onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “giving up sugar”

08 Oct 2023

No intuition. Just a routine and some friends.

I love my routine. But on Friday I got food poisoning for seemingly the first time ever. (I literally just said something about never having had it a month ago. And clearly forgot to knock wood.) So normally Saturday is the day I grocery shop, but I was resting yesterday. So now I have to go today, along with all of my other Sunday errands. And I don’t wanna!!!! 

Last night I went to bed without cleaning the kitchen, knowing this morning I would have to wash some dishes before I could eat breakfast. Ugh. And it meant I didn’t have enough fresh milk for my breakfast coffee so I had to use part of my portion from a box of milk I keep on hand. And it meant I didn’t have any grape tomatoes (my favorite dinner salad) so I had to have an orange pepper instead. That turned out great though because the pepper was perfect and sweet. 

But for as much as I hate a break in routine, and I really really hate it, I have learned from getting my eating under control that I need to take care of myself first.

For the most part, my routine is self care. It’s how I make sure I do all of the things I do for my mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. It’s how I make sure I get my workout and my water and my sleep and my meals and my meds and my errands taken care of.

But I am very bad at knowing what is good for me. I am very bad at listening to my body. Because it *always* wants to eat. And it *never* wants to workout or drink water or sleep. So I do the self care I do by routine. But that means I sometimes have to listen to other people when they tell me to take it easy.

And just like there is someone in my life who mentors me with my eating boundaries, I am the mentor of other people. And one came to me last week and said she was not feeling well, but she hoped her body would “snap back” the next day. And I could hear for her what I cannot hear for myself. That “snap back” was a judgement of the worth of her body based on its usefulness.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I felt compelled to tell a mentee that her body deserves gentle treatment and attention, and then, with loving urging from another friend, I was forced to take my own advice days later. 

But I did. And I am grateful. And once I get back from the store today, I can get back to rotting on my couch with a cozy fall audiobook, and some knitting.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
01 Oct 2023

Apologies to my fiercest protector

My mom and I sometimes refer to a study she read about once where they asked men and women what scared them most about the opposite sex. And men said they were afraid women would laugh at them. And women were afraid men would murder them. 

I bring this up because I am afraid of men. No, I am not afraid of all men all the time. But I generally fear men as a group. (Duh.) And when I think about my body, I know that much (no, not all, but a lot) of my fatness when I was younger was a fortress to keep me safe from men. Because, in general, men don’t want to be associated with fat women. 

I have written about my “fortress of fat” before. And how, when I got thin and conventionally beautiful, I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for dealing with unwanted attention, so I built a “fortress of bitch” to keep myself feeling safe.

I have been losing a lot of weight very quickly in the past 6 months. In April I was a U.S. size 14 and now I am a U.S. size 8. There are a few relatively obvious reasons for this. I started a new cardio workout on a mini stepper, as opposed to jogging. Plus I got put on a maintenance inhaler for asthma and can breathe all the time now, including while I exercise. 

Plus, I initially started to gain weight 11+ years ago when I quit smoking. So perhaps it has been long enough that my body/hormones have done some healing. 

But something else occurred to me this week. Yes I gained weight when I quit smoking. But I gained more when I started working in construction. Now I have not worked in construction for 2 years. And I know that I never want to work in construction again.

And the weight is just melting off? 

I am not eating less to lose this weight. I am eating heavier and fattier to keep myself from getting hungry. I am not working out more than I was. I was jogging 30 minutes and now I am stepping 30 minutes. 

But I don’t have to navigate men right now. I don’t have to be productive and professional but also feminine and friendly enough make them comfortable. I don’t have to have my work judged against the ego of a man. I don’t have to worry about my attractiveness (either way) to men who have a say in how much money I make or how I am treated or how I am referred to, either in company or when I leave the room.

My weight has always fluctuated, even after quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating. And even once I took my drug foods out of the equation, I have never been able to “eat lighter” into a particular sized body. I was no longer fat once I got my eating under control. But I wasn’t necessarily skinny either. Even when I ate “light,” eliminating things like bacon and pork rinds and eating more raw veggies and less starchy vegetables cooked in fat, I couldn’t make myself lose weight. So I stopped trying.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my body chose to protect me from that kind of attention and association in my daily work life. Whether or not it was “necessary,” it clearly was necessary. For my own sake.

