onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “change”

29 Jun 2025

This old(ish) dog’s new tricks.

It’s sort of crazy to me to think that over the past two and a half years so many things in my life and my body are entirely different than they used to be.

About 3 and a half years ago I got sick and I didn’t get better. And I hated doctors. I spent my young life fat and was not treated very well by doctors. And as an adult I was poor and didn’t have insurance so I just sort of managed. Went to a clinic if I had to, but mostly just rode it out. 

But I am married to a union construction worker. We have excellent insurance. Yet I still didn’t want to go. Doctors were a traumatic experience for me most of my life. And even unable to breathe I didn’t want to go. To the point that my husband was at his wits’ end. 

I will say that even right from the start, I had a whole bunch of experiences that reminded me that there is a reason I don’t like doctors. I was treated with so much condescension by several. And I have to say that being an incredibly smart person, being treated like a child by a person whose mother I could be, really brings out the bitch in me. (I literally had to stop myself from explaining the logical fallacy used by the probably 20 something first year resident while she was condescending to me…I did hold my tongue. Keeping my eating under control keeps my tongue under control too. For the most part.)

But here is the deal. That one change, being willing to go to the doctor to deal with my breathing, made a huge shift in both my physical body and my experience of it. 

When I stopped running because I could not breathe, I started walking stairs. Walking stairs gave me a butt that I never had. Having a butt moved my center of balance back from my toes to my middle foot. The shift in my balance made my short right leg tighter and more noticeable. That made me put a lift in one shoe to accommodate my short leg from being born with a club foot. 

Today I walk different. I workout different. My right hip rarely hurts anymore. My clothes fit differently, so that my belly is smaller and less noticeable. 

And I go to the doctor. Regularly. I have a doctor that I adore. And I have a particular phlebotomist that always gets me perfectly on the first stick. (Blood draws have always been another problem for me and I would often end up bruised all inside my elbow.)

But changing the way I ate at 28, giving up my drug food, weighing my food, eating only 3 times a day, created the opportunity to change. Anything. Anytime. If I could change my eating I could literally change any aspect of my life. Yes it takes work. But everything worth anything takes work.

And I am 48. I am old(ish). Which means you apparently can teach an old(ish) dog new tricks.

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25 May 2025

To Wren, and her best life

About a month ago I became enamored with a pretty little feral cat in my neighborhood. She was scared and jumpy and never let me touch her, but she was clearly hungry. And did I mention she was so pretty? I named her Suren, Wren for short, after a fantasy novel character who is a fairy queen who grows up feral on the streets in the mortal world. 

So I put out a bowl of food, and she was grateful. And I kept putting out food and she became affectionate in her own way. Rubbing against things near me, and lots of slow blinks and head cocks. And when she was hungry every day, she sat like a lady in front of my window and waited to catch my eye. So I was feeding her expecting her to eventually touch me. Trust me. But after over a week she never did. 

And then I figured out that she was pregnant. And had been the whole time she had been coming to me to eat. And my vet-tech-step-daughter said that moving a pregnant stray cat was often too stressful for them. And that it was *why* she was afraid to let me touch her. (And why she always had her tail down.) 

So I just kept feeding her and let her do what she wanted. Because that is the lesson of honoring boundaries. She was asking for food and also to not be touched. Was I offering help? Was I being of service or was I expecting a return?

And then one day, she came earlier than usual. So I fed her. And I noticed that her tail was up! And I thought, “you had those kittens.” And then she came back again later that same day. And ate a whole other can of food. Plus a bunch of treats. And I thought, “oh you definitely had those kittens.”

That day she led me to a neighbor’s home and went into their yard where I could not follow. But I knew where she was. And that felt better. Plus my step daughter said that it was better because if she thought I knew where they were she might feel the need to move them. So I left her alone. And she came every day and I fed her. 

But we went to our new work apartment this week and my husband found little pictures of her on our ring camera waiting like a little lady and I WAS NOT THERE. I got upset which got my husband upset. Ugh!

And then we came home this weekend, with a bunch of food and two bowls to hand out to two of my neighbors, to ask them to leave it out for Wren if they saw her. 

