onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “eating boundaries”

04 Feb 2024

The luxuries of 18 years

One thing about having my eating under control for 18 years is that I’m well into the life stuff. The relationship stuff. The dealing with stuff stuff. 

In the beginning all I could do was focus on keeping my eating under control. I had been addicted to sugar for almost all of my 28 years and I spent all my beginner energy making foods that fit my boundaries, and distracting myself from the foods I used to binge on. With books and manga, and that one anime (Fushigi Yuugi) that I watched on a loop for like a year and a half.

But this shit works. Putting down the sugars and things that turned into sugar in my body, and then taking responsibility for my actions. And living my most authentic life.

It has been a long, slow and unsteady process. It was worth every uncomfortable and insecure second.

The truth is now I have a healthy fear of the food. As one might have a healthy fear of the Ocean. But avoiding it and preparing to resist it does not take up my time at the moment. A true blessing and miracle.

But I am in some life lesson place and I feel a little crazy. A little stupid. A little frazzled. And I have been literally walking in circles.

And then this morning I was telling this to my best friend and she said “you’re the one who always talks about my ‘spiral staircase.’ You’re on yours. Plop your ass down on the steps and have a look around.”

(I mentor food addicts and one thing I talk about is how we are always coming to the same problems on a new level. Like a spiral staircase.)

Ah! I keep getting my own advice turned back on me. The joy and curse of being a mentor and knowing that means being available for mentoring…sigh

So I am reminded that it’s life on Life’s terms, not on Kate’s terms. That time will pass whether I wear a hole in my Luxury Vinyl flooring or sit my ass down.

I keep my eating boundaries a day at a time, and I get to contemplate luxury problems between luxury meals. Truly a life beyond my wildest dreams. 

But let’s be honest. Still uncomfortable, difficult, and scary. Makes me want to get up and walk around in circles.

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28 Jan 2024

Feels like a shame but probably isn’t

I am almost a full month into my “Peaceful Purposeful Joyful Creation” journey and I am still learning and shaky. But also still plugging along. 

One of the things that I had to learn early in getting my eating under control was time assessment and management. Because shopping and chopping and cooking and packing and eating took time. And I had to actually know how much time I needed. I had to learn to be practical about practical things.

And I got pretty good at that. Certainly good enough that I figured out my priorities and how to implement them in my life.

There is a saying that I think about a lot. “You can talk about priorities all you like, but your schedule doesn’t lie.”

And my schedule clearly says self-care is a priority. I take care of myself with my eating boundaries, my workout and sleep and meditation schedules, my skin and hair care. 

But all of this scheduling and routine maintenance has made a nice tidy place for my head to go chaotic. Rush through step 1 to get to step 2 while simultaneously preparing for steps 3-8 in my mind. My brain is full. No room for anything but the rest of my planned out time.

On the outside I look calm and confident. I know this because people say it all the time. “You have such a peaceful presence. You always seem so together.” Inside I am panting and panicking and focusing on perfection.

This past few weeks of trusting that my life will work out even if I don’t run around like a crazy lady is…frankly hard. There is a level of superstitious thinking to the way I live that stems from my childhood thinking. That the “magic” is in not stopping, not looking, not hesitating. Not giving life, or bad luck, or karma, or the devil or WHATEVER, a chance to get me.

But the thing is that I already know that the real magic is in slowing down. It’s in the stillness. It’s in the trusting. It’s in the space between thoughts.

Because ultimately that is what my brain chaos is. It’s me not having to trust. It’s me not having to look too closely at my dreams and my wishes and what I really want for my life. It’s me not having to expect that things will work out for the best for me in the end. So I can use that time and space to go into survival mode and “prepare for any eventuality,” instead of being excited, interested, involved, curious.

I guess what I am coming to recognize is that all of that mental busywork is a way for me to burn off my creative energy without having to create anything. 

And that sucks. I hate that! I’m annoyed at myself. I’m frustrated that I have taken so long to get here. I am impatient to grow faster and be better now!

But I am reminded, yet again, that these big changes come a little at a time. I do not currently have the capacity to bridge the gap between what I am and what I want to be. And the only way to get there is to continue. At life’s pace. Not mine.

Which feels like a real shame but probably isn’t.

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21 Jan 2024

Fight, Flight, Tears, and a Time Out

I think a lot about change and changeability. About how I actually have tools to change my life now. And how slowly and strangely information is dispensed to me. By Life. By the Universe. By my own ability to comprehend and implement it.

The other day my husband and I got into an argument. He said a true thing about me rather angrily and it made me cry. Which upset him. It is difficult for him to see my crying. It is awful for him to feel like he “made me cry.”

I cry a lot. I always have. But I have come to understand in the past year or so that it’s the way a body, my body, reregulates after I have gone into “fight or flight mode.” Which I do. Kind of a lot. (Way less since I got my eating under control, but still a lot.)

