onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “eating disorders”

19 Apr 2015

Reunited and it feels so good…

Yesterday was my 20th High School reunion. I didn’t expect to go. 


I went to a pretty prestigious high school. 20 years out, most people have pretty prestigious jobs. Doctors, lawyers, scientific researchers. Me? I’m just a college dropout with no job.

Of course, I don’t think that’s true. I mean it is true. But I am not even a little ashamed of it. I love my life. I have always done what I wanted to do. I have never lived by anyone else’s rules. And I do not judge my success in life by education, money, or recognition. 

I am happy. Truly, deeply fulfilled and satisfied. I like myself. 

So I guess that’s why I went. 

I was cripplingly self-conscious in high school. I had so much fear and self-loathing that my teen years were torture. I was fat. I couldn’t control my eating. I was overwhelmed with life to the point of paralysis. I was incapable of dealing with my giant emotions.

Perhaps that is true of most people. Hormones and school. Being essentially imprisoned with people because they happen to be the same age as you. 

But to my miserable teen self, nearly everyone else seemed to have everything totally under control.

To be blunt, the reunion was a lot like High School itself. I ate at a table in a corner with the same person I ate with at a table in a corner 20 years ago. I had nice conversations with a handful of friends from 20 years ago. I was ignored by the same people who ignored me 20 years ago. People who were nice then, even if we weren’t exactly friends, were nice yesterday. People who were obnoxious then, were obnoxious yesterday.

I brought my own food. (And thank God. There was a buffet dinner, but almost nothing I could eat.) Only one person who didn’t know about my food boundaries noticed that I was not eating what everyone else was eating. There was a little eyebrow raising, but nothing major. 

My eating habits were, for the most part, not a topic of conversation. But they were the reason I could be there. I was completely confident. Not just in my body, but also as myself. I didn’t feel nervous or awkward. I wasn’t judging myself. I didn’t care if I was being judged. I had a great time catching up with people I hadn’t seen in so long.

Having my eating disorders under control is, without a doubt, the foundation of my peaceful life. It gives me a freedom that I never had as a teenager. 

Especially when I have had my body size on my mind for a while now, it was such a blessing to have such a clear illustration of the gifts of having my eating disorders under control. I wasn’t thinking about my body yesterday. I was just enjoying the company and the nostalgia. I wasn’t thinking about food. I wasn’t sitting at home on my couch so ashamed of myself that I didn’t want to show my face. I was just being myself. And liking it.
Posted in Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
12 Apr 2015

Walking my mean dogs

I went for a walk yesterday. It was nice. I haven’t gotten to walk much in the past year.


I don’t miss living in New York City, but I miss various lifestyle options I had there. New York is a city of walkers. If it’s closer than a mile, you may as well walk there. If it’s a beautiful day, you may as well walk there. If you have the time, you may as well walk there.

Here, in the suburbs of Chicago, I haven’t had as much of a chance to walk. 

This winter was so long. It’s already mid April and we have only had a handful of nice days. 

And people don’t expect me to want to walk. Regularly, my boyfriend or neighbors will tell me to call if I want a ride, and then be surprised when I go wherever, or return from wherever, never having called them. People around me are always taken aback by my choosing to walkover getting a ride.

For me, walking is a great way to keep my eating disorders at bay. Especially my body dysmorphia. 

My body dysmorphia is dormant right now. I am not in the throes of hating my body. But where I am is a place of resignation. I don’t look at my body and feel content. I still don’t love my size. I wish I would lose this 30 lbs I gained when I quit smoking. But I’m ok. I can be with it.

But I can feel that there is a body image disorder attack in me somewhere. So I am looking forward to being able to walk every day.

When I walk, I do a few things for myself. It’s a kind of meditation for me, so I get my head straight(er). I work off a lot of my stress hormones, so I feel peaceful. It makes me feel like I’m doing something for the health and strength of my body. And it’s exercise, so it lets the bulimic part of me calm the hell down.

