onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “change”

30 May 2015

It’s not the salad, so much as the principle…

I have been eating a lot more raw vegetables for several weeks. I have been having big salads at least once, and often twice a day. Colorful, delicious arugula salads with radishes, onion, mushrooms, bean sprouts, cucumber, and a handful of steamed broccoli and canned artichoke hearts.

I haven’t generally thought much about raw versus cooked vegetables, but I have noticed that my body dysmorphia is in what seems to be a dormant phase. And it makes me wonder if the two are connected.

I eat my vegetables every day. I have done so for over 9 years. I have been regularly consuming fresh produce like Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, onions, bok choi, Swiss chard, cabbage and green beans. Mostly roasted or sautéed. But since I have started eating so much salad, I have been feeling significantly calmer about what I look like.

And I have not lost weight. That’s what makes it interesting.

I have questions about why. Is it chemical, and physiological? Is it all psychological? Is it a combination? Or is the whole thing just coincidence? Am I just in a good phase regarding my body image issues?

There is a part of me that wants to say that it doesn’t matter if the two are connected. What matters is that I am mostly well now. But ultimately, it does matter. It is the difference between peace and torment. And I need to admit that I do not believe it is a coincidence. But I don’t want to, because I love eating lots of cooked vegetables. And if I admit that is having an effect on my mood or my happiness, it means I will have to moderate how much of my food is cooked.

I am a compulsive eater. I might have my eating under control, but I will never be neutral around food. If I ever had the ability to be indifferent, that ship has sailed. And then it sank. I like my food, and I like it decadent.

It’s not that my big salads are not delicious. They are wonderful. I love every bite. But I can often forget how much I will enjoy them when I am not in the actual process of eating one. There is a kind of mental block I have around salad. And I know that I am not the only one. I have talked about this with lots of other people.

And there is that part of me that doesn’t want any more limits. Whenever I think it might be time to make a change, my first reaction is always to be a crybaby-whiner. But I already gave up sugar and grains, and I quit smoking, and I limit my coffee, and severely limit my diet soda. Don’t take anything else away from me! I mean, they are just sautéed Brussels sprouts? Can you really find fault with Brussels sprouts? Seriously?! (Can you hear the whining?)

The first thing I have to remember is that moderation does not have to mean The End. I do not have to give up my Brussels sprouts forever and always. I can limit them to, say, three or four times a week. But the more important thing I have to remember is that I don’t have to do anything. It’s one of my Jedi Mind Tricks. It takes away a lot of my initial instinct to rebel when I remind myself that I’m a big girl who lives her own life and makes her own decisions. If I want to fight and make a fuss, I can eat cooked vegetables every day on principle. Who is going to stop me? But just like every other action I take, I will reap what I sow. There is no escaping that.

In the end, I always want the gifts. If limiting my cooked vegetables means more days of peace and sanity, I will choose that. It’s how I roll. But I don’t always choose that first. Sometimes I take longer to get out of my own way than others. But ultimately, I want what I want. And I have learned over the years that I want sustainable happiness more than I want instant gratification.

I am still interested in the ways you take care of yourself and the gifts you get from not harming yourself with food. Use the hashtag #betterthanchocolate and share your experiences. I want to hear from you!

Also, follow me on twitter @onceafatgirl5.

And please feel free to follow, share and repost my blog!

Posted in Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
17 Aug 2014

Let the chips fall where they may. (Because they are going to anyway.)

It’s funny to realize that you don’t know yourself. Or that you are not who you once were. Or that maybe you were never that person you thought you were and you didn’t realize it.

I have always considered myself a person who never took chances. Who played small. Who never risked.

To a certain extent, I know that it’s true. Until a couple of years ago, I never took risks with my heart.

But when I look at the things I did do, I can’t help but note my own daring. I auditioned and got hired as an actor in a famous, long-running comedy in Chicago at 20. I moved to New York City at 21. I danced with a modern dance company for years. I wrote a play that went up in San Diego and spent a month there while it ran. And through all of this, I never thought of myself as a risk taker.

I also did all of these things while I was fat and food obsessed. I am not saying that these were bad decisions. They were not. But I was high on sugar. I made these decisions, but I didn’t always take responsibility for them. I had grand notions, but I was not a high-functioning addict. A lot of these exciting things were marred by my needing to get rescued when I couldn’t pull my shit together to see them through on my own.

When I got my eating under control, I let my life get kind of small for a number of years. In retrospect, I can see that it needed to be that way. They tell people who are just getting control of their eating that they shouldn’t make any major life changes for the first year.

The first year. That makes me laugh. I needed at least 5. But I have always been a late bloomer. Quick in understanding, slow to process. Fast with ideas, paralyzed around actions.

