onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “commitment”

15 Aug 2021

Does my ice cream bowl miss me?

My week has been insane and full of ups and downs. I have been under a huge amount of stress. And I have not been hungry. Which is an interesting thing for a compulsive eater. 

Perhaps I should rephrase that. It is not just that I am not hungry. I have lots and lots of experience eating when I am not hungry. I mean I don’t want to eat. I mean I am forcing myself to eat my meals. I mean I am choking them down. 

Because of this I have changed what I eat for some meals. For example, at dinner I have been eating 2 eggs, instead of my delicious delicacies like my homemade ice cream with soy nuts, or pork rinds. And I have also had to make a few calls to emotionally recommit to eating my food. Because I have not wanted to eat so much that I scared myself with the thought of not eating.

I eat my meals because eating my meals is what I do. I am not on a diet. Not being hungry isn’t “a great chance to skip meals and lose weight.” Not being hungry means I make my meals as small as possible within my boundaries and eat them anyway. Because I eat three portioned out meals a day. No matter what.

If you think what I do with food is about weight and weight loss then this may be confusing to you. But I do what I do with food because I don’t have a normal relationship with food. I don’t know how to “eat intuitively” and I don’t know when I have had enough. For right now I may not want to eat, but this, too, shall pass. And when it does I want to be right here where I am with my food addiction under control, my boundaries in tact, and my ice cream bowl sitting in the freezer just waiting for me to make ice cream.

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08 Aug 2021
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A life beyond your wildest dreams will spoil you for anything less

Oh guys. This one is going to be short because I am tired. 

I worked 56 hours this week. Fifty-six. And that doesn’t count my hour commute each way. (Thank heaven for audiobooks! They make the commute a pleasure rather than a chore.) If you know me, you know this is not how I roll. I like a lot of free time. I like my time even more than I like money.

Since I took this job (19 days ago. Not even 3 full weeks.) the workload for me alone has increased fourfold. And my husband, who was not even on this job, has agreed to run the night shift. An actual night shift. Until December. So we will barely see one another for the rest of the year. 

Here’s the thing. I am not entirely unhappy. I do really like the job just because I am that good at it. In many ways, this job was custom made for me. I was trained for exactly this kind of detailed tracking. And the company I work for just gave me a *huge* raise. I mean, I asked for it, but they gave it to me. 

But I am tired. And I hate the idea that I won’t get to spend time with my husband. I married him because I genuinely love his company. We have talked about the times we can spend together. 4 am, my wake up and before his bedtime. The time we may be at work at the same time when he has a break. And I am trying to work out the best way to get the job done and still take care of myself. How to fit in my run and my meditation and my full night’s sleep and cooking my meals for the week.

Because, as I have said in this blog before, self care is not all bubble baths and spa days. Self care kind of sucks. I don’t want to wake up at 4 to run. But I do. I don’t want to spend hours of my precious weekend cooking for the week. But I do. I don’t want to stop and meditate and have to be still for 3 minutes when I am busy and already feel like I don’t have enough hours in the day. But I do. (OK, mostly I do. I sometimes forget. But I am committed to 3 minutes daily.) I don’t want to put down whatever I am doing to go to bed….Actually, nope. That last one was a lie. I like the shit out of going to bed.

Having my eating under control gives me the possibility of enjoying living the life I have instead of lamenting the life I think I should have. It lets me be flexible. It lets me prioritize. And it keeps me clear about the reality of my situation. If I come to be miserable, if it starts to hurt my marriage, if I make myself sick, I know that I can ask for help, or back off my hours, or even just quit. Having my eating under control lets me see myself clearly, my options clearly, and the reality of my situation clearly. 

Putting boundaries around my eating offered me a life beyond my wildest dreams. I am not going to settle for less than that anymore. So for now, I am going to do the best job I can. And if it ever no longer serves me, I know that I can move on. I will trust that life is giving me what I need, and that it will continue to do so.

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01 Aug 2021

Maybe the least weird thing I have ever done with food

This week I am going to talk a little about the practical aspects of keeping my eating boundaries.