Growing up, I cried, and everyone told me it was me being overly sensitive. And me being emotional. And me being some sort of way. So I fit myself into the narrative. I could find the emotions there in the crying. The shame. The hurt. The anger. The fear. The indignation.

Plus I had a whole world of stories and books and all manner of art depicting overly sensitive weepy girls unable to manage their emotions. Hysterical women! I didn’t have to look far to reinforce the idea that my tears were because I was too emotional and the emotions were shameful ones, if only for their inconvenience to others.

But this time I didn’t need to look for an emotion. Not because I knew what it was, but because in that moment I knew it didn’t matter. I was having a biological reaction. I could assign an emotion to it later if I wanted. (And I did. I was embarrassed that I had been called out. It sent me into a panic.) But in that moment, I just wanted to calm back down. I told him I was just in fight or flight and I just needed a minute. I excused myself and got myself together.

Having my eating under control, not eating foods that make me feel drugged, knowing what and how much I am going to eat every day, have all contributed to lifting my food obsession. And not being obsessed with food means lots of time and room and energy to think about other things, and plenty of time to work on myself. 

When I learn something like this now, I remember that I couldn’t have known it before. That some things can only be understood because they are a culmination of knowledge and experience. 

As my mentor likes to remind me: More will be revealed.

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07 Jan 2024

Pretty sure my dreams are in the stillness

Over the past few years I have noticed that my New Year’s Day has set the tone for my coming year, though not intentionally. Which made me decide to be intentional about it this year. 

I chose to have an intentional day of joyful peaceful productive making, including crochet projects, comedy bits and improv jokes and snippets of singing on social media, and a delicious dinner to enjoy with my husband. 

And I noticed something in my intentionality to be peaceful; even when I am not upset, when I have plenty of time, when all is well, I am amped up to go go go. I am never really peaceful about being and doing enough. 

I want to crochet that row quickly and efficiently to get to the next step. I want to get the wording perfect but still get that quip out quickly in case someone else makes a similar joke! I want to salt and pepper the steaks quickly and efficiently to get them in the sous vide. So I can quickly and efficiently get to cooking the vegetables!

And I don’t just mean physically, though physically too. I am rushing in my mind. RUSHING ALL THE TIME!!!!

And I want to change that for myself. Because I know intuitively that the gifts of abundance, the life beyond even this life beyond my wildest dreams, are in the stillness. I know it. And I fear it. But perhaps I could notice because I am actually ready to be still anyway. Even if fear of success has always been on my list, just as much as fear of failure.

It occurs to me that that is why I spend so much time rushing. So I don’t have any space between thoughts of perfection in the now. I be careful what I think I can have. I be careful what I think I am worth. I be careful what I wish for. Or I don’t wish at all.

Because getting what I wish for means work. It means being great. It means trying and failing to be great and then being embarrassed about it. It means stretching and struggling. It means pain. 

If I ate over it instead, there would be no pain. 

But I don’t eat over things now. I don’t put sugar in my body to drug myself. And I have the benefit of 18 years of work, and trying and failing to be great and being embarrassed about it, and stretching and struggling and pain. And I know first hand that there is magic in the trying.

(Oh HEY! On January 2, I celebrated 18 years of having my eating under control! Yay!)

Now, when I notice my brain rushing, and telling me to go go go, I purposely slow down. I make every thought and movement deliberate and smooth. I trust that it will work out just fine. And so far it has. And has also brought me more peace daily.

My time on this planet has been a long slow lesson in easing into this life. 46 years in, I may be getting the hang of it.

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31 Dec 2023

Ice Cream Week > Cheese Week

One of my favorite things on social media is that this week between Christmas and New Year’s is “Cheese Week.” Nobody knows what day it is and everyone is full of cheese.

I find this particularly hilarious. And part of why is the connotation that cheese is a guilty pleasure, a “sometimes food.” The idea is that this week all of the structures and routines are suspended and the rules are out the window. Cheese all day every day!

For me it has been ice cream week. I have eaten (my homemade, fits in my boundaries) ice cream every single day. And on a few days, I even opted to have it twice, once for lunch and once for dinner.

My husband often teases me that I have the palate of a 4 year old. He’s not entirely wrong. I am still a food addict. 

Getting my eating under control only works for me because I can do it while sometimes indulging in the foods that make my inner 4-year-old happy, while still having no sugar or drug foods and therefore zero guilt. And I am a 46-year-old grown ass woman. I can eat what I want. So I choose to eat foods that don’t make me high. But I still want foods that make me giddy!

I can see that a lot of people look at what I do and think it looks punitive. So many rules. So much restriction. No sugar. No carbohydrates. No potatoes or pasta or rice.