But when I went to see if I could lure her from the neighbor’s yard, another friendly neighbor who was friends with the neighbor in question looked and said there were no more cats but there were empty food and water bowls out. 

So maybe she moved her babies because they were found. Or maybe she and her babies *were* found by someone who took them to Animal Welfare. But for now, I don’t know. And maybe I never will.

One of the hardest things to give up is the idea that “I should have done a thing better.” If I had been better, known better, done better, an outcome would be different and I would not have failed or come out lacking. 

But that is the first thing that everyone told me when I got my eating under control. That I am not in charge of anything but my own actions. And that “If all you did today was keep your eating boundaries, you won. You succeeded.” It didn’t matter how many other things I failed at. Because the world is not on my shoulders. And not every problem or situation is mine to solve. And if some of them are mine, the best thing I can do is not drug myself with sugar. The rest will follow. 

Clearly I know intellectually that I did “enough” with Wren. I was willing, and did what I was able. But somehow it still feels bad.

And also, I liked her. We would sit together while she ate. She would occasionally come close enough to eat cat food off a plastic fork in my hand. She had a personality and I liked it. And now I miss her.

It feels hard to just accept certain boundaries. Especially from a feral cat. It feels like I want to help her, and do what is best for her in spite of herself. 

But also, I have a lot of identification with a feral cat. I am also used to doing what I want. And don’t really care if you like or appreciate my decisions. And trying to put me in an environment that makes you comfortable is not a gift to me. It is a trap. 

But hell. For all I know, she is living in the lap of luxury because someone snatched her and her babies up and took them home. What do I know. We all make our own choices. (Human and cat.)

There is a saying of people who do what I do with food. Having my eating boundaries lets me “wear my life like a loose garment.” When I am not eating my drug foods compulsively, I can (usually) gracefully navigate my life. Including my relationships, my hopes and disappointments, and just the changing of everything. 

So here’s to Wren. I hope she’s living her best life, whatever that looks like.

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16 Feb 2025

Trusting Life to be exactly what I need

I’m feeling creative again. I’ve been trying new makes. And I made a short instructional video on “reading your knitting” for someone on social media. Lots of ideas and thoughts swishing around with no idea what I will settle on. Some trials and errors. Mostly imaginings and daydreams with a few shots at different fibers and sizes.

For a few weeks I was out of ideas. Not in a bad way. I was just creatively exhausted. I did some mindless knitting. Listened to my audiobooks. Went for a walk. Watched some videos on crochet and embroidery techniques. 

Having my eating under control let me create a life for myself where I don’t have to worry about if I am doing enough. Because all I have to do is keep my sugar addiction and compulsive eating under control. If I can do that then it was a successful day. And as long as I am not craving drug foods, I have a shot at doing something meaningful to me tomorrow. Or the next day. 

Keeping my eating under control is me taking the very best care of myself. Everything on top of that is a blessing. And the longer I keep my addiction under wraps, the more I am able to do big, beautiful things above and beyond keeping my eating boundaries.

I used to always wonder if I was doing enough. And the answer was always that unless I was working myself to death, I was not.

So I didn’t really do anything. I worried about what needed to get done. I froze up. I freaked out. And I felt really bad about it. And I drugged myself with sugars and carbohydrates to feel better.

Now I know how to do things with the time and energy and love that I have in the moment. And as an artist I don’t feel compelled to be making all the time. I don’t need to be creating and putting out art to feel like an artist. Plus I have never rushed myself into something spectacular. 

Having my eating under control has taught me that the most important learning is learning to be still and listen to my life and my heart. And the best thing for me to grasp was that it all takes much more TIME than I thought it would and assumed it should. That care and attention take time. That fully grasping something new takes time. That when it comes to creating my most authentic self, everything worth anything takes time.

So I didn’t have to worry about not creating for a while. And I don’t have to work in a frenzy to complete a project before the “magic” runs out. And I don’t have to distrust myself or my discipline or my work ethic. I could, and can, trust myself. And trust that the more authentically I live, the more I can trust my Life to be exactly what I need.