I work on the office side of construction. I do things like make sure workers get paid and keep the paper trails of what was built when, and who signed off on it. And a lot of times, the thing getting built is getting built where there was previously just a big field. So often there are no restaurants or grocery stores close by. When I have a job where I go into a physical office, especially when that job is in the middle of nowhere, I keep backup food on the job site.


Today I will cook and pack meals for the week. And every morning I will pack my bag with a breakfast and a lunch to bring into the office. And they will be decadent and delicious.

But sometimes something happens. Sometimes things go wrong. Food spills or spoils. Or heaven forbid, I *forget* to pack my food and I drive the 45+ minutes to the job site. 

In my office I keep an emergency food bag. It has an extra food scale and extra batteries. It has canned pineapple and a can opener. It has boxes of milk that last for months without refrigeration. It has several kinds of protein options like cheese crisps, bags of pepperoni, and soy nuts. Plus a jar of wheat germ and a jar of pickles. It is more than enough to feed myself within my boundaries for two entire days. I keep all of it in a little box in the corner of my office. In a perfect world it will all go bad and get thrown out at the end of the job. But it is not a perfect world and I am not perfect.


The items in this box will not add up to a decadent meal. They will be fine. Even tasty. But not anything as delicious or exciting as the meals I will make myself today in my kitchen with everything at my disposal. But they will make meals that are 100% within my boundaries. And that is the most important thing for me. Even if the meal is meh, I will still have my abstinence. And the chance to eat another guilt-free, 5 star, 10/10 meal at dinner.

I have kept my eating boundaries for over 15 years by doing things like this. By having a plan for trouble. By putting preparations in place in case trouble comes. By protecting my eating boundaries from circumstances. 
Getting my eating under control is still the best thing that ever happened to me. I want to live like this for the rest of my life. It is not a chore or a punishment to me. It is a gift and a blessing. And I will do whatever it takes to keep it. 

When I think about the things I did to get sugar – the lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, the ways I ignored danger – just to eat, I think that keeping a box of food in my office may be the least weird thing I have ever done with food.

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04 Jul 2021

Boundaries are a Love Language

I am planning a fun little trip to LA in September. I will fly in on a Thursday, and out on a Monday. I am specifically going to see a friend, and my husband doesn’t want to take the time off of work because we are planning a big Florida trip in October. So I will be going go by myself. And in making my plans I got in touch with my friend about dates and times and whatnot. And she very generously, and very kindly, told me that she would only have a certain amount of time to give me in the days I will be there. And can I just say, I freaking loved it!

One thing I understand now after 15 years of having boundaries around my eating is that as a person with boundaries, I love it when other people have boundaries too.

The truth is that I was not expecting my friend to give me all of that time in LA. I’m a loner, by nature. I can and do amuse myself alone. All the time. I am good at it. I enjoy my own company. But knowing, in no uncertain terms, what I can expect, what I can ask for, what is on offer, and what I will be responsible for makes my life easier.

Boundaries are a life tool. They are how I manage my priorities and my time for myself. They are how I organize and create my day and my experiences. But when offered up to someone else, they are a kind of love language. This is how you can care for me. This is how you can honor me. This is how you can respect me.

Before I got my eating under control, I did not have any boundaries. And I hated other people’s boundaries. I wanted to please people so they would like me. But that is not how people pleasing works. People pleasing makes people like what you can do for them. They stop seeing the person, and only what can be gained from the person. I didn’t have any way to say no, so I would give more than I could and then behave badly when I couldn’t take any more. I was “an exploding doormat.” I let you walk all over me until I blew up.

In setting boundaries, in taking care of my own needs first, I don’t need to blow up. I can walk away. I can disengage with love. I have told you how I will be treated. And I *will* be treated with the respect that I dictate. Or I will walk away. 

My relationships are very different now than they were when I was eating compulsively. I like myself better. I like the people in my life better. Not because they are different, but because I am different. Because I have set the tone of respect and honor. Because I offer honor and expect it in return. And the people from my past who could not or would not learn to honor me and allow me to honor them, have all fallen away. 

Because there is another little tidbit to this. To set a clear boundary is to preempt drama. To speak your truth, and ask for what you want, and make clear what you have the capacity to give, is to give shape to expectations.

My first boundaries were around my food. But those boundaries I set for myself forced me to set them for others. If I wasn’t going to eat sugar and carbohydrates, I had to say no when my beloved grandma wanted me to eat her spaghetti and meatballs. Or when someone brought a cake especially for my birthday, or when someone wanted a taste of my meal that I had weighed out and committed and could not share. 

I am eternally grateful for the gift of having my eating under control for many reasons. But learning to have and keep boundaries is one of the most useful and freeing aspects of that gift.

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13 Jun 2021

Truth *and* consequences

I’m listening to a book series right now that I do not want to put down. (I am a huge audiobook fan. I can do so many things, like exercise or cook, and enjoy a novel at the same time.) But I have things to do right now that require all of my attention, like writing this blog or doing some work for my job, and I have to put it down. Waaahhh!!!

When I was eating compulsively I would have just continued with my book, and the consequences be damned. I let a lot of things fall by the wayside before I had boundaries around my eating. I did what felt good in the moment.

But of course there were consequences. The biggest was the stress that came from being out of integrity. And I didn’t even think of it that way. I didn’t even know at the time how to acknowledge that I owed something and that in not paying up, I was harming myself to myself. It always looked to me like it was about other people. The people I owed something to: teachers, friends, parents. 

For me, the consequences never ended up being as bad as the stress I caused myself. But also, the consequences never registered for me as completion. 

When I got my eating under control I learned how to let things go. But here is the important piece that I never understood before then. You cannot let something go until you see and acknowledge the truth of it. So if I, let’s say, didn’t do a homework assignment, and I got a bad grade, I could not look at either my responsibility to do the work, or the fairness of the grade. And therefore it never left me. I never moved on. I still had the yucky feelings of both my bad behavior and the consequence. Even though I already *paid the consequence*!

You would think that having paid the consequences would mean that I could move on. The transaction was complete. The fine was paid. Except I never wanted to look directly at the infraction. I never wanted to acknowledge what was my fault, my doing, my responsibility. I never wanted to see what I was doing, and by virtue of that, who I was being in my life.

In getting my eating under control I learned how to look at what I did and did not do within the framework of my integrity, my word, and what I wanted to create and put out in the world. 

A friend of mine sometimes talks about thinking about herself when she was eating compulsively as “a floating head.” She didn’t want to think of her body as herself. She could not confront the idea that she and her body were one.  

I often thought of my integrity that way. I thought that what I liked and admired, what I thought and believed, was who I was. But of course who I am is what I do in the world and how I interact with its inhabitants.

So for this moment I am keeping my commitment to write this blog. And in a minute I am going to do the work I need to get done. And then, with a clear conscience, when it is time for cooking or knitting or relaxing, I will get back to my book! And there will be no consequences except the exquisite feelings I get from a good novel.

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06 Jun 2021

Keeping it to yourself: the gift that keeps on giving!

Today is my birthday! I’m 44! Hooray!

About 5 1/2 years ago, I started working out regularly, 5 days a week. I had left New York City, where significant portions of my daily travels were done by walking, a few years before. But even in the suburbs of Chicago, I was still using my own two feet as transportation. But in early 2016, when we moved to Kentucky, I got a driver’s license and a car. And I thought to myself, “Kate, you are very clearly never going to move your body again now that you can drive.” So I started my bare minimum workout.

And that workout has done me well over the past few years. It keeps me sane. It has especially kept me grounded and emotionally elastic over the past year and a half, which were particularly stressful for me. 

But I don’t workout to lose weight. I don’t do it to sculpt or tone. I don’t do it to wrangle my body into a traditionally pleasing shape for the benefit of the eyes of others. I do it because that is how one cares for a body. And my body has been particularly good to me over the course of my 44 years.

But this thing happens every once in a while and I hate it. Someone will see me on my jog and tell me “it’s working” and that they can see how I am losing weight.

The other day, I was running, and a neighbor, not one I know, called out that she was proud of me and she could see how much weight I was losing. Ugh! Cringe!

First, let me be clear. I have not lost weight in the past 5 years. I have, in fact, gained some. Not a lot. But definitely some. And I don’t actually care. When I laughingly assured the lady that I had not lost any weight, she assured me that I had and that “she has been watching me.”

This has happened to me repeatedly, not only when it comes to my workout, but also when there have been people who perceive my food boundaries as “a diet.” They will suddenly see that “that diet is working.” And they will insist that I have lost weight. (Again, I have not lost any weight in years. My “diet” is not about losing weight. I’m not *on* a diet, I *have* a diet.)

I don’t know what that thing is that happens, but it happens. Strangers and friends alike see something that they associate with someone trying to lose weight, they somehow see the weight loss, real or imagined, and then they *talk to me about my body* as if it were any of their business.

The idea of praising this perceived weight loss is that fat is bad and thin is good. Period. That any kind of “thinner” is always better than any kind of “fatter.” And I have been dealing with those judgments all of my life. I was “good” when my weight was down, and bad or shameful or “needed work” when my weight was up. And I let these judgements color how I saw my own value and worth for almost all of my life. I let the size of my body dictate how much I liked myself and how much I harmed myself for about 30 of my 44 years. That is a long history of self-hate and self-harm.

I just want to be clear, there are a very specific few humans who I speak openly and honestly with about my weight and my body now, and they know who they are. Other than them, I hate it when anyone remarks on my body, even when they think what they are saying is a compliment. And frankly, most people I know feel this same way. I don’t know many (any?) people who are interested in anyone’s opinions about their body.

The truth is that people don’t know what constitutes a compliment to me. Certainly not if they think telling me I lost weight is a compliment. Especially, though not exclusively, when I have not. And their wrong assumptions about what will please me only make me feel gross and a little angry. I even made some minor changes to my running route, because I don’t want to have to deal with that lady ever again. That is how much I hate people talking about my weight.

I love my 44-year-old body. I love the way I look, and the way I feel. But I love it for me. I love it because it is mine. And I love it because I take care of it and it takes care of me in return. So if you want to give me a gift on this celebration of my 44 trips around the sun, maybe keep your body opinions to yourself. Not just about my body, but about all bodies! It’s a gift that keeps on giving!

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30 May 2021

Would you [date] me? I’d [date] me.

I really like my husband. A lot. I am a fan. I have a very happy marriage.

I feel like this should be an obvious thing. Of course I would like the person I married. Of course I am a fan of my partner. Isn’t that why we chose each other? Isn’t that why anyone chooses a partner?

It turns out that this is not an obvious truth for a lot of people.

This week my husband came home from work and said one of his crew members was being a jerk on the phone to his wife in front of everyone. Making faces to show his disdain for her to the other guys, while being rude and patronizing to her. 

Somehow it came up that he asked my husband if he liked his wife. (Me!) And he said “I adore my wife.” (Well, that is what he told me, anyway. Swoon.) He said “We like and respect each other.” (Give me a sec. I’m going to have to swoon again.)

The reason I am bringing this up is being a recovering addict is the primary reason I have a happy marriage. I got the tools to be who I want to be in a relationship by getting my eating under control and then living in a way that I could keep my eating under control, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

I grew up fat and sugar addicted. And in that time my relationship to love and romance was twisted and sad. I thought for all of that time that being fat made me unlovable. And I am not going to go into it today, but being fat really is a huge obstacle to dating in US culture. And it is not about attraction. Because I certainly had plenty of that kind of attention. It’s about what it says about you (especially as a man) when you date a fat person. The implication being that you must be somehow lacking, because if you were better, you could have a thin person. If you were better, you could do better than fat.

So needless to say, when I got my eating under control, and I lost a lot of weight, and was a total knockout by societal standards, I expected to find the man of my dreams right away. I thought the problem had been my fatness, and now that I was not fat anymore, it was inevitable that “The One” would be right there. 

But “The One” didn’t show up! In fact he wouldn’t for over 6 years!