But what I eliminated with sugar and my “drug foods” was guilt. So I can have ice cream every day of every week of the year and not have to think twice about it. (I would quickly get annoyed watching my husband eat filet mignon and shakshu without me, so I won’t.)

I may not know the day of the week, and I may be full of ice cream, but at no point did I think these were bad things.

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24 Dec 2023

Custom Holiday Wishes

A thing I don’t usually think about, but I am eternally grateful for when I do, is the emotional evenness of holidays for me since I got my eating under control.

I have pretty basic expectations. And I am only interested in connecting to the people around me. I don’t care about money or presents. I don’t care about going out.

Holiday food and drinks are not on the menu for me. And after almost 18 years, it’s not a blip on my radar. I can be right next to cookies and chips and not even see them. They have not been in my body long enough that my body doesn’t even recognize them. (I do still have an addict that lives inside me, so I be vigilant, I just don’t be scared.)

I feel like the holiday season is a wintry mix SAD, regular sadness, childlike wonder, hilarity, kindness, unbelievable rudeness, unrealistic expectations, family drama, unspeakable joy, and unspeakable grief. And it’s exhausting for everyone. Even if you love it. Even if it’s you’re most magical time of year.

So I remember for myself that I am in charge of my life and time and money.

The truth is, I am a great gift giver, because I love people, I love getting to know them, and I love showing them how clever I am. But I don’t have that in me for the number of people who are in our families. So it’s gift cards. And the gift of me paying unwavering attention to you when I get to bask in your presence. And not a single bad feeling about it.

Merry Christmas to you all. May you have exactly the holiday that suits your needs.

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10 Dec 2023

Not another quit in me

Today I am going to write about quitting. It has come up twice this week, once just this morning, so I guess I will take that as a sign. 

There is a very big practical difference between quitting, and having quit. It is harder to quit than it is to stay quit. And I am pretty sure I do not have another quit in me. Not for sugar. Not for cigarettes. Because both of them sucked so bad.

17 years and 11 months ago, I quit manmade sugars, starches and almost all grains, along with some foods so naturally high in sugar that they kick off sugar cravings. I think it’s worth noting that all of the natural foods I avoid (potatoes, grapes, corn) are all easily made into alcohol. My body is a still.

It took a full year for me to start digesting food properly after I quit sugar and carbohydrates. When I was in the food, everything I ate was so processed that my body didn’t even know how to break down whole foods. And then another 6 months on top of that to come out of the food fog I had been in for the majority of my life.

For that year and a half I wore fuzzy pajama pants everywhere because I could not handle anything rough or restricting on my skin. I was afraid of binging so I would go to the Manhattan flagship Barnes and Noble (in said pajama pants) and stay and read until it closed at midnight, and then take my time getting home so I wouldn’t eat in the night. I watched the same 3 DVD anime (Fushigi Yuugi) on a loop just to obsess over something that wasn’t food.

When I quit smoking cigarettes I got a side effect that affects about 3% of people who quit smoking. The top layer of skin in my mouth started to loosen and peel off. I had open sores all over my gums from having basically smoked the inside of my mouth like a salmon for 20 years. I had already been off sugar for over 6 years but I started gaining weight uncontrollably. And I mean uncontrollably. My food got cut. I was eating quantifiably less food and fewer calories and I was gaining weight. I felt crazy. I was miserable. And it is only over 11 years later, at 46, even after years of working out 5 days a week and keeping my eating boundaries, that I am *almost* the same size I was at 34.

If I had known how these things would look, and feel, and work out, I would NEVER have done them. Were they worth it? Ten thousand and a half percent! But I am afraid of exactly those things I had to get through. Pain. Weight gain. Feeling out of control. Sickness. Lethargy.

I don’t know how, knowing what I do, that I could ever choose it again.

Maybe I am not being fair to my very powerful and committed self. Because I have certainly learned to lean into choosing the practices of delayed gratification for the purpose of long term contentment. But I still think it’s asking a lot of the girl who went through all of that to do it again. And for what? A smoke at a party? A bite of cake?

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19 Nov 2023

The closest to Enlightenment I have ever come

When I was young, late teens and early twenties, I was always looking for something like “answers” or an “owner’s manual” for life. And I tried a lot of different religions and practices. I felt that my life was missing something.

I wouldn’t understand until later, when I got my eating under control that I was trying to “fill a God-sized hole.” It was, surprise surprise, also why I ate drug foods the way I did.

I was telling some friends the other day that when I was in my 20s and looking for contentment and peace, I tried to get into Zen Buddhism. One of the practices is called sitting Zazen. It means to sit very still in a rigid posture and think of nothing. 