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05 Jan 2025

I didn’t even want to be here

Honestly, I don’t even want to be here. There is a super ambitious (for me) project I’m working on. I’m cloth lining a crochet pouch and adding a zipper.

My first cloth lining. My first adding a zipper. I made my own pattern on graph paper. The piece, currently in progress, has gross imperfections that I will have to come up with better techniques for to make more in the future. But I always have a kind of deep knowing that I am good at making. And that I love it. That even the dissatisfaction is its own kind of satisfaction.

But I have the life I have because I take self care seriously and treat it methodically. 

I write this blog every week because I am committed to writing about my life as a recovering sugar addict. It’s self care like journaling, meditation, and exercise. Once I got my eating under control I could see that commitment was life changing. And that talking openly regularly about sugar addiction was a way I wanted to change my life. And it worked.

So here I am writing when I would rather be accidentally stabbing myself with needles and pins…(ok, I do actually hate that part. But I want to get back to it nonetheless.)

I could burn myself out on making. I want to. The addict in me absolutely wants to. I want to binge it the way I used to binge chocolate. Forget about my commitments. Just zone out.

And I used to make that way. Crazy up all night sugar fueled binges of compulsive creating. Too emotional to have the time or patience to actually care about craft. 

Being forced to stop to take care of my commitments, like eating my 3 meals, doing each of my weekly workouts, sleeping 8 hours a night, has made it possible for me to make more patiently. To take care of the details. There is no rush. 

It often felt like inspiration would go away if I didn’t finish. And sometimes it did go away. And sometimes it still does. 

But in the end, when I stop even when I don’t want to, to do things I know I need to, I get further, I learn more, and I make better. 

Now that this commitment is done I can make a little more. 

Until lunch.

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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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05 May 2024
1 Comment

I want to be myself more

I don’t love change. But I love having changed. I love having grown. And though I have never had a baby, when they say childbirth is the kind of pain you forget, I feel like that is what changing is like. Because I forget how bad it sucks when I am deep in the process and haven’t quite figured out how to be the thing that I am not yet, even though it is *right there*! 

When I quit sugar and got a handle on my compulsive eating, there were simple, if not easy rules. There is a list of foods I eat. I eat portion controlled meals of them 3 times a day. I choose whatever I want within the boundaries. I don’t eat anything else. Did it take something to not eat cake in the beginning? Of course it did. But there was no mystery to if I had done it. Did I follow the rules? Then I had done it.

When I quit smoking, one of the hardest things was the ways I had built it into my day and my life. The first cigarette of the day with a cup of coffee on my roof. The cigarette upon coming out of the subway onto the street. Where to stand to not be in the way. The cigarette after a meal. The last one before bed. But at least all of those things, I could see! I could tack them up on a calendar if I wanted and come up with new strategies to combat them if I needed. 

But just changing, growing, choosing to be a more authentic version of myself, and then doing it again, and again, there is no calendar and no map. It’s just me trying to change the air I breathe and the water I’m swimming in. 

It hurts. It sucks. It puts a strain on so many parts of my life that have depended on me being the way I was. The point is, I do have these inauthenticities built into my day like a cigarette. But I can’t put them on a calendar. I can’t pinpoint them on a map. I don’t even know where they are until I bump up against them. Or sometimes ram into them head first. 

But ultimately I want to be myself more than I want to be comfortable. No. I want to be myself more than I want to be anything else in the world.

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25 Jul 2021

A job, some fear and anxiety, probably a miracle.

One of my favorite things I had the opportunity to learn when I got my eating under control is how to go with the flow. How to let life happen as it does (because it will) and to make the best of it. To handle new and difficult situations with grace and ease.


On Tuesday morning this past week I got a call from management in my company, asking if I would take on a new position. And could I start the next day?


I was certainly happy to take it on. I have mostly just been working part time for almost a year now. And while I have enjoyed it, because I love having lots of alone time, the truth is I like work. I like being of use. I like being good at what I do. I like the feelings I get when I accomplish things. I like being impressive. My best friend’s old therapist said that a huge portion of our self-esteem comes from our job.