And it reminds me that I owe my body the living amends of giving it good food and loving care, for the ways I treated it like it was my shameful problem, and not my fiercest protector.

Posted in beauty, Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
17 Sep 2023

Am I the drama???

Last Sunday I went out to dinner with my dad and stepmom. And I had a difficult time getting what I needed. Definitely not the worst experience I have had by a long shot, but annoying and frustrating.

I had a waiter who kept saying “but…” every time I asked for something out of the ordinary. When I asked for my burger to be “just the meat on the plate” he tried to explain to me how the burger comes. I said that it was fine, but I only wanted the meat on the plate. Then I asked for a big plain salad. He explained to me that the burger comes with a little side salad. I told him it was not enough and I needed a whole big salad on the side. He never did get it for me. And rather than ask for it again, I just reached into my purse and pulled out a bag of cherry tomatoes I had brought for just such a situation, and put them on my plate right in front of the staff. He also didn’t put in my order of 3 orders of sautéed spinach, so I had to wait until everyone else was half way through the meal to even start. I also asked for a big extra plate and he stared at me and told me the burger would come on a plate. But I weigh my food. Even at restaurants. So I need a plate to put on the scale, weigh my meal, and then I send the rest of the plates back. But I don’t think I should have had to explain that to this guy. I just needed him to follow directions. I feel like I must have been glaring at him. But frankly I don’t care. I definitely snapped at him once. Thankfully my husband stepped in at every moment I needed him to, to get the waiter to just do what I needed.

I don’t like to eat out because of things like this. Frankly, most of the time, waiters are great, and follow my directions perfectly, and the food is delicious. We are good tippers even when the service is bad. Even this guy got over 30% and I was annoyed at him the whole time. 

But even when it’s good and easy, the possibility of trouble is stressful. Plus, I had this experience at a place I have eaten at many times before AND I called ahead this particular time anyway to make sure I could get what I needed. Even after all my due diligence, the experience was lacking. Though the food was absolutely amazing.

Even after 17+ years, there are times and moments when I have to deal with stumbling blocks to keep my eating boundaries. The good news is that after 17+ years, nobody is thinking I could or should or would just let it go. Just accept what I was given and make nice. I don’t make nice around food. It’s life or death for me. And if you think I’m being overly dramatic, you are clearly not an addict. Addiction is dramatic. And so is recovery.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
03 Sep 2023

No time to need to know

I can’t find my car keys. I have *a* set of keys to my car, but not *my* set. 

I ran errands on Wednesday. I didn’t do anything Thursday that required leaving my house. And then on Friday, the plumbers called to say that they were on their way to dig up and replace my pipes, so I needed to move my car. But I couldn’t find my keys.

After a very long time looking, I finally decided to just use the spare set to move my car. And then I used the spare set to run more errands.

But once I got home, I was back to looking for the keys. I would partially do some task, thinking about where my keys could be, and then stop what I was doing to go check some really ridiculous place. At one point on Friday, I was literally wearing one sock with my hair half braided because twice I felt compelled to stop getting ready for my workout to go look in my underwear drawer or my laundry hamper or under the bed.

I didn’t want to keep looking. I knew that it didn’t matter. I had the spare set. Surely the keys would turn up eventually. But I could only wonder if I put them in the fridge when I put the groceries away on Wednesday. Did I go upstairs to get yarn at some point? Did I leave the keys in my yarn closet?

My brain is obsessive. I already know that. And there was a time when I could, and sometimes did, lose whole days to looking for something I lost. But when I got my eating under control I *had to* eat my meals three times a day. That meant stopping what I was doing. It meant making and eating my portion-controlled, sugar-free meal, no matter what obsessive thoughts I might have. It meant getting the distinction of “priorities.”

When I got my eating under control, I was told I had to call someone every day and tell them what I was going to eat the next day. Over 17 years later, I still do that. Every single day. (Ok, occasionally I text or leave a voicemail. But still every day.) It taught me that there is power in telling another person my intentions. 

