onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “food addiction”

06 Sep 2015

A nugget of peace in my peacelessness 

Ah. Moods. They seem so real.When I got sober from sugar, I was told to be grateful. I was told be be grateful for whatever there was to be grateful for. Even if it was just that I was not eating compulsively that day. Even if it was just that I was not dead.

Gratitude may, in fact, be the opposite of addiction. The disease of addiction’s symptoms are about being self-centered, egotistical, and entitled. I got dealt a bad hand. She’s got more than I do. The world is against me. My life sucks. I deserve better. Why does he have what I want? I should have that. That should be mine.

As a food addict in the throes of my disease, I was regularly in a bad mood. And it felt real. I felt that I was being treated unfairly. I was afraid of the future. I was misunderstood. I was abused and neglected. And my body agreed. It produced all the right chemicals and hormones to defend that point of view.

I have been thinking about this because I have been in a particularly good mood, after a few days of being more easily irritated. And I don’t know why. No reason. 

Or perhaps more accurately, the “reasons” are irrelevant. I could have a good reason to be in a bad mood on any day, and still be in a good mood. Someone can be a jerk at work and I could still be perfectly happy.

Another thing I learned when I got my food under control was that while I might not be able to completely reverse a bad mood in a moment, I have the ability to change my mind about it, step away from it, and take its power away. 

Just like I do not romance thoughts about sugar and carbs, I do not romance my bad moods. I do not justify them with how real they are. Perhaps I really am being treated unfairly. Perhaps I truly am being misunderstood. That is no justification for perpetuating bad moods. I do not play them over and over in my head so that they get me all worked up. I can look at them. I can let them be. I can find a kind of peace with my peacelessness.

It’s one of the ways that I gauge my own choices, relationships, and experiences. If I can’t find that nugget of peace in my peacelessness, then I need to make a change. Quickly. 

Moods used to run my life when I was eating compulsively. I am grateful that now I run my life. I may have to accommodate a mood now and then, but ultimately, moods serve me, and not the other way around.

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29 Aug 2015

Vulnerable, unpredictable, and intense – just as it should be

When I was in New York last weekend, I was with a group of people who make it their lives’ work to be present and honest. And it’s intense.

Now, it is also my life’s work to be present and honest, so quite frankly, I loved being there. But it was still really intense.

When I strip away the pretense of day-to-day living – like wanting to be liked, wanting to look cool, wanting to be acknowledged for being “good” or “right,” or any of the things that I do out of fear so that I don’t have to acknowledge my truth or be present for my life – what I am left with is unguarded love. To love and to be loved in return.

Here’s a secret. Love is scary. It’s vulnerable and unpredictable. It’s intense. Sometimes it can feel like it’s too intense.

I wouldn’t understand until years after I got my eating under control and got sober from sugar, but food was my main defense against being present and honest. And it was my first fortress against love. It did not matter how much love was sent my way. I had a wall up, and that wall allowed me to filter how much of it got in. I could take my love in easy-to-swallow, palatable doses. A lot of the love meant for me went to waste.

Being with this group of people was also interesting because I met them before I got sober from food. One of them was the one who sent me to get sober. Because of having known them for so long, I have memories, in my body, of how uncomfortable I was when I was eating compulsively. I could feel very clearly how free and peaceful I have become in the last 9+ years. I remembered how much I thought I had to hide then. I could feel so clearly, in contrast, how open I am now.

Another dear friend of mine talks about how getting sober from sugar and compulsive eating lets her discover who she really is, as opposed to who she was trying to be. And how she really likes the person she is discovering. That is my experience too. That in being who I am, I really like and love me. That I am happier being my flawed self than I was trying to be a perfect someone else.

So I am posing a question to you. (Yes, you. Who else?) Who would you be if you were totally yourself? What would it look like if you could let that true self be loved without filtering how much of the love you let in?

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23 Aug 2015

Serene, warm, squishy joy.

This is a super short blog today because I am visiting New York City, and I have people to see and things to do.I am here for an event. A Bat Mitzvah. I am seeing old friends I have not seen in a long time.

And I am totally unselfconscious. I am available to show and accept love. I am able to be in the moment without hesitation or fear. I am free to have fun. But most importantly, I am able to let the celebration be about the Bat Mitzvah, herself. Even in my own head.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that “it’s all about relationships.” I am able to be available because I have my eating under control. I am not high. I am not ashamed. I am not thinking about food, and how much I want, or how to hide how much I am eating. I am not worried about what my body looks like. I am present in the moment in the physical world outside of my own head. All because I have my eating taken care of.