And there is another part of it for me right now. I am not working with my husband on this job. My boss is someone I just met for the first time on Wednesday. And while I love working with my husband, and we make a great team, there is something exciting about getting the chance to show someone else what I can do. And knowing that what he has to say means something different to the company, coming from a stranger and superior, than it does coming from the person who chose me as a life partner.


The other important thing about getting my eating under control when it comes to this job is that keeping my food boundaries has taught me how to manage my fear and anxiety. Because for as excited as I am to do this job (and I am very excited), my brain goes on a little merry-go-round ride of thoughts and feelings, and a good portion of them are fears. Fears that I will fail, that I am not as good as I think. That I am not good enough in general.


It doesn’t matter that these thoughts are irrational. Anyone with irrational thoughts will tell you that knowing you are being irrational does not change the experience of it. It’s why self-knowledge was never enough to lose weight when I (and seemingly everyone else) cared so much about my weight. (I’m sure the world still cares about my weight because it cares about weight in general. I just don’t care that it cares anymore.)


But in getting my eating under control, I learned how to stop thoughts. I learned how to change my mind. I learned how to change my thinking. I learned how to harness control over my thoughts as a tool.


Eating compulsively always had me too high on sugar to manage anything, especially my thoughts. It had me foggy, and careless, and numb. These are not ideal circumstances to take control of one’s own brain. The point of getting high was always to stop thinking and feeling entirely, not to control myself.


I am very excited about getting a new opportunity. And if you read last week, I do believe that this job came straight out of a miracle door. So I am going to keep meditating on miracles and the doors they emerge from. And I am going to keep my eating boundaries. And I am going to do an amazing job! Probably. And if not, I expect there will be another miracle coming through another door. But for right now I’ll do the work in front of me.

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09 May 2021

Build the muscle to change a mind

Yesterday my husband and I had friends over for dinner for the first time in forever! And it was awesome! 

My husband is a great cook and he loves to do it. But when we have company he usually makes things I can’t eat. So I either eat the parts I can, and supplement the rest of my meal, or I just eat my own food.

Last night my husband made pasta, so that was a no-go for me. And the fancy sauce he made was also not one I could have. But I cooked up some of our homemade Italian sausage, which is a personal favorite of mine. And he made, for lack of a better term, an Italian salsa for bruschetta as an appetizer. And while you probably already know, I don’t eat bread, I did get to have the salsa itself which was super delicious. 

I am grateful that I no longer look at the things I can’t have as “missing out.” My dinner was delicious. And guilt-free. But that took something. It took a conscious choice to take control of my own brain and stop certain thoughts. To recognize them, and stop thinking them. To change the channel. And that did not happen today. It happened a little at a time over years and years.

If I have one piece of advice for people who want to start abstaining from their drug foods, it would be to understand the nature of their own thoughts. It would be to become aware of how much control we each have over our thinking, which seems, at first, like something we have no choice in.

I am a completely different thinker than I was when I was eating compulsively. I had been thinking a certain way for 28 years when I finally put boundaries around my eating. I had worn certain paths in my brain. Certain thoughts necessarily lead to other particular thoughts. All of those thoughts, all of the paths they created, led directly to the foods that made me feel miserable and out of control. 

It takes something to leave the path. It takes a kind of bravery. It takes a kind of fortitude. And it takes practice. It’s like building a muscle. You don’t start being able to do 100 push-ups. You do a few with bad form and much heavy breathing at first. But you get better and stronger every time. And if you do it regularly, you build the muscles to the point that a push-up is second nature. Your body remembers. It knows. 

I also understood that I was never going to get anywhere different while I was walking the same paths. If I wanted to change the way I ate, I had to change the way I ate. If this seems like an obvious truth to you, let me assure you I tried for many many years to change the way I ate without having to change anything. I quite literally wanted my cake and to eat it too.

When I got my eating under control, people who went before me told me to change my language. Not to call things “favorite foods” anymore. To remember that they were poison to me. To refer to them as such. To stop romanticizing them. To stop thinking of them with longing. To stop thinking of them at all. To build that muscle.