Finally I called my best friend and I told her “I need to tell someone that I am going to let this go because I am obsessed with needing to know what happened to them. And I don’t have time to need to know!!! I have to workout and eat lunch! I have shit to do!” 

My bestie said that it was clear that I was not done looking. (She was right.) And that that was ok. But that now was not the time. It was time to workout and eat lunch. (Right again!) Did I already know that? Yes! Could I get there on my own? No!

Days later and I still don’t know what happened to the keys. And I still take a moment occasionally to look in ridiculous places. (The box where we store the outdoor cushions? The countertop behind the microwave?) But the truth is, missing the set is barely even an inconvenience. And I expect the keys will turn up eventually. And even if they don’t, if it becomes a problem in the future, I will deal with it then. But I was probably on track to lose a whole day. When all I needed was a little help to reset my brain.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
30 Jul 2023
2 Comments

Coming around again (as long as I am not dead yet)

In my life, both before and after I got my eating under control, my weight has fluctuated. I have lost a significant amount of weight a few times. And a thing that happens every time is I have to figure out what to do about clothes. 

Over the past 4 months I have been losing a lot of weight relatively quickly. Right now, the only things that really fit me are some workout clothes and a pair of linen pants that I bought recently, and a handful of dresses I already had with elastic waist and/or top bands.

I don’t want to buy more clothes right now. I don’t want to spend the money until my body and I find some equilibrium and I can be relatively sure that they will fit me for more than a couple of weeks.

But also, it’s not fun to get dressed in clothes that don’t fit anymore. Even if they don’t fit because I am getting smaller. 

I loved my body in a U.S. size 14. I felt beautiful. I felt sexy and womanly and wonderful. I wasn’t self-conscious or embarrassed. I loved my food,  and my eating was under control. And I love clothes. So I had a lot of clothes that I loved that fit me. 

This weight loss was not planned and it is not really important to me. But it does have these very real consequences. And they can take up a ridiculous amount of space in my head. I can worry about the money and the timing. About whether I should get rid of my size 14s, or keep them in case I need them again in the future. About where to shop and what I want. About how to teach my Amazon account that I am no longer the size it thinks I am, so it can stop recommending everything too big. All while knowing that I am not even going to do anything about it for now anyway.

When I was eating compulsively, whether I was fat or not, I was constantly thinking about my body. CONSTANTLY! It was a program running in the background all the time. But since I got my eating under control, when my weight is stable, I don’t think about my body almost at all. All of my “body crazy“ goes dormant and I just sort of float through life content to be in my vessel. 

But when my body is changing it is on my mind almost as much as before. It’s not as traumatic, and not as dramatic, but it’s there and it’s intense. 

In my life I have a handful of recurring lessons. Things that I have to tackle and retackle, growing a little at a time. And one of them is learning to have a loving relationship with my body. So this too shall pass. And then come around again. And I suppose as long as I am not dead yet, around yet again.

Posted in beauty, Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
16 Jul 2023

Less bacon…but still a life beyond my wildest dreams

I was talking to a friend this morning who does what I do with food, and we were talking about how when we were eating compulsively we could never listen to our bodies because we were stuffing them too full with food for them to really tell us anything.

Over the past couple of months I have been losing weight quickly. And since I only eat 3 weighed and measured meals a day, I was eating a lot of high fat proteins like bacon and pork rinds to satisfy my hunger. It allowed me to feed myself enough calories to stave off the gnawing stomach pains. And that really helped. Until last week. When it became clear that my body didn’t need that much fat every day anymore. And it didn’t want it anymore either. 

Over the past few days I started eating more leaner proteins with my meals along with my fatty ones. I am still me and I will always eat bacon. But in smaller quantities for now. 

It’s a miracle that I can hear what my body has to say. That I knew to eat heavier, and now I know to dial it back. That my body is an ever changing vessel and it needs different things at different times and that if I pay attention, it will make it clear to me what it needs. And that I am not shoving it full of so much junk that I have numbed myself and smothered anything it had to tell me.

