First for those of you interested in a Suren update, she has apparently moved her kittens (that I have still never seen, but assume exist somewhere) but she is clearly still in my close vicinity. When I am around she comes for two meals a day. And when I am not, I know my sweet neighbor feeds her at least once a day. And I think occasionally more if she comes by. But she is still skinny and wary. And I adore her.
I just want to say that this week I have eaten like a queen. Ribs and meatloaf and tonight a roast that has been cooking for 2 days. Plus sautéed green beans and of course my ice cream and salt and vinegar pork rinds.
God I love to eat. I am so grateful that I still find intense joy in eating almost every day and every meal. Over the past 19 years I have been learning to enjoy the little things. Moments with people and animals and the natural world. Though that is perhaps just aging.
But I never needed to be convinced to love a good meal.
I have a lot on my mind lately. But none of it is about my body, my eating, obsessive food thoughts, or how much I hate myself. Plus I get to eat joyfully and without guilt three times a day. Which is priceless.
I don’t miss sugar or trying and failing to be normal with food. There’s nothing to miss.
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.
Another move. Today! (So another quickie.) I am pretty excited for this move. It’s close to home so I can get my salt n vinegar pork rinds whenever I want, but I also found my favorite yogurt again in the new place! So the best of both worlds.
I am excited to move on. I am ready to be back on a daily routine. I am ready to be back in a rhythm.
My eating boundaries are portable. I have been able to keep them for over 19 years. And also, it means that even when my life is in upheaval and I’m neck deep in change, some things are the same. My eating never changes.
When I ate compulsively, my eating didn’t change much either. It’s just that I was eating drug foods basically constantly and I hated myself for not being able to stop. Now, I eat guilt free three times a day and a satisfied physically and emotionally.
This past week has been enlightening for me as a person looking to continue to grow. I always forget that most real spiritual breakthroughs in my life happen through breakdowns. I always think about the joys of the other side without remembering the absolute physical, mental, and emotional misery of the catalyst for it.
The 2 month period that led up to me quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating was emotional torture. But people who saw me then said I seemed fine. Perfectly normal.
The months that led up to me no longer weighing my body and no longer judging my life based on the size of my body were riddled with uncontrollable weight gain, nightmares and stress hormones, and crying jags I couldn’t control.
This week it took some time to get me out of my woe-is-me-feelings. But they say to do service to feel better. So I did some stuff for other people. Which got me out of my head. And I decided on my amends. (I ended up donating to the GFM for Burn the Cape by Dr. Raquel Martin.) So that I could move on. Because I hurt someone by accident and then I got terrified that I would do it again. And I made myself as small as I could be. Made as little movement as I could. Froze right in place and stayed as still as possible.
Because that is how it goes for me. I be whatever I am. And I get bigger. Weirder. Sillier. And then make a mistake and hurt someone. Again. And I freeze. Then I flee. And I go and hide.
Getting fatter was absolutely a way for me to get smaller when I was still eating compulsively. More invisible. A way to have less impact. To be less seen. To hide in plain sight. I definitely did not know that intellectually at the time. And the being high on sugar helped me not know.
This is a difficult thing to explain. If you know me you may already think I’m “big and weird and silly.” You may think I have a gigantic personality. Which I do. But even that is still a stifled little girl doing a cha cha dance of trying to never ever make a mistake and then making one anyway and then quitting the dance and then 5-6-7-8…
And that is the lesson here for me. That the shutting down and the woe is me and the hiding away is not authentic. It’s a way for me to stop and regroup and figure out what is palatable. What’s a tolerable dose of Kate? Let’s get it in that range.
That is a problem. For me, anyway. Because what got me here to my sugar addiction and compulsive eating being arrested, and loving my life, and being in a loving and happy marriage, has been an uncovering of who I am. Very much *not* the making myself easier to digest. My life is better because I care about my authentic self.
I understand a few things.
My ego is not particularly big but it is fragile AF!
My impact in the world, and not my intention, is what I am responsible for. So that ALSO MEANS I don’t have to have a whole emotional breakdown about being a scourge on humanity because I made a joke that landed a way I didn’t mean for a person I really like. I can make it about my integrity (a thing I can do something about) and not my ego (an amorphous blob of ever changing and impossible standards.)
I just want to say that over these past 2+ years I have seen an incredible transformation in so many aspects of my life. My breathing health. My mental health. My physical strength and wellbeing. My balance. My willingness to see the doctor regularly and to get blood work done.
I am clearly changing for something. Into something. And I expect it won’t be the last time either.
A few months ago I stopped eating eggs. They were expensive and I was lowkey worried about bird flu. Yes I know if you cook them through they should be fine. It’s not that I didn’t understand. I was just still bothered. Enough that the relief of quitting them outweighed missing them. I don’t miss them. Other people in my house still eat them. I have the option. I just don’t.
But now I have to consider if I want to continue to drink milk and eat yogurt since the FDA is suspending milk quality tests.
Milk and yogurt are a huge part of my diet. Butter too. Plus meat. Another food that is important to have standards for. And let’s not forget how many foods that get contaminated and recalled are vegetables. Lettuce pretty regularly. Cucumbers pretty recently.
I eat real fresh food. Most of it was recently alive. And that is dangerous if it is not handled properly in a mass production environment.
I am worried about my food. I am worried about your food too. I am worried about food safety. I am worried about food transparency.
Am I just going to have to be sick occasionally? Do I just have to accept that?
Or am I supposed to trust that Kroger and Albertsons would never do anything sneaky or inappropriate to sell me their product? Am I supposed to trust in the free market?
I have been having a little bout of body dysmorphia this week. I looked in the mirror yesterday and I looked very fat to myself. And I had some kind of judgment about it. Not positive. But also sort of disconnected from any real physical sensation. There was not the pain of hating myself. There was not any despair or dread. Just a kind of mean thought like if I saw a really unfashionable woman at the mall. (Yes. I am judging your fashion, people!)
I need to say that I am objectively the same size I have been for months because I am wearing clothes that fit the same. If anything I may be slightly smaller. But my body dysmorphia is not rational. If it were they would call it something else.
So I kept looking at myself until my body lost its already minimal emotional charge.
Even in that moment that little judgment didn’t go away entirely, but I don’t expect it ever will. All of my addictions and disorders are just reined in for the time I have my eating under control and I’m taking care of myself, physically, spiritually, and emotionally.
One of the strongholds of my body dysmorphia when I was still in the food was eating foods I was ashamed of eating. Shame feeds the body dysmorphia. (Which is not to say that they were bad foods. I’m not the food police. I’m a sugar addict.)
I (we all) had been told what good women with good bodies ate, but I wasn’t eating those things. So I was fat. Plus I hated my body. Plus I was ashamed of the foods I was eating. So when I looked in the mirror and saw something I hated, even if it were objectively untrue, it made sense. It *felt* real.
Taking the morality out of food loosened the grip of my body hate. And that blunted the majority of the agony of the body dysmorphia. Sugar is a drug to me. My body is a still. It turns sugar and grains to alcohol on its own. I don’t need to eat skinless chicken breast and steamed broccoli to be a good woman with a good body. I do need to quit and stay away from foods that will get me high and kick off cravings. And also stop caring about whether someone else would call me a good woman with a good body…
I have eating rules. Foods to eat and foods to abstain from, weighed and measured portions and timeframes. But with the *understanding* that I should be eating foods I LOVE. Every day. Every meal I can! I belong to a community that is for abundance not deprivation. It’s how I can do it for over 19 years. It’s how I still love it 19 years later. It’s how I feel good in my body. Because when I don’t feel shame about my food, why should I feel shame about my body?
I watched a video on social media this week about how if you want to truly be an activist a great step to take is to start some slow hobbies. To learn how to continuously work and wait with hope.
Not results.
And I looked at myself, which I do when I am confronted with something that I want or am afraid that I lack, and I realized that that is what having my eating under control has been teaching me, a day at a time, for over 19 years.
In fact, it was in getting my eating under control that I not only returned to crochet, but for the first time in my life, had the wherewithal, the attention span, the patience, and the cognitive capacity to significantly advance my skills. Then I had the desire to take on yet another craft, knitting. Then embroidery. Weaving. All the while still learning new crochet techniques. New knitting. Trying new things. Designing! Designing crochet dolls. Designing crochet doll clothes. Designing accessories for dolls.
I can make things that only existed in my head before! Things that were once just yarn and stuffing and my imagination are now art.
But that took time. So much time. So many years of trials and failures and biting off more than I could chew. And sometimes managing to succeed anyway! And sometimes just not. And having to take 2 steps back. And having to take 200 steps back! Years, coming on decades.
Addiction and instant gratification have a lot in common. And there are many ways that they overlap. When I was in the food, actively in my sugar addiction and eating compulsively, the instant gratification of sugar always got me too high to really be able to advance in learning much of anything. And any project that didn’t come out the way I expected was a miserable failure. And anything I did had to be done in a frenzied burst, before I got too high on sugar and sort of ran out of steam.
I did creating but it was always long on idea and short on execution.
When I put boundaries around my eating, first thing I had to learn was to wait at least 4 hours between meals, plus over night for breakfast. That felt like an eternity to me. It was literally painful sometimes. It sometimes felt like I was going to die. That’s not hyperbole. It’s addiction.
So learning to wait to eat was a lesson. Then doing something to pass the time was a lesson. Then rediscovering my love of learning was a lesson.
Keeping my eating under control is a practice. There is no end goal. It’s an ongoing lifetime goal of authentic living. It’s a lifetime commitment to process. And I only have that because I happen to be a sugar addict, who is now in recovery. A happy outcome to a shitty situation.
So many of the best and most fulfilling aspects of my life are a direct result of getting my eating under control and thereby gaining the ability and possibility of choosing delayed gratification. The possibility of practice. Of doing something just because I do it.
Because if I am goal oriented, at 4:30 in the morning, my butt is not going to be as good an incentive to get out of bed. But I am going to get out of bed anyway, because I work out with my husband at 5, so I may as well get that butt. It’s the workout that is the practice. An hour a day, 5 days a week, to practice loving movement and strengthening of my sacred vessel.
My workout, my meditation, my sleep, my skin care, and my eating are all ways that I take care of myself every day. And any results are from consistency and are a bonus. I do them because the practice makes me proud of myself. Period.
It is a blessing for me to have learned the lesson of patience, of growth, of worthwhile things taking time to build, before the pervasiveness of things like Door Dash and Amazon Prime. Because I cannot imagine how much less patience, or how little capacity for change I would have now if I had not put boundaries around my eating 19 years ago.
It’s worth the reminder for myself that worthwhile things take patience and time. And that the things that I want and want to be a part of, are going to take, not just work, but work, plus time and hope.
I violated a friend’s boundary this week. With no malice or ill intent. And I didn’t even think I was in the moment. But I did. And shit, did that suck!
My immediate internal reaction when she called me on it, even though she was so sweet about it, was defensiveness. All of these rebuttals flashed through my mind! *But you said! But I thought! But I didn’t mean it and you can’t blame me.*
But years ago when I wanted to find my husband and fall in love, the best advice I got was stop looking for a husband and start *being* the kind of partner I wanted to find. And that is just great life advice. Be the kind of person I want in my own life.
How would I want someone to react to a generously set boundary?
So I did what I have heard called “fall forward fast.” I immediately apologized, assured her of my good intentions, but also acknowledged the harm I did. I asked for forgiveness and immediately set to make it right based on her desires.
And how she came back to me later was with so much additional generosity. Coming up with ways that she could accommodate me and keep her own boundaries. And that was amazing. And I feel even closer to her! Which is a joy!
But I also want to say, I had a hard time forgiving myself. I slept uneasy that night. And I woke up still a little ashamed.
Part of me thinks that this stuff is supposed to feel good. A weight off my shoulders from knowing I have honored another person. And usually it does. But right now it just makes all of the relationships in my life feel more important. And maybe more fragile. And like the stakes of being a person who can be trusted and counted on, are higher than ever.
I learned to set boundaries at all when I learned to set them around my eating. But they have turned out to be one of the best tools for living I have. Because boundaries aren’t to shut people out. They are to keep people in our lives.
You are getting the barest of minimums today. I am writing this while scarfing down my breakfast before a 2 day 20+ hour trip back home.
I have all my meals packed for the next 2 days. I have some audiobooks downloaded and I am ready to go! Ok, I’m not. I still have to clean out this refrigerator. Any way, next week, friends!
I have had an ever changing body throughout my life. My size, shape, muscles, weight have all shifted and transformed based on the ways I shifted and transformed.
Physical changes, even ones I consider good changes, often mean short term physical pain for an adjustment period. Generally more acute than the pain it is correcting. Like when I got my wisdom teeth pulled and my bite shifted, my teeth no longer fit together the same, and the readjustment of different teeth banging together gave me headaches. When I quit sugar, my body was so used to only eating processed foods that I had bad digestive issues for over a year. When I quit smoking I got sores in my mouth and on my gums from the healing and new growth where the smoke had damaged my tissues. When I have changed my center of gravity because of something like weight changes or new muscles, I will bang into things for a while and get bruises on my hips and thighs. The list goes on. But the lesson for me is clear: Change is worth it, but it hurts.
The lift in my right shoe has been transformative. Muscles and joints that have plagued me for decades are pain free. There was a knot in my butt, just below my hip that I haven’t felt or had to massage for weeks, and a tight area in my groin that is now just easy and comfortable. I don’t limp first thing in the morning anymore. I don’t have any doubts that I need to be walking with a lift in my right shoe all the time. The pressure I am relieving on my joint and all of its connections is a blessing. I am so grateful for the relief.
But it means there are other muscles that are not used to their new work. And they are tender. I am sometimes bruising myself with my massage roller to loosen them up. And they tire quickly.
I guess that’s the good news, right? Working to exhaustion is the best way to build new muscle. But it does not FEEL good. It just is good. Delayed gratification.
This too shall pass. But I am happy for the reminder that change is painful; and also the only way to get all the things I want out of life. So I am stretching and massaging when I need to. And taking some naproxen sodium to relax my muscles when I need that too. But moving forward with the lift. Because the only way out is through.
onceafatgirl 