onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “commitment”

12 Jan 2013
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Knock knock. Who’s there? Dopamine and metabolism. Thank God!

I have had an exciting couple of weeks! I got my dopamine back! To tell you the truth, it didn’t occur to me that it went anywhere. But now that it’s back, it’s obvious. And my metabolism started back up again!

It’s funny. I knew that quitting smoking was affecting me. And it was clear from the weight gain that it was affecting me physically. But it didn’t exactly register that it was affecting me chemically.

I knew that I was not quite right. That I was having a hard time. I think I thought about it as a “spiritual” problem. Or a “mental” problem. I knew that I had to readjust the way I dealt with things. I knew I had to learn new coping mechanisms. And I definitely learned a lot about my feelings. And how to deal with them. And (one baby step at a time) how to honor my own life without regard to how I would be judged by others. And how to make decisions that honor my heart even if they seem unreasonable, or foolish. Or scary. But I didn’t understand that my brain had stopped producing happiness chemicals. That just like my body was going to have to heal, my brain was going to have to heal. I think I thought about it as mind over matter.

In practical terms, I suppose it is just mind over matter. At least in terms of waiting out the withdrawal. It’s the actions I take and don’t take in the end that make up my life. My self-respect. My character.

I don’t smoke. I don’t eat compulsively. I don’t eat sugar. I don’t take laxatives. I don’t make myself throw up. I don’t take any drastic actions. I don’t act out. I just live with the fact that it sucks until it stops sucking. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It doesn’t matter how much weight I gain. It doesn’t matter what thoughts I have. The promises I made to myself matter. Commitment matters. Everything else is vapor and ego.

What I have learned is that these commitments end up culminating as my self-respect. They are my self-esteem. They are my dignity. And I don’t need a substance to get high. I don’t need to eat sugars, grains or starches to numb out. Or create enough crazy to escape reality. I could skip a meal. And lie about it. And I would be just as high and sick and screwed up as if I ate a chocolate cake.

But I was keeping my commitments these past seven months, and still having dark thoughts. I was unhappy. And I couldn’t seem to “bright side and gratitude” myself out of it. On a good day, the best I could do was change the channel in my head and not obsess about how much I hated my body. Or what a loser I felt like. Or how I was certain that I’m unlovable and destined for loneliness. And on a bad day, all I could do was cry. And manage to not hurt or numb myself. All I could do was keep my promises to myself and live in pain.

And now that I can feel the relief, I can see how scary that time was. How it’s kind of a miracle that I came out on the other side with my integrity. I wrote in this blog that I was unhappy, but that I was not depressed. But I was wrong. I was absolutely depressed. But it was exactly that integrity that kept me from despair. My brain was incapable of producing happy without cigarettes. My dopamine levels dropped severely. But it was nothing like the horror of 28 years of sugar addiction and self hatred.

What is interesting to me is that I knew that it would pass, because I know that’s how life works. All things pass in time. But I didn’t expect it to pass all at once. I didn’t expect it to turn on a dime. I didn’t realize that my brain would just start producing dopamine again. I didn’t even know that my dopamine levels had dropped until this week when I realized I was happy again and googled “quit smoking depression”.

And as if it couldn’t get any better, my clothes are getting looser. I bought a very sexy dress when I gained the bulk of my weight. It was sexy because it was tight. Now it’s not tight. And it’s not so sexy anymore. Now it’s just a cute dress. And I can’t tell you how happy I am about that! Plus for the first time in many months, I have been hungry between my meals. (Is that you metabolism? I’m so glad you’re here! Why don’t you stay a while…)

So hooray for going through hell and coming out on the other side! And thanks to you for being there while I got through it. I’m hoping that I am now back to my grateful, joyful self. And that I’ll get to stay here for a while.

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18 Aug 2012

Being committed: It’s not just for institutions anymore

I’ve been a little blocked about what to post this week. Because with only subtle differences, this week is much like last week. Doing that dance with myself. Worrying about my weight. Eating well anyway. Trying to remember that my value is not the size of my body. Forgetting. Waiting it out. Waiting for my body to adjust to quitting smoking. Waiting for what it looks like to be a non-issue again. Waiting for my eating disorder brain to quiet down. And it will. This too shall pass. There’s nothing to do but live my life in between my meals.

But then what am I going to write about? Because I have a commitment to post every week. Even if I have nothing to say. So I have decided to write about that. That kind of commitment. Because that kind of commitment is how I keep my eating under control. And I apply it to other things too. Like my daily meditation. And this blog. And being committed has changed my life.

I didn’t know anything about commitment when I was eating compulsively. I knew about excuses. Sometimes I just didn’t “feel like” doing something I was supposed to do. Or I did “feel like” doing something I wasn’t. But I knew that the right excuse, a strong enough excuse, would “make it ok” in the eyes of “the world”. Whatever “it” was. Whoever “the world” was. If I could get a “who could blame you?” kind of response, then whatever I had done or failed to do was “made right”. And I could move on. This was how I thought, and therefore how I lived.

What I never understood, of course, was that I couldn’t move on. Or at least that I wasn’t moving on. Sure, my feet weren’t being held to the fire by humans with authority anymore, but my conscience actually didn’t give a shit about authority. I didn’t even understand that my conscience was my conscience. All I knew was that I was incredibly hungry. Starving! I didn’t know that that feeling was shame and not hunger. Because food made it go away for a while. I didn’t know that was numb, not fed. So I just kept making excuses and eating. Getting bigger and bigger and never ever being satisfied.

My conscience still doesn’t care about authority, by the way. Its only authority is my word. My truth. My commitments.

When I put boundaries around my food, I had a kind of epiphany. I understood that I had to keep those boundaries no matter how I felt about it. What I “wanted” was taken out of the equation. What I “felt like” eating was irrelevant. Gratification ceased to be an option. There were more important things. Honor and commitment.

In a way, of course, my boundaries are about what I want. Because the big picture is that I “want” to be thin and peaceful and sane. And not be fat, or crazy, or sticking toothbrushes down my throat to make myself vomit. But at any given moment, whether I like the way I eat, or want a piece of cake, or feel like keeping my boundaries, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I keep them. I just do. That’s it. No discussion. No negotiation.

And what I learned from eliminating the idea of “feel like it” from my eating, is that there is value in doing things because I do them, regardless of how I feel about doing them at any given moment on any given day. That gratification is a trap. That commitment makes my life better all around. It doesn’t even matter what the commitment is.

So like I said, I have a commitment to post every week. And I don’t even know who it’s to. Myself? God? You? I just know that I do it. There are no excuses. Circumstances don’t matter. Because I almost never “feel like” writing a post. I can think of a million excuses not to post on any given week.

Unless some glaringly obvious eating disorder thing comes up in my life, I always think there is nothing to tell you. And yet I manage to get something up every week. And most of the time I think it’s somewhere between not bad and pretty good. And every time I respect myself for doing it. Respect myself that I did it simply because it is something I do.

But I’ll admit that this commitment often feels like a burden before the post is written. I’m regularly afraid to write. Because I want to wow you! Every time! And that’s not how it works. And that’s not how life works. And that’s the best way to crash and burn and never write another entry again, let alone another entry I’m proud of. Or impressed by. (Because sometimes I do impress myself.)
Needing to top myself every time would be the best way to come to hate this blog. And myself. Not posting an entry one week because it’s not up to par would be an excellent first step in letting this blog end. More like disappear. Because it’s not good enough. And I’m not good enough. Will never be good enough.
So I write every week, even if I have nothing to say. And I post every week, even if it’s not so particularly good. And I keep in mind that to make greatness a requirement for sharing my writing is like killing the Golden Goose. Cutting open it’s belly looking for the gold inside. Forgetting that the gold comes from the magic that lives in the goose. And from the time in between laying the eggs. That there’s more gold. If I don’t get greedy. For pride. And praise.
And wisdom too. Because sometimes what I want most of all is to be the best person I can ever possibly be right now, instead of wanting to just be the best person I can be right now right now.
So here’s this week’s post. I wrote it even though I didn’t feel like it, and was afraid it would come out mediocre. And now that it’s up, I am relieved. And feeling pretty good about my level of honor and commitment. And sure, I do hope you like it. But mostly I just like that it’s done.
You can share my blog anytime you want. You can also follow me on twitter @onceafatgirl5
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16 Jun 2012

Commitment, surrender, and God’s totally effed up sense of humor

There were two things that I had to figure out before I could make a lasting change for my life around food: commitment and surrender.

Commitment was where I had to agree, between me and God, that  circumstances and situations had no bearing on whether or not I would stay within my food boundaries. I had to recognize that there would always always be some reason to cross them. That even the most paltry excuse could be rationalized. That even the most valid reason would still lead me straight back to bulimia, 300 lbs, misery, and insanity.

And I have kept my food boundaries through some crazy things. 2 years ago my grandmother, who was the love of my life, got sick. She passed away about 4 months later. About a week after that, my favorite aunt, who was also my godmother, and way too young to die, was diagnosed with cancer, and again, was gone within about 4 months. That was a hard year for me. From April to November I did a lot of crying. But I stayed within my food boundaries. While they were in hospitals, nursing homes, hospice care. During regular updates from my parents about their rapid deteriorations. At their funerals. Throughout the traveling back and forth to my hometown. It didn’t matter that I was sad. It didn’t matter that life sucked. The only thing that mattered when it came to my food was that I had boundaries and a commitment to stay within them.

Would you have blamed me if I had eaten a chocolate cake? Probably not, right? But I had made an agreement with God. That circumstances and situations have nothing to do with my food. That my feelings have nothing to do with my food. That my life has nothing to do with my food.

The other part was surrender. Surrender was when I stopped asking why. Why me? Why do I have to give up sugar to be happy? Why do I have to have boundaries? Why can’t I just eat like a normal person? I stopped complaining. It’s not fair. It’s hard. It’s too much. It’s too rigid. Nobody else has to do this. People are going to think I’m weird. I stopped looking for it to be easy. I stopped wishing for it to be convenient. I accepted that I had been given a solution, and stopped trying to renegotiate the terms. I surrendered to it exactly the way it was. And surrender brought me peace. Is there something better or easier or more convenient out there? The truth is I don’t know. And I don’t care. I have no desire to give up my solution for even a moment in order to find out. That’s what I mean by surrender.

So let’s get to God, and His totally effed up sense of humor.

If you don’t know, I quit smoking 11 days ago. I made a commitment to myself and God. And I surrendered to the fact that smoking is just not something I do anymore. I think having a point of reference with food probably made it easier to do it with cigarettes. But commitments get tested. That’s actually the definition of a commitment if you think about it. If it didn’t take something, some strength or honor, to make and keep it, it would be called something else.

Ok, backtrack two weeks. I was still smoking at the time. One night, I was physically threatened, by a man I was becoming friends with. He told me he had no reservations about punching me in the face. (Over this blog, actually. Which I still don’t understand…) Needless to say, I walked away. It was obvious that we weren’t going to be friends, and I didn’t think too much about it after that.

A few days later, on my 35th birthday, I quit smoking, as was the plan. The smoking itself wasn’t so hard to give up. I didn’t miss it. I had already changed my thinking about it. I had committed and surrendered. But the feelings were pretty awful. Just regular life feelings. But they were hard to deal with. It became clear to me that I had been smoking those feelings. And now I didn’t have cigarettes to numb them anymore.

And then a week after I quit, I got a text message from the guy who threatened me. He wanted to know if we could reconcile. I was gracious. But I told him no. And I went to bed.

I woke up to a series of progressively more upsetting texts from him. Amorous texts. Too forward. Too intimate to come from someone I had never touched or kissed or even been on a date with. Or whose last words to me had been violent. The texts scared me. So much that I went to the police station after work. (After dinner actually. Because food first. Always.) I filed a harassment report.

But I could practically hear God. “It’s only been a week. So I’m wondering. How committed are you, Kate? How about if I make you scared for your safety? Those are some pretty intense feelings, huh? You still not gonna smoke?”

Yes, God. I’m still not gonna smoke. But you do realize that you are totally twisted, right?

“Oh, yeah. I know. But I’m proud of you, Kate. I honor your commitment and surrender. You’re doing good work.”

Part of me wants to tell God to go to hell, of course. But there is another part of me that is grateful. Because this experience has actually been an opportunity. Because by honoring my commitment not to smoke in the face of real fear, I get a look at how powerful I am. I get a boost to my self-esteem. And I get to recognize that I can make the choice that no circumstance, situation, and maybe more importantly, no person, gets a say in how I live my life.

Of course I would love it if you would share this blog! Or follow me on twitter @onceafatgirl5

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