onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “body image disorders”

11 Aug 2024

No pictures please

It has been almost two years since I started walking stairs to work out because I couldn’t run because I couldn’t breathe. It’s about a year and 8 or 9 months since I started treat my new breathing problems (adult onset asthma) and learned that I have always had exercise induced asthma. And about a year and a half since I have been able to breathe while working out. All of this while in perimenopause. 

The changes in my body have been extreme. I have more than doubled the size of my butt with muscle, while simultaneously losing weight in my lower body and dropping multiple pants sizes, but also having barely any change in my upper body.

It has changed the way I walk. The way I stand. The ways I have to stretch. The kinds of clothes I want to wear. 

It has changed enough to change everything.

But my body has always been so changeable. Resilient and strong and adaptable.

I was 300 pounds at 19 years old. 130 pounds at 34. And since then I have stopped weighing myself. But in my life I have gained and lost hundreds of pounds. Sometimes when I was dieting before I got my eating under control. But after too. The changes when I had my eating boundaries were not as drastic, but what is drastic compared to 150 pounds?

The truth is for most people, especially women, 20 pounds is a lot. Even with my eating boundaries in place, firm and honored, I still have gained and lost more than 30 pounds at a time. 

And I have never felt so good, so free, as when I stopped caring about my weight. Let it fluctuate. Let it go where it wants. I don’t eat sugar because it’s poison to me. I don’t eat compulsively because I do not have a “done” button. But I love to eat. I live to eat and once I made friends with that, I let it be what it is. And what it is is lots of bacon and ice cream. 

I have a thought every once in a while that I should be taking pictures of my butt to mark my progress. Because there is so much change. And I’m proud of it. I like the way it looks. I like that I did it. I like that I knew what I wanted, and I put in the work and I get what I get. Which is as close to what I want as genetics will allow.

But then I remember that the kind of scrutiny that a picture a day welcomes turns on me quickly. It’s not too big a gap for me between the moments of “I love this milestone” and “HOW CAN I GET MORE AND QUICKER RESULTS????”

I am remembering to be present in my body. To let that hour in the morning be my time to care for it, enjoy it, push it, and admire it. And then go about my day not thinking about it.

I hope I can remember how much of my life was spent obsessing about my body, specifically how much I hated it, when I was eating compulsively. And that not having to think about my body is a luxury that comes from keeping my sugar addiction and compulsive eating under control and not letting my body dysmorphia get a good hold. Which means not taking pictures of my butt every day. Even if it is spectacular.

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02 Jun 2024

Obsessed is not in love

Over the past 2 years, I have not been trying to lose weight, but I have. I don’t weigh my body anymore, because of my body dysmorphia. But I am in size Small linen and workout pants and I believe I am a US size 6 right now. Which I was in my early 30s and is right around the smallest I have ever been since I was 12 years old. But also, I have not actually tried on a pair of size 6 hard pants, so I don’t really know.

And I don’t want to know right now. 

Managing my body is simple, if not easy. I sleep 8 hours a night, I drink water and keep my eating boundaries and workout and now I even go to the doctor and do my health maintenance. 

But managing my *thoughts* about my body is regularly a shitshow. 

I named this blog Onceafatgirl because once a fat girl, always a fat girl. Because the society and the culture made its mark on me because I was fat. And it’s a scar. 

I know it’s societal. I know that all women and even plenty of men are subjected to this same scrutiny and many  unrealistic expectations. But those of us who are or have been fat, know that it is not just about our looks. It’s a condemnation of our characters. And has a whiff of the Predestination of our Puritanical roots.

And even though I have spent many years now actively trying to dismantle my internalized fat phobia, my knee-jerk first thought of being physically smaller is a little shot of dopamine. A little happiness. As a treat.

So I am not going to go try on clothes. I am not going to stand in front of the mirror looking for minute changes. At least not right now. Not while I am obsessive. Because what comes after that is…insane….It’s wondering how many fewer calories I can eat (even though I don’t count calories.) How much more exercise I can do. It’s researching online how to burn more fat, and thinking about actually doing some of the weird or stupid stuff I see recommended. It’s just general craziness. 

And it makes me like myself less, not more. 

So I am just trying my best not to think about my body. Because being obsessed with it isn’t love. Love is accepting something or someone exactly as they are.

But I will close by saying that one of the best ways I keep my body dysmorphia at bay is to do those things I mentioned at the beginning. Sleep and water and exercise and general self nurturing. As long as I do my daily routine of self care, I don’t need to hyper focus on my body anyway.

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26 May 2024

Bodies gonna body

There is a brag that I have heard older women make my whole life, on TV and in movies and in real life. That they can still wear their clothes from 30 years ago or they can still fit into their wedding dress or some other claim of victory that their bodies have not changed significantly in their lifetimes.

And this is not my story. Not even a little. And not even since I got my eating under control. Actually I hear it more since quitting sugar because so many woman who do what I do with food used to yo-yo diet and then, once they gave up sugar and stopped eating compulsively, they, too, have been in the same clothes for decades. But not me.

Just in the past 18 years I have been a US size 4 and a US size 14. All weighing all of my food. When my beloved grandma was dying, I was eating bacon at every meal and giant fruits twice a day and was losing weight like crazy. Sometimes more than 5 pounds a month. When I quit smoking, my quantities of food were cut and I quit eating bacon and ate less fat and more raw vegetables and still gained weight. Over 30 pounds in 3 months. Literally eating quantifiably less, both calorically and by weight.

This was actually an important lesson for me. Because we are told and taught and treated like we have more control over our bodies than we do. At least aesthetically. And health wise too I imagine. And having specific measurable actions failed to give specific measurable results. At least not the ones I wanted.

Look. I do the things that one is supposed to do to stay healthy. I exercise regularly. I eat nutritious foods in amounts that keep me fueled mind and body. I drink water and meditate and sleep 8 hours a night. I am not saying that a person’s lifestyle doesn’t directly impact a person’s quality of life. I believe it does.

But bodies gonna body! Hormones and genetics and even brain chemistry and any of the myriad experiences that living in a meat suit offer, are all components of what I LOOK like. Of what you see when you see this body. And I am telling you that I have so much less control than I ever thought I did.

Of course I do have some very specific examples of how I do have some control. And that is fun and fascinating. I have absolutely changed the size and shape of my butt in the past year and a half through muscle building exercises. And I LOVE it. 

But when it comes to fat, to the distribution of fat, to my weight, to my size, I don’t have the kind of control I have been told I should have. The kind of control that says I can diet and exercise my way into a certain size or shape. I cannot. I have tried. It is *why* I got my eating under control in the first place. And even quitting sugar and weighing all of my food, I did not have that kind of command over my body.

But in getting my eating under control I got a clear enough head to see that I could only do my best. I could only keep my promises to myself, and let my body do its thing. And it’s doing a great job, frankly!

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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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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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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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04 Jun 2023

Ups and downs and how little control I have over them

I don’t weigh myself. I haven’t for about 10 years. I used to. Once a month. Most people who do what I do with food weigh themselves on the first. 

But when I quit smoking over 10 years ago, I gained a bunch of weight. I was keeping my eating boundaries and gaining weight anyway. It was really difficult. I was having nightmares about my weight and getting on the scale. And I would weigh myself on the first and be relieved that I didn’t have to do it again for another month. But the relief only lasted a week, tops. And then I was obsessed with what I could do to not gain more weight by the next time.

But I was not overeating. I was not doing any of the things that conventional wisdom tells us make us gain weight. I was eating less and less calorie dense foods and weighing more.

I started losing weight about 6 months ago. And since we have moved back home and I got a mini stepper two months ago, the weight loss is quicker. The other day I put on a dress that I bought 5 or 6 years ago and that used to be just the right amount of snug on me. Now it hangs off of me. Pants that used to be tight are now way too big and I have to roll the waistband down twice to get them in a comfortable position.

A lot of people who do what I do talk about how they still wear the same clothes from years ago. But that is not my story.

My story is that my weight has changed many times in the past 17 years. Not just when I quit smoking. And that I personally don’t have any answers as to why. I have gained weight eating all salads. And I am currently losing weight eating ridiculous amounts of bacon and pork rinds. Weighed and measured yes. So there is a limit. But bacon and pork rinds don’t weigh all that much.

I decided years ago that I would concentrate on keeping my food addiction under control and not worry about my weight. That whatever weight I am when I am weighing and measuring my food is exactly the right weight for me to be. 

But I still live in our society. And I am most definitely conditioned to think that getting smaller is always automatically good. So I keep an eye on those thoughts. I don’t entertain them. And I won’t make any major lifestyle changes, like longer or more intense workouts, without talking to a trusted person about them first.

I want to be strong and healthy. I want to love my body. But I don’t want that love to be contingent to my weight or size. I don’t want that love to be contingent on anything.

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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 Dec 2021

Listen to your h…ives?

When I eating compulsively I was willfully disconnected from my body. I hated my body. I blamed it for not being good enough. Mostly not pretty enough. But I didn’t really have an alternate way to relate to my body. Everyone made it clear that bodies were made to be beautiful, and that if mine was not, it was worthless.


That is a thing that happens in a fat-phobic society. We learn to internalize hatred for any body that is considered bad, mostly as a defense mechanism. To love your fat body is considered shameful. To be ashamed of your fat body shows that you are properly embarrassed by your shameful body. That you are on the “right side” of what is good and right and honorable.


I have spent the past few years actively shifting my view of fatness. It has nothing to do with my eating. At least, I am working consistently at disentangling my love of my body from its shape and size. I am an addict. I keep my addiction under control through the way I eat. I think of my eating as a way to honor my whole self, emotional, physical and spiritual, not just how pretty I am by societal standards.

So I have reconnected with my body over the years. I have learned to love it for all of the things that it has done for me, all of the ways it serves me. All of the things it wants to teach me. And it has taken a long time to get to understand it as well as I do. And I know that there is much more to learn.

One thing that I have come to understand over the past 15+ years, since I put boundaries around my eating, is that my body shows me how well I’m doing through my skin. I can feel “fine.” I can look on the outside like I am doing “fine.” I can seem to be managing everything just “fine.” But my skin can tell a whole different story. This is coming up this week because I am officially hive-free, for the first time in 4 months, since I started the very stressful job that I left this week.

In late July, I started a new job. And less than a week after I took it over, it got crazy, and I started to break out in hives. They were on my chest, in my armpits, and in my bellybutton. 

And as I changed the job, personally developing and implementing structures and procedures that streamlined the process while still capturing all the necessary information and creating the needed output, some of those hives went away. First my chest cleared up. And then, eventually, after many weeks, my armpits cleared up. But my bellybutton has been hanging on to those hives the whole time.

But I left my job on Monday. And yesterday, for the first time in months, my skin, all of my skin, is clear. There are no more hives anywhere. And it makes me a little weepy to realize how unhappy I was, and how I was holding it together with pure willpower.

I can remember having had stress-related skin conditions as far back as high school, though I didn’t know it at the time.  I could barely walk at graduation because of a terrible outbreak of dyshidrotic eczema on the bottom of my feet, that at the time was misdiagnosed as athletes foot. 

But when I was eating compulsively I thought about my body as little as possible. I just sort of suffered through. And I had lots of practice, since I avoided thinking about my fatness because it hurt my heart to be fat.

I want to acknowledge my body today, for always trying to look out for me, even when I treated it like the enemy. I want to be grateful for everything it has done for me, even when I was actively hating it, and sometimes trying to hurt it, with exercise bulimia, and good ol’ fashioned stick-things-down-my-throat-bulimia, and abusing laxatives, and drinking castor oil, and binging and starving. I want to be grateful that I have learned to listen to it, with love.
I am grateful to be in a place in my life where I can see that those hives were a defense mechanism against me harming myself. That my body was telling me that I was in the wrong place. That there was something wrong. And I am especially glad that instead of blaming my body for the hives, instead of treating them like one more way my body was broken and wrong, I could see them as a loving warning that something was wrong outside of myself, but within my control. And it took me a while, but I managed to listen and do something about it.

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27 Jun 2021
1 Comment

Jolly good fellows

The other day I was taking to some ladies who do what I do with food, and we were talking about fellowship and community. And I was reminded how important my eating boundary community is for many many reasons. But one that is most important to me is that for the most part, nobody wants me (or anyone else) to keep boundaries around my (our) eating.


For whatever reason, having a restrictive food plan for oneself makes other people really uncomfortable.


I often avoid using the word restrictive, because I know how it sounds. But the truth is that I have a restrictive diet. I do not eat simple man-made sugars, any grains other than wheat germ, and I even abstain from some fruits and vegetables with particularly high sugar content. My diet is full of restrictions. That is a simple truth.


But I want to remind you that I am a grown-ass woman. I decide what foods I eat and what foods I don’t. The food plan that I follow does have rules. But I follow the rules because I choose to. I can leave at any time. But I like my life better when I do keep my restrictive diet. And yes, sometimes it is hard. Even if I don’t crave my drug foods anymore. Because people want me to eat a thing they made especially for me. Or they want me to have a taste of something I am allowed to eat, but it’s in between meals and they don’t see how it’s a problem, even after I have said no. Or they want me to have some cake on my birthday. Or it just hurts their hearts that I have not had any chocolate for years. “Just have one! Live a little.” (I am physically incapable of having only one. And I am living a *lot* more by not eating sugar than I would be by eating it.)


I don’t fully understand what it is about food that makes people want a say in other people’s business. In our conversation the other day, one woman said that her food life is as private as her sex life. She doesn’t want to talk about either of them with anyone outside of those directly involved. And I can thoroughly appreciate that.


My relationship with food is, if not wholly private, at least deeply personal. I was shamed for much of my life for my eating and food choices and my body size. And when I made different choices that had a significant impact on that body size, people still had all sorts of opinions about it. Now instead of being unhealthy or gluttonous, I was being restrictive and extreme.


None of those people have to live in my body with me. They don’t have to face any of the consequences of my eating. Not the consequences of cravings, not the consequences of fatness, not the consequences of body dysmorphia, not the consequences of my bulimia, or anorexic thinking, or self-loathing or depression or any of the myriad effects that eating compulsively has on my brain or my body or my soul.


I need my food community because they are there to support me in what *I* want with food and my body. They are there to support me in fighting my addiction. For them, this situation is life or death. Just like it is for me. And if you think I am being dramatic, you must be a particularly well adjusted person with a happy life. And I am very happy for you. But it solidifies for me that you are not at all qualified to comment on my food.

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