onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “body image”

19 May 2024

Living the loose life

I had a super exciting Friday night this week. A family friend was in town running sound for a touring band and I got to see him and their amazing show. And I got to meet an internet friend for the first time! And it was all magical!

One of my favorite sayings is “how you do anything is how you do everything.” And in getting my eating under control I ended up changing basically everything about my life. 

I never wanted to do anything in preparation for anything when I was growing up as a sugar addict and compulsive eater. And as a really talented and intelligent addict, that was an easy lifestyle to execute but a difficult one to bear. It meant never preparing for anything and then having to constantly worry and overthink and perform spectacularly in the moment. I always wanted to “fly by the seat of my pants” but I don’t think I understood the toll it was taking on my peace and joy. All because preparation felt like work and work felt hard.

In order to get my eating under control, I had to start planning and preparing in advance to have what I needed to eat. I was told that I should be the most important person in my own life and that if I cared about getting sober from sugar and not eating compulsively, I was going to have to make sure that my food was taken care of. And that *I* very specifically needed to do it. 

I must weigh my portions myself. It’s part of my spiritual relationship with food and my ability to be totally honest and responsible for everything that goes into my mouth. I need to read ingredients. I need to ask how things are cooked at restaurants. I need to refuse to eat things that are not on my approved menu. Even if it’s something made just for me. Even with love. 

So now, I find that my life is so much the opposite. I plan and prepare all the things so I can relax in the moment.

Friday before I left I made sure everything was taken care of: My home, my husband, my food for the weekend, my dinner for the night, my tickets, my Ubers, my friends’ needs, my schedule, ALL THE THINGS! And that made me feel great about myself. That made me feel calm about my night. That made me feel like now all I had to do was go with the flow. And then I just got to be in the moment. I didn’t have to worry or overthink. I got to enjoy the moment and the music, my new friend and my old one.

Growing up my eating was addictive and out of control and it forced me to use ridiculous amounts of energy to try to keep myself together and show up for the most basic life tasks. I had to keep myself so tight and reined in, because of how loose my eating was. Now I keep my food tight so I can live my life loose instead. 

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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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28 Jan 2024

Feels like a shame but probably isn’t

I am almost a full month into my “Peaceful Purposeful Joyful Creation” journey and I am still learning and shaky. But also still plugging along. 

One of the things that I had to learn early in getting my eating under control was time assessment and management. Because shopping and chopping and cooking and packing and eating took time. And I had to actually know how much time I needed. I had to learn to be practical about practical things.

And I got pretty good at that. Certainly good enough that I figured out my priorities and how to implement them in my life.

There is a saying that I think about a lot. “You can talk about priorities all you like, but your schedule doesn’t lie.”

And my schedule clearly says self-care is a priority. I take care of myself with my eating boundaries, my workout and sleep and meditation schedules, my skin and hair care. 

But all of this scheduling and routine maintenance has made a nice tidy place for my head to go chaotic. Rush through step 1 to get to step 2 while simultaneously preparing for steps 3-8 in my mind. My brain is full. No room for anything but the rest of my planned out time.

On the outside I look calm and confident. I know this because people say it all the time. “You have such a peaceful presence. You always seem so together.” Inside I am panting and panicking and focusing on perfection.

This past few weeks of trusting that my life will work out even if I don’t run around like a crazy lady is…frankly hard. There is a level of superstitious thinking to the way I live that stems from my childhood thinking. That the “magic” is in not stopping, not looking, not hesitating. Not giving life, or bad luck, or karma, or the devil or WHATEVER, a chance to get me.

But the thing is that I already know that the real magic is in slowing down. It’s in the stillness. It’s in the trusting. It’s in the space between thoughts.

Because ultimately that is what my brain chaos is. It’s me not having to trust. It’s me not having to look too closely at my dreams and my wishes and what I really want for my life. It’s me not having to expect that things will work out for the best for me in the end. So I can use that time and space to go into survival mode and “prepare for any eventuality,” instead of being excited, interested, involved, curious.

I guess what I am coming to recognize is that all of that mental busywork is a way for me to burn off my creative energy without having to create anything. 

And that sucks. I hate that! I’m annoyed at myself. I’m frustrated that I have taken so long to get here. I am impatient to grow faster and be better now!

But I am reminded, yet again, that these big changes come a little at a time. I do not currently have the capacity to bridge the gap between what I am and what I want to be. And the only way to get there is to continue. At life’s pace. Not mine.

Which feels like a real shame but probably isn’t.

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10 Dec 2023

Not another quit in me

Today I am going to write about quitting. It has come up twice this week, once just this morning, so I guess I will take that as a sign. 

There is a very big practical difference between quitting, and having quit. It is harder to quit than it is to stay quit. And I am pretty sure I do not have another quit in me. Not for sugar. Not for cigarettes. Because both of them sucked so bad.

17 years and 11 months ago, I quit manmade sugars, starches and almost all grains, along with some foods so naturally high in sugar that they kick off sugar cravings. I think it’s worth noting that all of the natural foods I avoid (potatoes, grapes, corn) are all easily made into alcohol. My body is a still.

It took a full year for me to start digesting food properly after I quit sugar and carbohydrates. When I was in the food, everything I ate was so processed that my body didn’t even know how to break down whole foods. And then another 6 months on top of that to come out of the food fog I had been in for the majority of my life.

For that year and a half I wore fuzzy pajama pants everywhere because I could not handle anything rough or restricting on my skin. I was afraid of binging so I would go to the Manhattan flagship Barnes and Noble (in said pajama pants) and stay and read until it closed at midnight, and then take my time getting home so I wouldn’t eat in the night. I watched the same 3 DVD anime (Fushigi Yuugi) on a loop just to obsess over something that wasn’t food.

When I quit smoking cigarettes I got a side effect that affects about 3% of people who quit smoking. The top layer of skin in my mouth started to loosen and peel off. I had open sores all over my gums from having basically smoked the inside of my mouth like a salmon for 20 years. I had already been off sugar for over 6 years but I started gaining weight uncontrollably. And I mean uncontrollably. My food got cut. I was eating quantifiably less food and fewer calories and I was gaining weight. I felt crazy. I was miserable. And it is only over 11 years later, at 46, even after years of working out 5 days a week and keeping my eating boundaries, that I am *almost* the same size I was at 34.

If I had known how these things would look, and feel, and work out, I would NEVER have done them. Were they worth it? Ten thousand and a half percent! But I am afraid of exactly those things I had to get through. Pain. Weight gain. Feeling out of control. Sickness. Lethargy.

I don’t know how, knowing what I do, that I could ever choose it again.

Maybe I am not being fair to my very powerful and committed self. Because I have certainly learned to lean into choosing the practices of delayed gratification for the purpose of long term contentment. But I still think it’s asking a lot of the girl who went through all of that to do it again. And for what? A smoke at a party? A bite of cake?

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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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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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