

I have been thinking about body image and body image issues a lot lately. Partly because I live in a beach town now, and, to my own surprise, I am really comfortable here. I have never lived in a beach town before. Of course, both Chicago and New York have beaches. But neither of them have a strong beach culture. It’s not why people go there.

One thing I have noticed about Corpus Christi is that the people here don’t occur to me as particularly body conscious. I mentioned last week that I started wearing shorts here for the first time in about 30 years. Partly because I saw that people wear shorts, all shapes and sizes and ages of people. Not because their legs are shapely and their thighs are skinny. Just because it’s hot.

I think it’s interesting to note that when I started wearing my bikini in public 5 years ago, I was also in Texas, though in a different town. And here I see all sorts of bathing suits at the beach, again on all shapes, sizes and ages. Bikinis are not exclusively worn by young, skinny girls. And I don’t just mean because I am there. When I walk on the beach, I don’t feel embarrassed, or self-conscious. I don’t feel like people are even looking at me.

Now, one of the things I love about New York City is that it is a non-stop fashion show that everyone is putting on for everyone else on a daily basis, not just during fashion week. But because of that, there is a lot of judgment. Of course, to a certain extent, that’s the point there. I went out looking to be judged, and hoping to be found flawless, or at least fabulous. But sometimes that judgment could trickle down past the clothes and right to the body the clothes were on. And even if it didn’t, the line between fashion and physique always felt a little blurry, which made for a lot of insecurity when I wasn’t looking to be judged, like when I was feeling fat, or when I didn’t have it in me to “do it up.”

In some ways, I find that my fashion sense gets a little lost here in Texas. Clothes or looks that used to get me at least a double take, and sometimes praise from a stranger in the city now go basically unnoticed. And that’s a little sad for me. I love clothes, and style. I love the fashion show.

But the up side is that there is a lot of freedom from my body image disorders. And that leaves a lot of room for me to be myself, try new looks, and generally relax about my body. And as a former fat girl with eating and body image disorders, that is a welcome surprise.

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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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28 Feb 2016
2 Comments

It has to be about my head, not my butt.

I have been keeping up with my running. 2 miles a day, 5 days a week. (I may call it running, but I am unapologetically super slow, so what I really mean is jogging…)I like it. I like the way I feel. I like the sense of accomplishment that comes from keeping that kind of commitment. I like the way it feels to know that I can count on myself. Especially since I grew up telling myself all sorts of things about how much I hated exercise, how bad I was at it. And I was alway looking for the time that I would never have to do it again. Now I am jogging in the hopes of doing it for the rest of my life.

But there is another side of my exercise commitment. It is sneaky little thoughts about “more.” That I should run longer. That I should run faster. That if I do that, I might lose more weight. Maybe even get more food.

This might seem innocuous enough. Normal eaters with healthy weights might think that makes some sense. Many normal eaters and exercisers manage their weight like this. I am not a normal eater. I am a compulsive eating sugar addict, exercise bulimic, with body dysmorphic disorder.

I want to run 2 miles a day, 5 days a week for the rest of my life. And I want that to be enough. I will probably get faster, because I have already gotten faster without trying. But even if I don’t, heck, even if I get slower, I want to be satisfied that I’m doing something loving for my body, not something to “fix” it.

I don’t want to burn out. I don’t want to get injured. I want to run. Slowly and consistently. Because, as a friend pointed out to me, as a food addict, exercise can’t be about my weight or my size, it has to be about my head.

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