I am always grateful. But on this trip, the results are so profoundly laid out in front of me. 

This is joy. Serene, warm, squishy joy.

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15 Aug 2015

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

I used to be a miserable person. I was a victim. I saw everything from a negative point of view. Now I am a cheerful person.

I made a choice to be a cheerful person. I made that choice even before I got my eating disorders under control.

I started by faking being cheerful. I adopted a cute-girl smile. I would ask myself things like “what would a cheerleader do?” It got easier once I got my eating under control, because one of the people who helped me do it would tell me to be grateful for what I had. So I started saying “I’m grateful” like a mantra. Being grateful automatically makes me more cheerful. Plus, I didn’t hate myself anymore. And I couldn’t act like a victim anymore, once I had taken care of my eating problem.

In many ways, my pessimism and victimhood was based on what I thought a really smart fat girl should act like: snide and indifferent.

That person, the one who decided that she wanted to be cheerful, is the one who got her eating disorders under control. That person is the person who believed that she could change. That part of me believed, even while I was a miserable finger-pointer.

It gets me a little choked up. It’s good for me to remember that the person I was is the one who changed. That snide and indifferent fat girl is the one who decided to be a cheerleader (figuratively…sorta…I mean, I can’t do the splits or anything cool like that). That took a lot of courage. I sometimes forget how strong I was as that miserable fat girl.

Sometimes I hear people say things like “People don’t change.” But I have changed so much in my life. The first change was not getting my eating disorders under control. That was the biggest, yes. It cleared so much space for me to change in bigger ways, even more rapidly, but it was not the first. By the time I did that, I already had a history of changing. Maybe I could only do it because I was already a believer.

I don’t remember what the first change was. It doesn’t matter. It could have been anything. I am forever grateful for that thing in me that believes that people do change, and that I am the light bulb that really wants to.

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08 Aug 2015

Wanting and not wanting

One thing that I notice is that if I talk to people about food, most people equate managing one’s food with weight.

I have had a huge weight loss, so I’m sure my own personal story feeds that idea for a lot of people. But for me, keeping my eating under control is only about weight in a round about way. For me, weight was a symptom of my real problem. My problem is eating.

There are a lot of people who have a problem with eating and they do not have a weight problem. I am grateful that being fat was part of my eating disorder story. If it weren’t, I don’t know if I would have found relief. I may not have even noticed how miserable I was.

One thing that happened when I got my eating under control was that I stopped hating myself. But I didn’t even know that I did hate myself until it stopped.

I am bringing this up because something happened the other day. It doesn’t happen very often, so it’s worth noting.

I didn’t want to eat my dinner.

It was later than I usually eat. I was tired. I just wasn’t feeling it.

Now, sometimes I don’t want to eat, but then I get two bites in and it’s so good that I forget that I didn’t want to eat it two minutes ago. That doesn’t count. This time was a time that I didn’t want to eat it, and all the while I ate it, I never wanted it. Even though it was a super yummy meal, including frozen yogurt and a cookie (all homemade, sugar-free, and within my food boundaries, of course.)

I ate it. Every last bite. When I was done, I was grateful it was over. But I did it. I keep my food boundaries under control by eliminating “wanting” and “not wanting” from the reasons I eat. If my food boundaries were about weight, then I could just not eat a meal that I didn’t want. Easy. But conversely. there are many (many many) days where I would happily eat another whole meal after I finish one. So let’s say I didn’t eat dinner that day. The next day, when I wanted two dinners, could I do that? What about the day after that? Could I skip breakfast and lunch and just binge eat all night? Because when I am eating compulsively, I start to think like that. I get irrational and obsessive.

What I gained when I eliminated “wanting” and “not wanting” from my food life was peace from my obsession with food. Wanting and not wanting mean making infinite decisions around food. Because food decisions are infinite for me. I don’t think straight when it comes to eating. I feel crazy. I feel ashamed. I get all messed up and mixed up. It is so much easier to know that I will eat three meals a day. That they will consist of protein, vegetables, or fruit, and fat. That I will eat all of them and nothing more. It’s so simple. It’s a no-brainer. Because I can’t brain when it comes to my own food.

When my dad’s mother was dying five years ago, I didn’t want to eat either. I cried almost constantly. I was never hungry. But just like the other day, I ate my meals. And I will say that it was a huge blessing for me. I felt like my whole world was falling apart at that time. The person who loved me best in the world was going to leave me. I was not prepared. But there was something constant in my life. Three meals a day with protein, fruit, or vegetables, and fat. No matter what. Even if I cried through the whole thing. I had been doing it that way for four and a half years by then. It was three little respites in my day. I may not have enjoyed the food, but each meal was a little sanctuary of normality.

If I had not eaten my meal the other day, I would have invited all of my crazy in. I would have lost the peace of mind that I have had for over nine years now. That’s a pretty high price to pay for the sake of wanting and not wanting.

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01 Aug 2015
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It’s all just experiences

As I have mentioned, I live with a steady stream of low-level anxiety. It buzzes in my background like a radio station on the edge of a signal. (Does that even mean anything to anybody younger than 20? Anyway…) You know that thing where they say before you get upset you should ask yourself “Will this matter in 5 years?” Well, for me, even a minor struggle can be played out to me being homeless on the street in 5 years. I know it’s irrational. Knowing that it’s irrational doesn’t make the worry any less real. Since I gave up sugar, this kind of irrational anxiety is easier to keep in check, but it takes work on my part.

I have a similar anxiety about being stuck. About some difficult situation or another never, ever changing. I know this is irrational too. Same rules apply.

Since I have been working, I have not been writing fiction. I was doing a lot of writing before I had this job, but now I’m tired. If not all the time, close to it. And it makes me worry that I won’t write again.

There is a part of me that says I should start a new regimen of waking up at 4 every morning to start my day writing for 2 hours before anything else. But the tired part of me tells the writer part of me to shut the hell up, thank you.

What I have to remember is that everything changes. This part of my life where I am tired from my job and I don’t have time to write will change. Somehow. I am not saying that I will definitely start writing again any time soon. What I am saying is that when I look back on the past 10 years, I have lead so many different lives. I have encountered countless situations that I feared would never change, and they changed. Not to mention countless I wished would never change. They changed as well.

When I was younger, I used to believe I was supposed to make my mark on the world. I thought I was supposed to create a legacy that was big and bright and undeniable. I thought that was where meaning lay. I thought that was why I had been given such a big presence and prominent personality.

In getting sober from sugar, I came to realize that I am making a mark on the world. And it is bright, and undeniable. Right now it’s not big. It may never get any bigger than it is now. I am positively great with that. It doesn’t make it any less important.

Big personality celebrities and self-help gurus will tell you that you need to go after your dreams. That the only one stopping you is you. And I believe that. They say “don’t regret the things you never did.” But I’d like to take it a step further. Even if I don’t do them, I don’t have to regret the things I never did. I don’t have to have regrets of any kind. Life is not a race. It’s not a test. I don’t need to do anything to justify myself. I don’t need to “earn my spot.” I already have a spot. I already have a purpose. To exist as myself.

A friend of mine once shared an epiphany with me. She said “It’s all just experiences.”

I love that. I was freed by it. That is the meaning of life for me. To experience it. In the body I was given, and the circumstances I was born into, and the choices that I make every day. The meaning of life to be Kate. And that includes everything I missed out on because I was too afraid, and everything I ruined by being an addict, and everything I marred by being a liar and a manipulator. It includes all of it, because it’s all just experiences.

I want to write fiction because I love it. Because I’m good at it. Because I have characters and ideas in my head that entrance me, and I would love to share them with others. And because I make myself laugh and cry and think. And because I love to slip into another world and another life. Because I want more experiences than just the ones I am given. I want to feel all the feelings. I want to know all the corners of what it means to be human.

But if I never finish writing the stories in my head, there would still be nothing to regret. They provided me with hours of my own personal amusement. They were all experiences in their own right.

I don’t know why being sober from food made me content, but it did. Slowly but surely I stopped needing to prove myself in ways other than existing day to day. I keep my boundaries around food and I do my best. And suddenly that’s enough. And that takes a lot of pressure off of the anxiety-ridden girl who thinks that homeless on the street in five years is a perfectly reasonable possibility for the future. A day at a time, life seems pretty rosy. I’m madly in love. I have a job. I have a home. And I don’t have to do anything monumental to have any of it. I don’t need to prove myself in any way to occupy the space I’m in. It’s my space. In my lifetime, it has always been mine. It will be mine until I die.

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25 Jul 2015

Principles before Personalities 

“Principles before personalities” is a 12-step concept. The idea being that you don’t have to like everyone, but you have to support everyone on their journey to stay sober, even the people who have really irritating personalities.  I try to practice this in all areas of my life. For me, it’s not just about sobriety. It’s about humans getting through life surrounded by one another. We have to deal with each other every single day. My principles include being part of the solution, minding my own business, helping when I am asked and can provide help, and keeping my integrity in tact. I want to do this regardless of the person I am dealing with.

But now I am working in a grocery store, constantly surrounded by customers, and coworkers. And seriously, people make that shit hard! 

No, no. I am exaggerating. I find that most people rank on the scale somewhere between awesome and harmless. But then there are the ones who fall on the spectrum between manipulative (that pathetic manipulation in order to save their own asses) and down right malicious. And that is hard for me.

Perhaps the hardest part is that I was once that kind of person. When I was actively in my sugar/food addiction, I often tried to manipulate people and situations to save myself. And when I got angry, I became cruel. I didn’t have a means of expressing my feelings. I didn’t know I even had feelings. I was numbing them with cake. And being angry felt like enough justification to harm others. I was in pain, so you were going to be in pain too.

Now that I have my eating disorders under control, I can deal with people who are hurt or angry or feel treated unfairly. I can apologize for a bad experience, even if it’s not specifically my fault. And even when it is. I can empathize with people in pain, and I can make it better. 

But getting attacked is not easy for me. I am the same sensitive person I was at 5 years old, under the covers in the night, praying that life would get less painful, because I didn’t think I would be able to do it if it didn’t get easier. And people do attack. Sometimes with a smile, or a smirk, as if it were a joke. Sometimes with a snarl like a wild animal. 

I want to say, You’re at a high end grocery store in a first world country where you can afford to buy meat for $25/lb. Or, You have a union job in a nice suburb. Why do you need to be so malicious, obnoxious, or cruel? Why do you need to hurt someone else?

But, like I said. I was like that too. Until I learned another principle when I got sober from sugar. Gratitude. I didn’t know how lucky I was when I was eating compulsively. I only looked for the ways I was disappointed. I only saw what I thought was wrong.

So I have to go into work today. I’m grateful that it’s a good job. I’m grateful I’m good at it. I’m grateful I’m appreciated there by my coworkers and management. And I am especially grateful the most people fall somewhere between awesome and harmless. 

As for the rest, I am grateful that I practice the ideal of principles before personalities.

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05 Jul 2015

One of those times history did not repeat itself. Maybe because I didn’t backtrack.

I had my first day at my new job yesterday. It went really well. I think I will be just fine at it.
I only get a 15 minute break per shift, so that means packing the smallest possible meal when I have to work through a meal time. But it’s manageable. 

I had a handful of rough days worrying. First about meals. Now that I have the experience of having eaten one meal in my 15 minute break, it seems like a non-issue. But mostly I had been worried about scheduling. Or more specifically, asking for what I need in terms of my schedule, from someone I don’t know.

I have a history of working for power-crazy bosses. Not all of them. I have had plenty of kind, considerate, honorable employers. But I have also had a lot of bosses who liked to demonstrate their position as the person in charge of my money.

And I historically, I have let them.

I am the person in charge of my money. I always have been. But I lived for many years as if it were not the case. And I was easy to manipulate, because I was a people-pleaser who thought her job was to make the boss happy. I thought that I didn’t deserve money for less than that.

It turns out that all that time, my job was my job. And the boss being happy was not in my control. 

I do my best. I am committed to integrity. But my best isn’t going to make everyone happy. And I need to live with that.

So right, scheduling. I was hired with the understanding that I could not work after 4 pm on Thursdays. But I got my schedule and I was immediately scheduled for Thursday night. And I was so upset.

So the “Good Girl” in me wanted to just accept it and work Thursday night, so that she didn’t have to be humiliated by making requests on her first day. And that fear of humiliation made me angry. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was even more anxious than usual.

And there is another part of it. I spent most of my life alone. And that meant that my choices had limited reach. But now I’m in a relationship. So money is not mine anymore. It’s ours. In the past, if I felt uncomfortable with the way I was being treated in a job, it was my right to walk away. But now walking away from a job would at least require a conversation with my boyfriend. 

But Thankfully, I was at least present enough to know that I didn’t know what was going to happen. (Being sober helps in that way.) I knew enough to know that I needed to take care of this one step at a time and not get ahead of myself. 

So I walked in on my first day and I did my best. I also made my requests. And my boss was great. He told me he never got my availability schedule, so he didn’t know about my Thursday nights. He rescheduled me that day. He even accommodated another request, that I specifically told him was not a necessity, but would be nice since I had planned something before I got the job. In other words, he’s a good boss and also a nice guy.

I was worried and upset because of history. Because I didn’t know what to expect, and I was afraid of getting the worst of what I have gotten before. But it’s also about confronting the worst of myself. The doormat. The Good Girl. The martyr. It’s scary to go head to head with those aspects of my personality. I was that way because I got something out of it. And even though I get more out of being honest and straightforward and taking care of myself, the fear of losing something by not being obliging can still be intense.

But now I have another reference point for self-care, where it worked out perfectly in the end. So it turns out that history does not always repeat itself.

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21 Jun 2015
1 Comment

I’m just going to sit here and be anxious 

Living with anxiety is an interesting thing. Sometimes I get anxious because of specific events. But sometimes I just get anxious. Now I just live with it. But I used to eat it. Numb it with sugar.

That made it worse. I didn’t know that at the time. Sugar sure did feel like it was helping. But it really only made every feeling bigger, closer to the surface. Coming down made me edgy and cranky. More raw.
Living with anxiety, as opposed to numbing it, is not so bad. It’s not great. But when I’m sober, it doesn’t matter that I’m anxious. It doesn’t mean anything. Being sober makes it just an experience. Not an omen. Not a sign. Not a truth. It’s just a feeling. Feelings pass.
Even when it’s triggered by something real, it doesn’t have to mean anything.
I will be starting a new job soon. And that’s great. But it makes me anxious. It’s not surprising. Any kind of Change does it. Especially one where I have to prove my merit.
But I like myself. I know that I am an asset. And when it comes right down to it, it doesn’t matter what happens. Whatever it is will be the right thing. So maybe I’m a little tense, having uncomfortable feelings. I’m just grateful that I can be still and let it be. 

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07 Jun 2015
3 Comments

It turns out you won’t bleed to death from wounded pride.

For most of my life I ate my feelings. I do not recommend this. It didn’t work particularly well. I could only stuff them down so long before they burst out in unhealthy, unseemly, and uncontrollable ways. But more importantly, eating, instead of feeling my feelings, kept me stuck. In ways I didn’t really understand until I stopped eating and started feeling.

Now, I don’t really have any alternative to felling my feelings. The escape mechanisms I have, and use, are tame. Healthy. I read books. I watch movies. I crochet. In moderation (sort of.) I still manage to get stuff done. I am not paralyzed. Nor am I too high to care about my commitments or my integrity.

I am having a lot of feelings lately. Difficult feelings. The worst kind. I have a lot of shame and humiliation popping up.

I still don’t have a job. And it is hard for me to find peace around it. I have applied to a bunch of places, and I have had almost no response. That is beginning to affect my self-esteem. I know that I am not only a capable employee, but a desirable one. I have a fantastic work ethic, and the highest level of trustworthiness. Not to mention the fact that I am highly intelligent, a quick learner, and experienced in a wide variety of fields. When I think of myself as a worker, I can see that I am a catch.

I had this experience as a woman before I ended up with my boyfriend. I knew that I was the kind of person I wanted to be. And that I was the kind of person I wanted to be with. I had done a lot of work on myself to get to that point. And I knew that I wanted to be the kind of person who would continue to grow and get better. So why was I still single? I started to wonder if I was wrong about myself. If there was actually something wrong with me.

Of course, now when I look back on it, I can see that I could never have imagined how happy I would be with my boyfriend. I hated waiting when I didn’t understand that what was coming was worth the wait. I want to trust that the same applies to me and getting a job.

And there is something else that I really don’t want to talk about. But I am going to. Because this blog has taught me that keeping secrets only makes me more ashamed. Telling the truth, ugly or embarrassing as it may be, is the best way to get those painful feelings out. It is the opposite of eating them. It is the step after feeling my feelings. It gets me unstuck.

I have been applying for jobs on the internet as well as in person. And I was offered a job the other day. But it was not a real job. It was a scam.

First, let me assure you that I realized what was happening before I did anything that put myself at risk. And I turned over all of the information that I had, and all of my correspondence, to people who have launched an investigation with the FBI. The only harm was to my pride.

But that is a pretty big wound. I have a lot of pride, not only in my intelligence, but also in my savvy. I lived in New York City for almost fifteen years. I like to think that I can smell a rat a mile off. And I was tricked. And I am deeply ashamed of that.

I will tell you that I cried quite a bit over this, and then talked about it with friends and people I trust. I have come to the conclusion that my pride is not doing me any good in this situation. This experience doesn’t mean anything about me, what I deserve, or who I am.

I had to feel my shame because I refused to eat it. And it didn’t kill me. More importantly, it wasn’t that bad. I used to eat my feelings because I was afraid of them. But the fear of them is so much worse than the reality of them. And stuffing them down only allowed me to stay afraid. Telling the truth, shame and all, gives me freedom. I get to move forward without being shackled by my embarrassment.

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