But in that time I got some advice from a woman who does what I do with food. She had been single for many years like myself and she had just recently found her wife. And she said to me, “Stop looking, and take this time to make *yourself* into the person you want to date.”

And I’ll be damned if that didn’t work!!! I don’t think I had really ever thought before about what someone would get by being with me. I was too wrapped up in what I would get from them.

But then I got “The One” and I had zero experience in being in a romantic relationship. And boy, was that a learning curve.

One of the most important things I learned in addiction recovery is that I am responsible for cleaning my side of the street. I am the one who has to right the wrongs I have done. I have to make amends for the ways I have done harm. I have to acknowledge my part and fix what I broke. 

So much of my relationships for all of my pre-boundary-life was shifting blame. It was to never admit to anything bad. It was to manipulate all situations so that I looked like either the hero or the victim. Especially when I was actually the perpetrator.

Some things I learned through my recovery about being in a relationship include that my husband is a grown-ass man and he must be allowed to make his own choices without my nagging or unsolicited advice. That I don’t get a say in how he does things, and that if I think it’s important for a thing to get done a certain way, I better do it myself. That I must not take his emotions personally, and he is allowed to have feelings that I find difficult. That Ruth Bader Ginsburg was onto something when she said “Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.” That not everything needs to be a conversation. Sometimes I need to work things out for myself, and often, something that irks or annoys me is really my own problem and has nothing to do with him. (Look, sometimes we have to have a conversation about something that has upset me. Obviously. But I don’t go in assuming it is all his fault.) But maybe most importantly, that I must give him the benefit of the doubt. My husband is a good man who loves to provide material things, but also, a happy home. So I spend a lot of my marriage energy making sure he feels comfortable and peaceful in the space we are creating together. It’s about the way I respond to a question with a generous spirit, or give him my attention when he asks for it, or anything else I can do to let him know that our marriage is the most important relationship in my life.

And in return I get the same. I get a man who likes and respects me as much as he loves me. I get days filled with laughter and affection. I get honest communication from a position of resolution rather than “winning.” I get appreciation and honor. I get a happy home and a happy home life. 

I don’t think I would ever have been able to be the wife I am if I had not put boundaries around my eating. I don’t know if I would have been able to get out from under my own selfishness or victimization. I don’t know if I would have been able to see my own bad behaviors or cruel actions in the food fog and downward spiral of my sugar addiction. And I don’t know that I ever would have been in the vicinity of someone with the life changing advice that I should make myself into the person I wanted to date. But even if I had, I can’t imagine I would have been able to take it.

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23 May 2021

Self-awareness does not always make us wise

Today I ate half of a terrible cantaloupe. What’s funny is that I bought it because it seemed ripe (it was not) and it was not huge. I thought I was doing myself a favor by only buying a very large cantaloupe instead of a gargantuan one. And instead it ended up *feeling* like the biggest cantaloupe ever because I had to force myself to eat it. (Before you worry about why I ate a cantaloupe I didn’t want, let me assure you there was nothing *wrong* with it. If it were rotten or even just tasted bad I would have been able to make a call and eat a different fruit. But it was fine. Just flavorless and kind of hard.)

My eyes are definitely bigger than my stomach and I have a long history of buying cantaloupes that are bigger than my head. When I buy them I am excited to eat them but then when I *do* eat them, they are often too much. I fee a little sick and a little overstuffed. But I do it anyway. I forget that it’s too big. I forget that I get enough food every day. I forget that when I have a “mere 8 ounces” of fruit weighed out on my scale, it is plenty of fruit, and along with the rest of my big breakfast will keep me satisfied for many hours until lunch. That I don’t need half of a 4 pound cantaloupe to be sated.

Even after over 15 years, something in me is often worried that I will not get enough to eat. That there is not enough for me. That I will end up…HUNGRY!!!! It does not seem to matter that I have learned to live with hunger when it occasionally happens. It does not seem to matter that I am almost never hungry anymore. That perhaps I have the experience a few times a year. It does not seem to matter that I know intellectually that I eat enough food every day, no matter the circumstances. 

I think this is an important thing to note as a food addict. I forget about the reality of my food situation all the time. I forget the ill consequences of my eating. And I always have. Addicts call it a “built in forgetter.” We forget about the outcomes of our actions. This was true when I was eating compulsively, yes. But it has stayed true on some level since I got my eating under control.

For years since I started putting boundaries around my eating I have bought cantaloupes that made me kind of sick. And I ate them and got kind of sick. And then went to the store or the farmers market and bought more ginormous cantaloupes that would make me kind of sick in the coming week.

I am going to throw away that 2nd half of cantaloupe today. But here is an interesting thing to me. I am going to throw it away because it does not taste good. Let me assure you, however, that if it were delicious, and all it did was make me a little sick and a little overstuffed, I would eat it tomorrow as planned. I would look forward to it. Because I have my priorities when it comes to food, and taste is way up there in importance. And being a little sick from too much fruit is a thing I forget easily when the fruit is delicious. In fact, if the fruit were delicious, I would not be writing this blog. And I would have *already forgotten* that this morning’s breakfast was too much.

Self-awareness is lovely, but doesn’t always make us wise.

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16 May 2021

Managing in my contentment

It is sometimes the hardest to write this blog when I am happy. And I am happy now. I am content. My life is free of real-world drama and filled with fictional drama, exactly how I like it. But it makes it hard to think of something to write here.

When I was eating compulsively, my life was filled with drama. And not the kind I find in novels and comics. 

I sometimes write about learning the skill of changing thoughts. In fact I wrote about it last week. And for the most part it is not really something I deal with consciously anymore. Because I have already done 2 things. 1) Created a new set of “default settings,” and 2) learned to keep my mind elastic enough that changing my mind is not that complicated.


My default settings growing up were always selfish and nearly always to argue. I did not trust anyone to do anything in my best interest. I expected the worst from people. Or I had a thought about the way something or someone should be and any deviation from that created a need to fight in me. Well…fight or manipulate. I was a better manipulator. I was a kid, and I knew that kids don’t win fights. At least not fair fights.

My current default settings are to trust. They are to trust Life, but that also means to trust people. I don’t mean blindly. I am sure I will never be that trusting. I am not now, nor do I expect I will ever be a “turn the other cheek” kind of girl. If you got the one cheek, that’s life. But I don’t believe in anything like a Christian heaven. So the other cheek will stay facing the direction it is, thank you.

But there is a relief to trusting first. I don’t think I ever understood to how much energy I used in being constantly ready for battle. There is peace in not always expecting war. This is obvious in retrospect. And certainly when you put words to it like battle and war and peace. But growing up it felt like the way it was. It felt like reality. I didn’t understand what choices I had or even that there were choices. I felt like the world, or life, or other people threw circumstances at me and I had to throw them off as best I could in order to just survive. How exhausting.


And as I said last week, I have learned how to change my mind. I know how to stop a thought in its tracks. I know how to change a thought. I know how to switch my focus. It’s not always easy to accomplish, but it has stopped being hard to fathom. The obstacles to it are usually about pride and self-righteousness, or about not wanting to give up my grasp on something, or about not wanting to lose. They are about being right and wanting to be right. They are about willingness, not capability.

Growing up addicted to certain foods affected my braid chemistry which affected my thoughts which affected my actions which affected my habits which affected my food. My food life and my inner life were like an echo chamber, feeding and reinforcing more of the same, taking me deeper and keeping me ever more entrenched.


What changed was I changed my food. I stopped giving myself the fix. I stopped giving myself the drug foods that perpetuated the same cycle. I interrupted the pattern in a very specific, concrete way. I did not only change my mind, though I did, indeed, do that too. But I also acted differently. I acted differently by eating different foods and that stopped a literal, physiological, chemical reaction. And then I continued to do that until what felt normal to me was something new. Something I created.

I created my own peace. It was not easy. And it was not immediate. And it is not even done yet. I am still working at it and growing into to it and pushing toward it. But I created it for myself and made myself into a different person.

I made myself into a person I wanted to be. And now that person is happy and content. And happy, peaceful me still managed to write a blog post in the midst of all of my contentment, so wins all around I guess.

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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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