So much of changing my life was in changing my mind. One thing at a time. One word at a time. One wishful thought at a time. And the gift of changing my mind about sugar also gave me the option to change my mind about other things. To know that the thoughts in my head were not “me.” They were merely thoughts. And I was in control of all of them, because once upon a time, even when I was really bad at it, I was willing to change my mind.

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28 Jun 2020

Amends are the worst! And also the best!

I have had a very hard week emotionally. I have been crying a lot. I have been thinking a lot. I have been trying to reconcile a lot of things. I have been restless, irritable, and discontent, as they say. And then yesterday I was a real asshole to two different people. A stranger and my husband. And I had to make amends.


Ugh! Making amends is the worst. But it is also, of course, the best.


I won’t go into details, because they are boring and would be filled my in-the-moment justifications for why, exactly, I acted like a jerk. But just rest assured that I did, indeed, act like a jerk.


The stranger let me have my way, not because I was right, but because it was easier for him to deescalate the situation. So I got what I wanted by being obnoxious.


Then later my husband and I got into an argument about a misunderstanding and a miscommunication. Because he has been frustrating and annoying me all week. But not because of him, or what he has been doing. But because I have been unhappy and frustrated and stretched thin myself.
To both my husband and the stranger, I admitted that it was me, and not them, that was the problem.


But amends are something else. Not just an apology. A mending. It’s right there in the name.


So for the stranger, I wrote a sincere note of apology. I admitted that I was entirely in the wrong. But I also left $20 in the note. Because I had gotten everything in that interaction, and he had gotten nothing. An apology, even a sincere one, doesn’t give him back his time. An apology wasn’t going to dry his clothes. In order for it to be a sincere amends, I felt it should cost me something. And while money is not the only way to make up for such things, it was the easiest way with a stranger.


With my husband, on the other hand, the amends has to come with a change in behavior. In order for it to be sincere, I have to hold myself accountable to being the kind of wife I want to be, even when I am sad, or hurting, or depressed, or struggling.


This morning I feel better, cleaner, freer, having taken responsibility for my own bad behavior. I am still not particularly happy. I still have a lot of things to work through and deal with for myself, but I have had a wake up call to show me that whatever is going on inside, I am still responsible for what I do and say and create on the outside.

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14 Jun 2020

Not dead yet…So expecting change

One of the most useful things about having my eating under control is my ability to change, often gracefully, sometimes less gracefully, but always with sense of well-being. If I’m not dead yet, well, then more will be revealed.


When I first put boundaries around my eating, parts of my life got very small for a while. I had to live through the withdrawal. I had to figure out how to reconfigure an entire life that had been centered around eating, specifically eating sugar and carbohydrates.


But then my life had all of this unused time in it. Time that had been spent pursuing and eating sugar. And my head had all of this new space. Space that had been taken up by my food obsession. And eventually I had both the capacity and the free time to try new things and think in new ways.


Change became a muscle I was building. It’s a muscle I continue to build. And it is invaluable in times like these. Times where flexibility and adaptability are currency. In times like the times we are living in now, people like me, who can get swept up in the current of a present in flux and an uncertain future, and just ride it until we get spit out onto the shore somewhere, are in a great position. We have the power that comes from being present in the moment. We have the power of freedom.


I have this gift because my eating is under control, which means my head is clear from both sugar fog and food obsession. I have it because upon getting the clarity of mind, I realized I had to live honestly and with integrity in all areas of my life, or I was going to end up back in food hell. I have it because I had to take on a way of life where I am rigorous with myself and deal with my own life, rather than looking to blame others. Even when others are wrong. Even when I am right and my anger is righteous. I have this gift because I got to move away from centering my life around what I want, and move toward the power of choosing what I wish to do with what I actually got.

I had to learn to make friends with my food issues. I had to learn to work around them, and make them work for me. And through that, I learned to make friends with what is so, and to not fight against the actualities of my life and my world, but use them. Or at the very least, learn to accommodate them.

Changing my eating and behavior around food also rewired my brain. In actively changing both my thoughts, and my actions, I changed a lifetime of compulsions and defaults. And I got good at change in the process. And it is a gift and a blessing that goes far beyond food or eating or the size of my body.

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