If you know me, it may not come as much of a shock to you that I was very very bad at sitting still and thinking of nothing. The other thing that I learned at that time was that Zen Masters believe in many roads to Enlightenment, and 20-something Kate was *positive* that my path to enlightenment was *suffering*! Maybe it was why, at 28, I was willing to give up what I expected to be the only joy in my life: sugar.

Now, at 46, the idea that I was made for suffering is hilarious to me. Hilarious!

The closest I have ever come to Enlightenment is the pure peace and calm of having my eating under control. The only thing I actually gave up was the high, and the subsequent shame that I could not stop eating.

Because I still love food. I still love to eat. I still get excited about meals and particular dishes. I still do little dances. I still sing little songs to my meals. I still talk to my food. I even talk to it at the grocery store. “Oh! You’re a pretty baby! Are you mine? Yes you are!”

Giving up foods I am addicted to and keeping within my eating boundaries frees up so much space in my head. It helps me prioritize my relationships and goals. It makes me like myself enough to make hard choices. It gives me the fortitude to choose the practices that will make me truly happy in the long term, not the ones that will make the moment feel better momentarily. 

Keeping drug foods out of my body lets me think straight, and feel my feelings. It helps me make honest and honorable decisions that I don’t have to worry about or backtrack on. And if I do make a mistake, I know how to take responsibility and make amends. 

Yes simple. No not easy. But the closest to Enlightenment I have ever come.

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12 Nov 2023

Grocery store blues

Kroger bought Albertsons, and I am kind of freaked out about it.

I swear 28 year-old Kate did not know this was the path she was going down when she put boundaries around her eating 17+ years ago, but here we are.

If you don’t know what that means, it means one grocery store chain bought another and now my groceries are going to change. And that is terrifying to a person who really cares and kind of worries about what she eats. It means a new level of vigilance in reading labels. It means brands and products I used to buy might no longer be sold there.

For over a week already they have been out of my very particular favorite pork rinds that fit into my eating boundaries. And they are also rearranging the ENTIRE grocery store. So for all I know, they will stop carrying them entirely. 

I have had to mourn foods before. On this blog, in real time. Remember when Frontier started to put alcohol in their vanilla flavor in 2014???? I cried real tears for that. Did I mention I am still obsessed with food?

I survived then, and I will survive whatever happens now, with my boundaries intact. But food, groceries, are a huge part of what I think about. What comes into my home and goes into my body is the top priority for me. It’s an aspect of my life that is worth all of the time and effort and energy that I put into it. It is the most important thing in my life, because it is the ultimate first step in self care for me. 

But damn if it isn’t stressful.

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05 Nov 2023

Kate, what game are you playing?

I have a complicated relationship with “all or nothing” thinking. For one thing, I have an all or nothing relationship with simple sugars and carbohydrates, and that is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. 

But that relationship, for all of its black and white, (no you can’t eat that, yes you can eat this and this is how much) also taught me boundaries, doing the bare minimum, and “working the system.” Which are things other people like to look at as lazy or cheat-y.

I remember someone years ago asking me why I was going all the way across town to get apples. And I explained that I could have 1 apple for breakfast, and whatever market had apples that weighed more than a pound. This man who barely knew me told me that was “cheating.” Because I was obviously supposed to be on a diet if I had that many rules around food.

He thought I was cheating because he didn’t know the game I was playing. I was playing “make the food you eat so delicious and satisfying that you can withstand the appeal of chocolate cake.” That’s not the kind of game people understand. I don’t need them to. I am satisfied in my food life.

This week I decided to join NaNiWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month.) It is a thing lots of writers and authors do. The idea is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days of November, with a daily goal of 1,667 words. 

Well I woke up Wednesday and decided I was going to try to write a romance novel that has been rattling around in my head for a year-ish. I signed up and wrote over my 1667 word goal. But the next day I had a bunch of things to do. And I only got 900 words in before it was bedtime. And Friday was cleaning for company and then company. Saturday was weekly errands and husband time. So two days in a row that I did not write my novel. And here it is Sunday and I am writing this blog. Because I always write a blog on Sunday. Because it is truly a priority in my life.

But will I write my novel?

And what if I don’t?

And what if I just do it when I have time?

Will I fail at life?

My first reaction is to quit. Not because I want to, but because I have already shown that I am not taking this seriously. I’m not willing to do the work. I don’t have what it takes. That I am not good enough for my inner Good Girl.

My Good Girl and her needs – to do it right, to be perfect, to show you *how good* she is, how smart, how disciplined, how well she pays attention and follow directions – are making this NaNoWriMo experience a whole lesson. As far as she is concerned, we have already failed! FAILED!!!

But I did not choose to try it for my Good Girl. I did it because I don’t know what comes next in my life and I just want to put a whole bunch of the best of myself and what I love into Life, and see what Life offers back.

So I guess I have to ask myself “what game do I want to be playing with NaNoWriMo and this novel?”

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