I mostly manifested my bulimia through exercise. Though I did have a short (thank God) stint of old fashioned making myself throw up.

I keep a watch on myself when it comes to exercise. When I start asking myself how many calories I figure I just burned, that’s a glaring red flag. Seriously. A have-a-seat-and-drink-a-diet-soda-because-that’s-enough-for-today red flag.

When I was fat, people treated me as if I didn’t care what I looked like. They seemed to assume that if I were really ashamed (and a lot of people thought I should be ashamed), I would do something about my weight. But I was always that ashamed. I cared so much it was killing me inside. 

And now that I live in a healthy weighted body, people seem to think I shouldn’t care so much about what I look like. But I do. Because no matter how I have learned to take care of myself, and lovingly put boundaries around my eating, I am still that same person.

It’s funny, because people encourage others to work out. Excessive working out is often praised. And I truly believe that people who work out because they love their body and want to nurture it are praise-worthy. Same for people who do it for love of sport. Or any kind of love. 

I exercised because of hate. I hated my body. I hated the way it looked. I hated how I couldn’t stop eating and I wanted to hide that fact from the rest of the world. I exercised to the point of exhaustion and injury. I was punishing my body for not looking like society told me it should look like. What society told me it could look like if I were disciplined enough. What it would look like if I were a “Good Girl.”

I had to give up those notions, but I am still sick around those things. I will always be sick. I have to actively keep from killing myself with exercise. Just like I have to actively keep from killing myself with sugar and compulsive eating. And I have to remember to accept myself the way I am right now in the moment. So I don’t abuse my body.

It’s OK. As problems go, it’s not the worst. I have a solution for my eating disorders. And along with that, a way of life that keeps me happy, sane and well adjusted. And now that the weather is breaking, I will get to walk, and keep my body image issues on a short leash. Like the mean dogs that they are.
Posted in Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
06 Apr 2015
2 Comments

I suppose “better late than never” is a saying for a reason…

I was in the shower today, and I realized that for the first time in over 3 years, I forgot to write a blog.

Obviously, here I am, a day late. Writing because I have a commitment. But I have to be honest with you. This scares the crap out of me.

I fear the first chink in the armor. I fear the first mistake. I fear the first slip. Because I fear that snowball effect. I don’t like knowing that I forgot to write a post and the world didn’t end. It would be so much easier on me if everything had bigger, scarier, more life-changing immediate consequences.

I am so incredibly afraid of my own lack of character. I am terrified that if I let my guard down, I will revert to being the kind of person I have been. The kind of person I was ashamed of.

I feel like the words I am writing here are not enough to explain to you the terror I am in. I sometimes wonder if anyone can understand what it is like to hate yourself so thoroughly and completely that you don’t even know that you hate yourself until it stops.

I fear slip-sliding back to that place. In tiny movements. In nearly imperceptible increments. An insidious regression.

I have gained so much peace in the past 9 1/2 years, since I got my eating under control. Even when all is not well, I am well. Even when I am in pain or unhappiness, I am still strong in my heart and soul.

But today, I am afraid. Not of what I am, but of what I know I am capable of being, because I have been something else before. And it was a terrible way to live.

I am also reprimanding myself right now for my perfectionism. It’s a kind of sickness for me that is also tied in with my eating disorders. It is the M.O. of The Good Girl who wants to please everyone but herself. But on the other hand, that same perfectionism is the very thing that can allow me to say “F*** it! You’ve already ruined everything,” when I slip up, like I did last week when I forgot to write a blog. My perfectionism is the back door to my laziness and resignation.

Forgetting to post in the past two days was, without a doubt, an honest mistake. I have had a lot on my mind lately. And Easter yesterday made it more complicated in my head. So far, in 2015 I have had a lot of malice pointed in my direction. And it has been taking its toll on me. It makes me tired and has me distracted. I have accidentally hurt myself more in the past month than usual. It takes a lot of patience for me to let things go again and again and again. And then messing up on my own, especially something so important to me like this blog, makes everything feel so much more overwhelming.

And I am embarrassed to have screwed up. I don’t like coming here and saying that I have a commitment and I failed.

Needless to say, I am putting an alarm on my phone to remind me to post to my blog every week from now on. I don’t want to let this mistake become a regular occurrence until I just stop blogging and the whole thing falls away.

I don’t want to be cruel to myself. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, either. But the fear of regression is real for me. I don’t want to wake up one day hating myself because I let my commitments break apart one by one. It took too long to live a life I love to let it go without a fight.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , ,
28 Mar 2015
4 Comments

Free to be funny another day

I was reading a blog the other day. It was a parenting blog. I am not a parent. It was about DIY cleaning products. Which I will almost certainly never make or use. I was reading it because it caught my attention and I clicked on it.

It was funny. It was one of those sarcastic-mom blogs. The kind of thing Erma Bombeck was writing before blogs. Even before the internet being readily available was a thing. I liked what I read. It was fun.

And it got me thinking about the fact that this blog is not particularly funny.

I am funny. In my life, I make people laugh. A lot. And I will be blunt. Eating disorders, while serious, and worthy of an authentic conversation, can still be pretty hilarious.

Anything that is not killing you at any particular moment can be funny. Even something that is killing you can be funny.

So I thought about how to make this a funnier blog.

I thought about the things that make my friends with eating disorders laugh. Like how my boyfriend will eat one snack cake in a package of two. He will just leave the other sitting there. He’s not even controlling himself and saving it like a good, obsessive eater would. Really? You can’t just mindlessly eat the other one because it’s there? What, you’re too good for that? Or when a friend talks about how her grandmother used to tell her that if something had fruit in it, it wouldn’t make you fat. So she would eat big, rich desserts that had some element of fruit and didn’t expect them to make her gain weight. How could I have gained weight? All I ate for dessert was fruit!

But then I wondered if it would land for people who didn’t have eating disorders. Or if it would just be salt in the wound for people who did, and who were not having an easy time of it.

And then I remembered one of the things I love about having my eating disorders under control. I have time and space. For whatever. I don’t have to do everything now. There’s another meal coming. There’s another day coming. There’s another week coming with another blog post to write. If I want to be funny, I can think about being funny. I can try it out some time. No rush. And it will be OK if it doesn’t turn out for the best. I don’t write for an audience. I write for myself and sincerely hope that people get something out of it. But if they don’t, that’s not actually my responsibility.

A while ago I thought about writing some fiction. And I am writing some fiction in my spare time now. I thought about starting an eating disorder blog long before I actually made Onceafatgirl. I thought about quitting smoking before I quit smoking. I didn’t jump into any of those decisions. And in the end, I ended up doing them. In my own time. At my own pace.

It’s so freeing to remember that I really am free.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , ,
21 Mar 2015
1 Comment

The difference between bliss and calamity

I am on my way back home after a really fantastic, week-long vacation. We rented a boat and cruised around on the ocean for two days.  We saw sea turtles and manta rays and jellyfish. I went in the ocean for the first time. I got lots of sun. (I’m a little crispy actually.)


We ate really well this whole trip. One night we borrowed a grill from the resort and had filet mingon stuffed with crab. But my vacation was not about eating. It was not about restaurants. It was not about “cheat days” or “free-for-alls”. A vacation is not an excuse for me to eat whatever I want.

I gave up excuses when I put boundaries around my food. I took on a belief system that says no excuse is acceptable. I do what I do no matter what.

And that allows me a certain kind of peace. I wore my bikini when I was by the pool or on the boat. I’m not skinny. But I am comfortable enough in my skin to wear my bikini in public. 

But If I broke my food boundaries, even if I weighed exactly the same, and looked exactly the same, I would never have been able to wear my bikini. Having boundaries around my food allows me to be happy with myself. It allows me to be less judgmental of myself. It allows me a certain freedom from my own obsessive thinking. About my body and about food.

While I was prepping meals for the flight home today, I was mixing sesame seeds into my butter. But the butter wouldn’t soften in the air conditioning. So I took it outside to our patio and sat in a deck chair and watched the ocean while I was mixing it. My boyfriend came out and looked startled. He asked “Are you eating?” 

I said “No, I’m just making tomorrow’s dinner.”

He said, “Thank God! All I could think was ‘Oh no!'”

I told him, “Yep. If you ever see me eating and it’s not time to eat, think ‘Oh no!'”

My food boundaries are the difference between blissful serenity and disastrous calamity.

This trip was bliss. I can’t wait to do it again. 


Posted in beauty, Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , ,
15 Mar 2015

Can’t talk now. On vacation. (YAY!)

I am in the airport now waiting for a flight to Florida! I love Florida!

It’s these times, when I am out of my routine, that it becomes so obvious that I have food boundaries.

We are staying at a hotel with a kitchen, like we do when we travel, so I will probably be getting myself a temporary routine. I like routine, it makes me feel safe.

But today, my routine is off. Airports mean bringing all of my food for the day in my carry-on. At 6 AM, two hours before I usually eat in the morning, I ate a breakfast I would never eat at home. Because I had to get it through TSA. I never notice my food boundaries are “inconvenient” in my day to day. But when I am flying it’s always a day of cooking in advance.

And then yesterday I put off eating dinner to pack my clothes, and I got worried like I would forget to eat.


Not having things be predictable gives me fear. Especially around my eating noundaries.

The truth is, it has happened before. I can remember one time in the past 9 years. Probably seven years ago by now. When I remembered that I forgot to eat dinner, I panicked. I made a phone call. I asked what I should do. I followed directions. It all turned out fine in the end. My eating disorders stayed under control. And it was an honest mistake. 

I make hones mistakes. The honesty part is important. I can’t keep my food under control with lies.

When I was eating compulsively, I told a lot of lies about what I was eating. Especially when I was on a diet. (Which was not often. I was not a dieter.) In my experience, a little lie leads to big lies. Once I let dishonesty in, dishonesty was inescapable.

I don’t plan on missing a meal. I love my meals. And I don’t plan on sabotaging myself. And I don’t plan on making honest mistakes, but that’s what makes them honest mistakes. They’re not planned. 

I’m willing to spend a day cooking so I can make it through the airport. I have been willing to do what needs to be done, even when it’s inconvenient. 
Posted in Inspiration, Life and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
07 Mar 2015
4 Comments

Not to succeed, win, have or accomplish

I was an impatient child. Especially when it came to learning. 


See, I’m smart. Really smart. And most things came easily to me. I didn’t have to work hard to learn. And things that I didn’t learn immediately…well, I hated them. I didn’t want to do them. I didn’t want to fail. It made me feel bad. And I always felt like whatever energy I put in to something that ended in failure was a waste of my time. It was all about what I had to show for it in the end.

Soon I am going to get back into the workforce, and I would like to get a job teaching crochet, and helping people fix their crochet projects. At least one place I am looking at requires that you know how to both knit and crochet. So recently I started trying to knit again.

I am a bad knitter.

That is an imprecise way of putting it. There are things that I am great at. Like the dexterity parts. I am excellent at making the different stitches. I can make beautiful patterns with them. I can make cables and laces. When it comes to the actual knitting, I am really talented.

But there is another part of knitting that I am really really bad at. I cannot fix mistakes. This is inconvenient for a girl with mild perfectionist tendencies. If I make a mistake anywhere in a project, I don’t know how to get myself back to the point before I made the mistake without unraveling the whole thing. It’s all or nothing. I either have to live with the imperfections, or start again from the beginning. And I can’t stand making mistakes. So, so far, it’s all nothing.

But there is something different about me since I got my eating under control. I am patient. I am now one of those people who believes it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. (Seriously, I never thought I would be one of those people. I promise I don’t have art with motivational sayings. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

So for the past few weeks, I have been knitting. And I have nothing to show for it. And I am a-okay with that. I must have started anew at least ten times. And yet none of the times I unraveled the whole thing and wound it back around the ball of yarn did I feel it was a waste of my time. I wasn’t doing it because I need a scarf or a blanket or a sweater. I have plenty of beautiful clothes. And my house is cozy warm. I was doing it to practice. To get better. To learn. I was knitting to knit. It’s that simple.

The events and circumstances of my life are so much less “significant” since I got my eating disorders under control. And it’s such a relief. I love being free from having to be great at everything. I love having the ability to be incapable without shame. I love being exactly who I am all the time. I can even be ok with being a bit of a perfectionist.

I’m going to put the knitting away for a while. I just finished a really amazing crochet project and I’m ready to do more of that. But it’s nice to do something for the sake of doing it. Not to succeed, win, have, or accomplish.
Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , ,
28 Feb 2015
3 Comments

Praying to a Magic 8 Ball or sitting in a chair

I was talking to some friends recently and one of them gave a beautiful analogy about faith.

There is a chair. Do you have faith in the chair? Words about having faith in the chair are meaningless. You can say you have faith in the chair, but you show your faith in the chair by sitting in it. You may truly believe the chair will hold you, but unless you sit in it, your faith is meaningless.

I was raised Catholic. I believed in God as a little kid. When I got older, I stopped. Then I believed. Then I stopped. Then I believed. Around and around.

The reason I was able to go around and around was that I never “sat in the chair.” Faith was something decorative like a painting, or maybe more of a kitschy novelty like a Magic 8 Ball, but never something practical, like a chair. I would live as if God had no part in my day to day life. I would do whatever I could to make things go the way I wanted them to. And then when things were going badly, or I wanted something I wasn’t going to get, I “prayed” for a miracle. It was always about what I wanted. And in the most short-sighted, specific way imaginable. Not that I wanted peace, or love, or security, but that I wanted that apartment that I didn’t get, or that boyfriend who didn’t like me back, or those shoes they didn’t have in my size. And I wanted the old, white-haired, white dude in heaven to make that happen.

As a Catholic child I absolutely conceptualized God as the love-child of Charlton Heston and Merlin sitting on a big Throne in the clouds. But now, I do not have an anthropomorphized vision of God. Now my belief can be considered a belief in the general benevolence of life. I believe that when I meet the circumstances in my life with integrity and honor, I always end up better, and with better circumstances than I had. And I have come to trust that the pains and the dips and the falls are not setbacks. They are simply me not getting what I want. And I have come to trust that if I am not getting what I want, it is because it is better not to.

Lately, there has been a lot of me not getting what I want. Quite a bit of sadness and frustration. Lots of disappointments. And I do get disappointed when I want things and my life doesn’t work out that way. I could exhaust myself trying to get what I think I want. But instead this is where I exercise my faith. This is where I sit in the chair.

When I was eating sugar, I used food to numb difficult emotions. When I stopped eating compulsively, I learned how to bear uncomfortable feelings. I had to. There was no other option. And it turns out to be an incredibly useful skill. It has made me calmer, happier and stronger. And it let me have faith, because I suddenly had a means of showing it. I could be still and let things be the way they were. I could sit in the chair.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , ,
21 Feb 2015
5 Comments

Sorry, not sorry

What are you willing to do to win?

Are you willing to lie? How big of a lie? A little lie? How big can a lie be before it’s not a little lie anymore. What are you willing to do to cover up that little lie you told to win? Are you willing to cheat? Are you willing to pass the blame? Are you willing to steal?

Over the years, I have figured out that winning is not my goal. For me, every day I am sober from sugar, my goal is to be simultaneously more humble and less of a doormat.

When I was eating compulsively, I spent almost all of my life apologizing for existing, but refusing to apologize for my bad behavior. I would justify it, blame other people, and just plain old lie about it, but I never just said, “I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

Now, I am committed to the opposite. I apologize for my bad behavior. And I refuse to apologize for existing. And that extends to being myself and taking care of myself. It’s the difference between being a self-righteous chump and a modest powerhouse.

To my self-righteous chump self, winning was a necessity that I was willing to do anything to achieve. To the modest powerhouse, life is not a zero-sum game.

It turns out that a lot of people have opinions about me. They have opinions about my lifestyle, my choices, and my personality. They have opinions about things that are absolutely and 100% none of their business.

That’s OK. They can have their opinions. What they cannot have are my apologies. Too bad, so sad. Sorry, not sorry.

And there is another thing that they cannot have. They cannot have a say in my heart, soul, or spirit. They cannot make me hard. I will not allow it.

I’m a sensitive person in some ways. I have very big feelings. Books and movies make me cry. Even TV shows and comic books make me cry. (Good ones, of course…)

But malice and cruelty make me cry too. Especially, but not exclusively, when they are directed at me.

My being susceptible to being hurt upsets a lot of people in my life. People who want what’s best for me want me to be harder to touch. Growing up, people used to tell me not to be so sensitive. My boyfriend tells me that when I get upset “they” win.

But I don’t think that’s true. I think “they” win when I grow a crusty layer of ice around my heart, so that I am immune to malice and cruelty.

I don’t want to be immune to malevolence. I want to be hurt by hurtful things, so that I never stop being moved by moving things, or inspired by inspiring things. I never want to forget my humanity.

I spent the first 28 years of my life trying to numb my gigantic feelings with sugar. I built fortresses around myself trying to be hard. Fortresses of fat and indifference and meanness. I ate my feelings into a 300 lb body. And it never did work, either. I was still sensitive. I just lived in a tiny world. A tiny world of self-involvement and ego.

This is better. Crying is not the end of the world. Nobody is winning when I cry. Because crying is not part of a game. It is part of being alive and aware and available for life. Which I do for myself. So, sorry, not sorry!

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , ,
15 Feb 2015
1 Comment

I love my boring life.

The past few days have been perfectly delicious. Cooking, cleaning, writing, reading, crocheting, watching TV with my boyfriend. Peace and quiet. Nothing exciting.

This life I live now is exactly the thing I was terrified of before I got sober from sugar. I knew that I needed to give up sugar. My eating disorders were making my life unbearable. But I thought all of my happiness was over. How could I ever enjoy life again without chocolate cake? Without drinks at the bar?

I was so afraid of being bored to death. I was afraid of not feeling alive. The irony is that I was so trapped in my fear and insecurity, or sometimes the fantasy life in my head, that I was not actually living.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a lot of fun when I was younger. I was definitely a party girl. And I have great friends. But fun is not happiness. Fun is not serenity. Fun is not joy. It’s just fun. And it has its place. But it is external.

Chasing fun is no longer a necessity in my life, because I have a kind of peace and contentment that comes from inside me.

A lot of the fun I was having was so I could escape thinking about the things in my life that I was ashamed of. I was so easily overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. I had so much anxiety that I didn’t know how to take a small step because I was intimidated by looking at the whole journey. So there I was letting my life pass me by, not doing things that needed to be done, telling lies to cover that up. Constantly worried about the state of my life and what was going to happen to me.

Very exciting. If you’re into that kind of thing…

For me, being sober from sugar is not just about not eating sugar. It’s about dealing with all of the things in my life that I was using sugar to avoid. Because without sugar, I was forced to deal with them. They say if you want to know what you are eating over, stop eating. All that stuff comes right up and pokes you in the forehead.

I am not done dealing with myself. The point for me is to never be done dealing with myself. And the changes I have made so far were not quick. Or clean. Or smooth.

But I got myself to a place where I don’t have to escape the life I have. I am not ashamed of myself. And I don’t have to enjoy everything. Some things in my life are not sunshine and roses, it’s true. But every day, at any given moment, I love my life. The mundane is a sweet reminder that I can be with my reality exactly the way it is and be perfectly happy.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , ,

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