When I keep simple sugars and carbs out of my body, I keep a clear head, which lets me listen to my body and my life and make choices accordingly. And because of that I have a life that I could never have imagined before I got my eating under control. Truly a life beyond my wildest dreams.

Posted in Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
09 Jul 2023

Ready to be of service

I have been reminded this week that if nothing changes then nothing changes. It’s a saying I heard a lot when I first got my eating under control. If I don’t do anything different, I won’t get different results or a different life. 

I spent much of my young life wishing things were different than they were, especially my body. I wanted to be thin and I was not. But also, I wanted to be thin, while I simultaneously wanted to eat whatever I wanted. And I wanted both of those things to be true at the same time. And any time I did lose weight, I was eating smaller quantities of the same foods, until I was thin enough, or just not invested enough anymore, to go back to eating the way I wanted to. Which led to me being fat and hating my body again.

But this was true for lots of aspects of my life. I used to be late a lot. If it should take me 20 minutes to get to work, I would leave the house 20 minutes before work. And I would only make it on time about 2/3 of the time. And even if I said I would try to be better, I didn’t really *do* anything different. I just got angrier at traffic or the subway or my job. Like the “trying” was just wishing harder to be on time.

But I eventually got my eating under control because I changed the way I ate. I stopped eating simple sugars and carbohydrates. I started weighing my food. I only ate 3 meals a day with nothing in between. And I only changed because other people had gone before me and told me that if I did what they did, I could have what they had. A body and a life that were different in their joy and freedom than I had ever experienced before. And they were right. I ate differently, I thought differently, I lived differently and I got a different life.

And lately I’ve been changing again because, again, I have been making changes. I have been going to the doctor after 20 years of avoiding it, and I am taking care of my health. I have changed my workout, so my body is changing. And I signed up for The Craft Yarn Council’s Certified Instructors Program to get certified to teach crochet. So I’m acquiring new skills and techniques and learning how to make my passion for making into a shareable product. 

And all of these changes, that already feel pretty big on their own, are combining to make me feel like maybe I am on the precipice of something even bigger. Perhaps something new and exciting that I haven’t even considered before. 

I don’t know what happens next. But I am kind of thrilled. I am ready to be surprised! I am ready to be tickled! But maybe most importantly I am ready to be of service.

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth, Relationships and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
18 Jun 2023

Another bacon shake up

I had to start buying a new brand of bacon from a different grocery store recently. Because the brand I had been buying changed their recipe. And can you guess what they added? 

You got it! Sugar! (DING DING DING)

Which is why I still occasionally read the labels on foods I have been buying for years. Because sugar is a cheap. And it keeps people coming back for more. And it finds it’s way into so many things you wouldn’t expect. (I wonder how it could have gotten there?!?!)

It didn’t help me that this particular bacon recipe changed over while I have been on the biggest bacon binge of my life. (My mini stepper workout has me positively ravenous almost all of the time. And since I only ever eat at meal times, lots of bacon -yes, and pork rinds- at those meal times really keeps that gnawing hunger feeling at bay until the next meal.)

There is so much talk about “obesity related illnesses” and “an obesity epidemic” but what almost nobody is talking about is the food we consume and what is in it. And how it has changed. Nobody seemingly wants to put those puzzle pieces together. 

Society thinks we should all collectively just “push away from the table.” They don’t seem to have any questions about why so many of us can’t. Or why so many *more* of us can’t than ever before.

We talk about eating as if it were easy, natural and cost effective to eat whole unprocessed foods. That anyone who doesn’t lacks common sense and willpower. That the fact that more people are fat is some sort of onset of cultural laziness.

It takes a great effort to eat real food. It costs a lot of money. It requires that you or someone in your household prep and cook it. And while it does satisfy true hunger, it doesn’t light up a brain the way sugar does.

When I was fat and eating compulsively, I purposely kept what I was eating and how it was affecting my body separate in my head. But that wasn’t doing me any favors. And I only stopped doing that because I found a way to put boundaries around my eating and that required that I take an unflinching look at the reality of what I was putting in my body. And why. But it took my own individual total desperation to get me to that point.

What would it take to get the world to that point? And why would people profiting off of our inability to push away from the table let that happen?