But then I started writing this blog, and keeping a commitment to write weekly, which was risky in my little life. And then because of this blog, I fell madly in love and let myself get risky again. Really risky. Like leave-my-home-and-go-start-a-new-life risky. Only this time I was sane and healthy. I was sober. I made bold choices, not rash decisions. Choices I knew I would take responsibility for. Because I had the clarity to think them through, past the current moment. And because I had given up trying to control life.

When I put boundaries around my food, I learned that you can only do the best you can, only do the right thing, only follow your heart. And then you have to let the chips fall where they may. And go from there. I learned that I don’t get a say in where the chips fall. That I can’t control the outcomes of my choices with manipulation. That even exquisite planning and execution don’t deliver the results I think they “should”. In other words, when I put boundaries around my food, I learned to let go.

And since I have been in love, I find that I really do love adventure. Yes, I am afraid of the unknown. I think that is part of being human. But I am not paralyzed by it. I am actually excited by it. I think love makes me excited for the next adventure. Because it’s an adventure with my boyfriend. Because it’s not my adventure, it’s ours.

And it may be time to embark on the next adventure. I don’t know for sure yet, but it might be time to move forward. And I don’t know what that looks like or where it will take us. And I can’t wait. Because there is something else that I learned when I got my eating under control. If you do your best, follow your heart, and let go, things always get better. Maybe not right away. There might be dips and stalls. But ultimately, I have always ended up happier, wiser, more content, and in a superior position. So there’s always that…

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
15 Jan 2012

You get what you get and you don’t get upset

My mom is “something” at me about this blog. I say mad. She says “not mad”. She won’t say what. But she’s something. She said I was blaming her for my difficult childhood. In case you think so too, let me be clear: I do not blame my mother for my difficult childhood. Everybody gets the life they get. Yes, I had a lot of pain growing up. But in case you hadn’t noticed, I turned out fucking great!

I also feel I should note that my mom is not insinuating anything about my personality that is particularly far-fetched based on her experience of me. There was a very long period in my life when I did blame her for most things, and everybody else for everything else. I had no concept of responsibility. I was a victim of life. Life hated me. And it was everybody’s fault but my own. I can see how she might come to the conclusion that I wanted to get righteous and lay blame. She has known me my whole life, after all. But she is mistaken about the point of this blog. I’m different than I was growing up. Inside and out. Not that I’m cured of my defects. But I don’t lead with them anymore. And I certainly don’t want to use this blog to foster them. I want to scrutinize them. I want what I write here to be an exploration of honor, not a manipulation of people and feelings. I want to expand my integrity, not make excuses.

The thing about blame is that it takes away responsibility. If I blame my mother for my life, I give up my power and freedom. Thankfully, I have already learned that this is a fallacy. That no other person can be responsible for my life. Even if I want them to. Even if they want to. Even if I don’t “take” responsibility for my own life, I can never escape its consequences. I guess that’s kind of what makes a life a life. It belongs to one person who is responsible for the whole thing.

I have a lot of emotions. I feel things very deeply. I didn’t know how to cope with that as a child. (I’m still figuring out how to cope with it now!) I can remember being about 4-years-old, in bed under the covers, having some overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t manage. I don’t even remember what it was, or what brought it up. I just remember that I said to God, “This has to get easier, or I’m not going to be able to do it.” I meant life. I meant feeling.

Who’s to blame for overwhelming feelings? Maybe it’s chemical. Maybe it’s my personality. I don’t know why I got this intensely sensitive heart. But I did. It makes me an excellent friend and a fabulous babysitter. It made me eat myself to 300 pounds. How I dealt with it, good and bad, was up to me. And no, I did not do a very good job of dealing with it for most of my life. But it’s my sensitive heart. They were my ill-judged coping mechanisms. And I paid the consequences for them with my life. Which, frankly, is exactly as it should be. Because then I got to change.

For years, I believed that I was fat and crazy, and that fat and crazy were me. But through some miracle, my understanding shifted. Yes, I was fat and crazy. But no, fat and crazy were not me. That was not my inescapable fate. My past did not have to be my future. I was going to have to change myself in extreme ways. But it was possible. And more importantly, it was up to me. Only me.

Now I want peace in my heart. Who’s to blame if I don’t have peace? Shall I blame my parents? Or my boss? Or my government? Shall I be angry and righteous? My heart will still be sensitive. And I will still have eating disorders. And life will still be life, with its million valid reasons to panic and cry and rage and hate and quit. And a million legitimate places to lay blame. But I’m pretty sure that all of the validity and legitimacy in the world will never make blame into peace. And I’d rather have peace.

Posted in Life, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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