Posted in Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
04 Jun 2023

Ups and downs and how little control I have over them

I don’t weigh myself. I haven’t for about 10 years. I used to. Once a month. Most people who do what I do with food weigh themselves on the first. 

But when I quit smoking over 10 years ago, I gained a bunch of weight. I was keeping my eating boundaries and gaining weight anyway. It was really difficult. I was having nightmares about my weight and getting on the scale. And I would weigh myself on the first and be relieved that I didn’t have to do it again for another month. But the relief only lasted a week, tops. And then I was obsessed with what I could do to not gain more weight by the next time.

But I was not overeating. I was not doing any of the things that conventional wisdom tells us make us gain weight. I was eating less and less calorie dense foods and weighing more.

I started losing weight about 6 months ago. And since we have moved back home and I got a mini stepper two months ago, the weight loss is quicker. The other day I put on a dress that I bought 5 or 6 years ago and that used to be just the right amount of snug on me. Now it hangs off of me. Pants that used to be tight are now way too big and I have to roll the waistband down twice to get them in a comfortable position.

A lot of people who do what I do talk about how they still wear the same clothes from years ago. But that is not my story.

My story is that my weight has changed many times in the past 17 years. Not just when I quit smoking. And that I personally don’t have any answers as to why. I have gained weight eating all salads. And I am currently losing weight eating ridiculous amounts of bacon and pork rinds. Weighed and measured yes. So there is a limit. But bacon and pork rinds don’t weigh all that much.

I decided years ago that I would concentrate on keeping my food addiction under control and not worry about my weight. That whatever weight I am when I am weighing and measuring my food is exactly the right weight for me to be. 

But I still live in our society. And I am most definitely conditioned to think that getting smaller is always automatically good. So I keep an eye on those thoughts. I don’t entertain them. And I won’t make any major lifestyle changes, like longer or more intense workouts, without talking to a trusted person about them first.

I want to be strong and healthy. I want to love my body. But I don’t want that love to be contingent to my weight or size. I don’t want that love to be contingent on anything.

Posted in Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
14 May 2023

Isn’t it ironic?

I have been thinking about writing about the weight loss drug, Ozempic, for a while. There are so many things about it that I have thoughts, but maybe more importantly, feelings about.



So first, I want to say that I don’t want it. Even if I could get it, I would not take it. I have a solution to my eating problem. And I have learned to separate my weight from my eating problem. It would not do me much good to be thin and obsessed with food. The obsession is the problem. My guess is a pill can’t fix that. And also, I have no proof that it would work better for me than my eating boundaries. And I am not interested in messing with a 17 year proven solution.



Second, weight loss drugs have been around a long time. And yet, individually, none of them are still around. I am personally old enough to remember Fen-Phen. And I am old enough to remember the commercials in the subsequent years claiming that if you had heart problems from it, you might be entitled to financial compensation. Plenty of women who have the same eating boundaries that I have remember being prescribed amphetamines by doctors when they were younger. Plus downers so they could sleep at night.

Third, you need to take it for life. Which actually  makes sense to me. I mean, I have to do what I do for life. But a lot of things can go wrong with something like that. The drug could be taken off the market. It has already become prohibitively expensive for most people. 

But I guess the thing for me that makes it all the more frustrating is that while it really may help people who have diseases like diabetes, it is mostly being used by celebrities and various rich people to stay skinny and cultivate “a look.” A friend of mine was even on it for a while and lost a lot of weight. But then he was no longer big enough to “qualify” for it, and his prescription was taken away. But like I said, you have to take it for life for it to work.

I suppose ultimately it’s all tied up for me in the fact that we have scientists making junk food addictive on purpose, we have a “fitness” industry telling us that if we would only work hard enough (and buy the right products) we could, and should, look like a magazine cover model, we have a culture that hates and vilifies fatness as a personal and moral failing, and when we do come up with a possible medical solution, wealthy people commandeer all of it to fit into a smaller size for their social media accounts.

I’m just going to be over here reading ingredients and weighing out my food. Ironic, but honestly, seems so much simpler than taking a pill every day.

Posted in beauty, Body image, Inspiration, Life, Personal Growth and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Post Navigation

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →