onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “keeping my food boundaries”

08 Dec 2019

Self-care is a virtue. Thinness is a state of being.

When I realized that I was a sugar addict, I got to understand that being fat isn’t a moral issue. And that what I eat isn’t a moral issue. And that was a great relief to me. 

When I was fat, I had a lot of mixed up thoughts and feelings about fatness and about myself. I thought that I was “broken” and my body was “substandard.” I thought that I was morally deficient and that if I were “good enough” I wouldn’t be fat. I thought that having a fat body was a sign (and a neon one at that) that basically said “this girl is unworthy.”
But then I started to understand that there were foods that I had a reaction to. Foods that, once I put them in my body, set up a craving for more. Not a craving. A CRAVING! A desperate need. I felt like I might die if I didn’t eat more. And I would live in deep pain until I did eat more. So I ate more. And was fat, and I hated being fat. And I hated not being able to stop eating. And I was overwhelmed with shame *all of the time!* There was literally not a waking moment that I wasn’t aware of how “wrong” I was.
For all of the non-weight related benefits of having my eating under control, when I gave up simple sugars and carbohydrates, and put boundaries around my eating, I did it to lose weight; to not be fat. And it worked. It was not easy, but it was simple. And in the beginning, I had a few years of being skinny. And they were lovely. I enjoyed them. It was fun to not only not worry about my body, but to have it admired. (OK, sometimes I really did not like the attention, but often I did.) 
Over the years (13 years, 11 months and one week, give or take) my weight has fluctuated. I have not been skinny like I was for a while there for the past 7 or so years. But the definition of fat in the US has also changed in the past several years.
See, fat Kate would have wished desperately to be the size I am now. A straight size L. Sometimes XL depending on the cut. (I have a big butt.) And the world that fat Kate lived in would have said that L or XL wasn’t fat. But in the world today, “fat” keeps getting smaller and smaller, while real human bodies keep getting bigger and bigger. And thinness is being seen more and more as a moral issue. Thin people (women) are “good” and anyone (any woman) who is not thin is now fat, and also “bad.“ And who qualifies as thin keeps getting more and more exclusive. And harder to achieve. 
I am very happy in my body, which can climb stairs with ease (a very real anxiety for my fat self) and jog 2 miles 5 days a week (it would not have even been an option for fat Kate to be anxious about.) I am happy naked and in my clothes. I am happy because I am not a slave to food. And in not being a slave to food, I can also not be a slave to public opinion, or cultural standards. I do what I do. I stay in my lane and mind my own business. And I don’t have to worry about who thinks what about my body. *I* think it’s a miracle!
I want to continue to devalue thinness in my world and in my thinking. I value my eating boundaries, not for keeping me “socially acceptable,” but for keeping me free of food obsession, for keeping me active, for keeping my comfortable in my body and in my skin, for letting me not be constantly thinking about what other people are thinking of my body.
I want to continue to dismantle the ways I have internalized “thinness as a virtue.” I also want to note that when I was skinny, besides having my eating under control, I was a pack-a-day-smoker. Since I quit, I have never gotten back to being as skinny as I was then. So part of my thinness was due to abusing my body. Hardly virtuous. I want to be virtuous by caring for my body with good food, good exercise, good sleep, good hydration. I want to remember always that self-care is a virtue. One I want to cultivate. Thinness is a state of being, and it has zero moral implications or ramifications. 
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01 Dec 2019

Sometimes, just sometimes, food is not the point.

Today is going to be quick because I was already supposed to be in Oklahoma yesterday, but we didn’t leave. Because we don’t really want to leave our beautiful house! So I am eating breakfast and prepping for a 10 hour drive. All of my food for the day (and tomorrow just in case) is cooked and in Tupperware. And I am enjoying one last meal (for now) at my dining room table that I love so much.

Friday night we had people over. Friends who are family and family who are friends. It was a great night with lots of laughs. And I didn’t eat what everyone else did. 
My husband and our friends’ son made everyone food I can’t eat. The main dish had rice in it. And then they made potatoes on the side. So I ate one of my “junk food” dinners. Mostly Pork rinds dipped in salsa, and sausage. Nobody cared. When you’ve been doing something for over a decade, the people who have known you for a while run out of questions.
My husband was happy to make something he thought would be delicious for our guests. And at this point, the eating part of being with people is not important to me. 
If I want to really savor my eating experience, which I do sometimes, I want to eat alone. But on Friday, I wanted to laugh with our friends. To hear their stories and tell my own. I still love to eat, but the eating is not the joy of get-togethers for me anymore. It’s the relationships that I can be in and available for, because my eating is under control. 
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24 Nov 2019

Letting go of foods, and stuff, and FOMO

One of the most important gifts I got when I got my eating under control was the gift of letting go. 

As a sugar and carbohydrate addict, getting my food taken care of meant I had to let go of my “favorite” foods. No more cake or candy bars. No more french fries or pizza or cereal. The vast majority of what I ate had been highly processed carbs and sugar. And I made the decision to let it all go. 
Well, we just had our home in the suburbs renovated, and everything that had been in the house ended up in the garage. And yesterday, my husband and I started to go through it. And my friends, I have the freedom to throw most of it away. And for that I am grateful. 
I am not a person who lets go naturally. It does not come easily to me, literally or figuratively. In fact, sometimes I will be walking around in the world doing things one handed, because it does not occur to me to put the things in my hand down. It could be my wallet, or an empty mug, or just something I picked up and haven’t thought yet to put down. So sometimes I see something, let’s say a sweater that I haven’t worn in 5 years, and think that maybe I will need to wear it some time. That I better not get rid of it yet. That it might come in handy some day. (Spoiler alert! It is never going to come in handy.)
I am obviously not the only one. Marie Kondo created a multimillion dollar business for herself because we are a society that desires material comforts, and hates to part with what we have. 
The kids today *shakes walking stick* call it FOMO, fear of missing out. I was a slave to food, afraid there would never be enough. That I would never get my share. (Oh, I got my share. And a good portion more than my share.) That I would never feel safe and comforted again. So I ate the cake, all the cake.  And while that made me comfortable and numb, it did not make me happy. 
So if I can let go of my addictive foods, the foods that quelled my overwhelming feelings, and felt like my friends and companions during my difficult times, I can let go of a sweater (or 15) that I don’t even like well enough to wear. 
And it feels good. It feels almost as good not to be tied to *things*, as it does not to be tied to food, or chasing that sugar high. Almost.
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17 Nov 2019

Why do they put sugar in meat?!?!?: A sausage story

I am going to keep this kind of short again this week, because my husband and I have more shopping to do for our gorgeous home and we also need to stuff some Italian sausage before we leave. 

Because guess what? The one sausage I used to be able to get here in the Chicago suburbs that didn’t have sugar in it, started adding sugar to its sausage since the last time I was here. (This is why I still read labels, you guys.)
But I will tell you that our homemade Italian sausage, like my homemade vanilla, is so much better than anything packaged I have ever gotten anywhere else. Also, by making our own, we can adjust the seasoning so it is as close to real Chicago Italian sausage as we can make it. (Though my husband is a little bummed because we just got a new meat grinder for this house and we used the smallest grinder setting and it seems to have crushed all of the fennel seeds.)
That is one thing I want to note about my sugar-free lifestyle. It takes work. (My husband does 80% of the sausage work. I feel like I need to say that. The vanilla is all me, though.) But ultimately, what I am getting in the end is better than what I can get packaged and processed. Not only do I know what isn’t in my food, like sugar, or starch, or flour, but I know exactly what *is* in my food. 
Fresh food tastes better, makes me feel better, and keeps me in a body I like and love no matter my size. Giving up sugar is not easy in the beginning because it is everywhere. (Even in Italian sausage, which seems so ridiculous to me.) But once the commitment really set in for me, it got really easy. I know my priorities. Number one is to keep within my boundaries. But number two is to eat really delicious foods that don’t make me feel deprived. 
I love food. I will always love to eat. And now I do it guilt free. 
Having a husband who will cut up 6 pounds of pork shoulder and season it for you so that you only really have to help with the casings (P.U. Do those things stink!) and the actual stuffing is just an added bonus. Though I highly recommend you get one of those kinds of husbands if you can manage it!
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27 Oct 2019

Hooray for bare minimum days (and knowing what my bare minimum is)

I am tired today. And mildly lethargic lately. I am sure it’s a bunch of things, like stress from my job, and the change in the weather. (Though aside from the really wet days, the cold mornings have transformed my jogs into a brisk joy rather than a swampy misery.) 
And a few months ago I started another blog, for designing crocheted dolls based on book characters (willhookforbooks.com) and I am *2 months* behind on my first design. It’s funny how just thinking and planning, trying and failing, stitching and ripping out, are physically exhausting. I mean, I’m sitting the whole time. But I can only do so much, which is really very little, before I need to put my half-designed doll down and just rest. 

So I am grateful for the gift of the “bare minimum” that I got in putting boundaries around my eating.
Since I got my eating under control, and gave up refined sugars and processed carbohydrates, I have more energy, more focused ambition, more time to do what I love instead of eat or think about eating, more confidence in my abilities and more ability to learn. 
But I also know when I’m tired. I know when I need a break. I know when I need to back it up and shut it down. And the other thing I know is what is it that I need to do to keep my self-respect. I know my bare minimum.
I need to eat my 3 portion-controlled meals. I need to call someone who will hold me accountable to make a promise for tomorrow’s 3 meals.  I need to drink my 20 ounces of water. And I need to complete my workout 5 days a week. And really that is it. That is all I *must* do. Everything else is a bonus. 
Obviously I work. And I am good at my job. And I am respected by the people I work with and for. But even if I do a mediocre job on any given day, because I’m tired, or overwhelmed, or stressed out, I am available to better, to be great, the next day.
My bare minimum keeps me proud of myself. It keeps my self-esteem high and my self-judgement honest and minimal. 
Today I am going to do my cooking for the week. And it’s going to suck, because all I want to do is lay around and read. And the truth is, if I didn’t have it in me, I have some full meals in the freezer, and some canned vegetables in the cupboard. And if I were really desperate to rest, I could put off my weekly cooking and leave it for another day. But I am not that desperate today. And the idea of messing with my regular routine sounds much worse than just cooking.
So I am tired. But it’s just for today. Tomorrow will be better. And if it’s not, that will be temporary too. But I will still have the sense of peace that, for myself, only comes with having my eating under control. Everything else can be dealt with when I am feeling energized. And that will happen in its own time. 
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20 Oct 2019

The real cost of pork chops

Yesterday my husband made dinner. It was a pork chop recipe. And it was delicious. But after I took a bite he sat up straight and said, “I used a new kind of canned tomatoes and I didn’t check the ingredients!”

So I stopped eating. He fished the can out of the garbage. I read the ingredients. Everything was fine and I got to finish my delicious dinner. But for a moment there, I had a spike of panic.

Look, there is nothing wrong with making a mistake. And if there had been something I don’t eat in the tomatoes, either sugar or starch, I would have made a phone call to tell someone what happened so that I could not have to think about it anymore, and I would have made myself something else for dinner. No big deal. 

But if I didn’t check, and decided to eat it without knowing for certain, I would have stewed on it. For who knows how long. And if I had found out that it had something I don’t eat, and I had eaten it anyway, or even just not talked about the bite I had taken, that would have lived with me too. 

My addiction certainly lives in my body. I have a physical reaction to sugar, grains, and starches. Putting them in my body sets up a cycle of craving. But my addiction lives in my head too. And for as much as I don’t miss sugar and carbohydrates, there is something deep down in me that is always looking for an out. 

My addict is dormant almost all of the time. After all, it has been over 13 years since I gave up sugar and the longer it has been, the less of a hold sugar has on me. But every once in a while, when I am extremely emotional, or worried, or stressed, she comes out. She wants cake. She wants something. She often wants something someone else has. And some high fructose corn syrup in some tomatoes kept secret because “how big of a deal could it be anyway” is an excellent little crack in the door. Big enough for my addict to stick her fingers through and grab hold. Given time and energy, given the proper motivation, she could yank that door right open.

If you think a bite is no big deal, you probably don’t have the same experience that I do of food being your own personal hell. So I will fish a can out of the garbage to read the ingredients. I will throw away a whole meal if it comes to that. I don’t care how much that pork chop cost. It isn’t worth letting my addict in. 

Also, I want to note what a hero my husband is for, not only cooking dinner, but when he realized his mistake, not hiding it from me. He knows what is important to me and he not only knows my rules, but he accepts them without question. That is incredibly important to me, and I am grateful for it. Plus, did I mention that dinner was delicious?

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13 Oct 2019

I won’t be haunted by the ghosts of things I left incomplete

I seriously wonder how people function in the world sometimes. There are things that I am excellent at, some of them even crises. I can keep it together and not panic during some particularly difficult times. When things go wrong at work, I can handle it. When my father-in-law got sick, I was able to be calm and be of service. But sometimes, just regular life things can throw me for a real loop. 

This week I had to drive 10 hours to Chicago to go to jury duty. And I was a wreck. On my way there, my “low tire pressure” warning light came on. And I had a bit of a panic. I want to be clear, this has happened before a few years ago. I keep a mini compressor in my car for just this reason. I have done it myself before on one of my many solo long distance drives. But I was afraid to do it this time, and called my husband to basically see if he would give me permission to not do it. Guess what. He did not. He told me I should do it. For my own peace of mind. So I did it. And it was fine. Quick and easy. 
And then I was distraught that I might get picked for a jury, and be away from my husband and my job for over a week. And have to deal with my food in a kitchen that was not mine. And be away from my routine. I mean actually distraught. I cried. I was miserable and my heart was pounding so hard. I did not get picked. Thank heaven. 
And then on the last stretch of my drive back home to my husband, I was debating if I should get gas or just get home and get it in the morning on my way to the grocery store. I was emotionally exhausted and my butt hurt from the 10 hour drive and knew I had enough gas to get home…until I missed my exit. And then I panicked and got scared that I wouldn’t get to a gas station in time. And I called my husband having a panic attack. I am sure being so stressed out for the previous 2 days didn’t help. He calmed me down and stayed on the phone until I was able to get gas. And the truth is, I should have known that I would find a gas station in plenty of time. But I got scared and I just lost it. 
When I was eating compulsively I was regularly paralyzed. I didn’t do things if they were scary or hard. And because of that, a lot of things didn’t get done. And that, the things not being done, made my life extra stressful. If my homework felt overwhelming, so I didn’t do my homework, I then had to deal with the consequences of not having done my homework. That was stressful. But I could get high on sugar and forget, temporarily, that I was unhappy, or stressed, or overwhelmed. 
But now I have to sit with those feelings. I have to feel overwhelmed. I have to freak out. I have to panic. But in feeling my feelings, I always choose to do something about it. The pain of the anticipation of fear is almost always worse than the thing I am worried about. But if you’ll notice, when I got super scared, I called my husband. I have other people I call too. People I know can talk me through. People who will give good advice and be generous with my fear. 
The bottom line is that I am sensitive. My feelings are vast and deep and unwieldy. Even now as a grown woman. My fear is big. My anxiety is big. But I have tools to deal with them. I have a commitment to living. And I can make friends with this aspect of myself.
I do not want to harden my heart. I don’t even know if I could. I do not want to crawl back into a sugar shell to be inert. I want to feel all of the inconvenient feelings and do all the hard things. Not because I like to. I don’t. But because I love the freedom that comes with the doing. Because the only way to leave those difficult things in the past is to go through them. The things that I avoid never really go away. They hang around like ghosts, haunting me. In a lot of ways, what I had been eating for so long was the ghosts of the things I had left incomplete. 
But my eating is under control now. And there is nothing to numb the fear and the anxiety and the worry. And because the hell of active food addiction is worse than the fear of a difficult situation, I will feel the fear, and the panic. I will cry when I must and make a call and ask for help when I can. And I will also know that 3 times a day, I will be able to turn it all off, and eat a delicious meal within my eating boundaries. And that when I deal with my life, all things are temporary. And this, too, shall pass.
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06 Oct 2019

Love for myself and my fat sisters

The internet is a fascinating place. And I am in an unusual position. I am a person who grew up fat in the 80s and 90s, when being fat was less common. And I lost my weight just at the rise of smartphones, when the internet, and more specifically, social media, became prevalent. 

In this blog over the years, I have had the opportunity to get over a lot of the feelings I had about being fat. I got to learn to separate my eating disorder from my body. I got to learn to separate how I felt about myself and my body from how I was treated by others. 
But in the 80s and 90s, there was really only how *I* was treated. Fat shaming was just a person to person experience.

On the internet, now, in 2019, we have these self made soap boxes and anyone and everyone gets to spout an opinion about all things. And I get to see a lot of nasty, fatphobic, self-righteous ranting about the wrongness fat people, very specifically fat women. Some of it from men, but so much more of it from women. 

There were, for so long, so many things tied up together in my own brain,  that I now understand shouldn’t have been. Like how I hated being fat, and how others hated me being fat. The first is my business and nobody else’s. The second is none of my business and not my problem. Or how I hated my fat self so much for being disgusting and a failure and I transferred it on to other fat people. As if now that *I* had the solution to my own self-hate problem, those without it were foolish, or lacking, or disgusting. Just like people used to treat me.
It took years for me to untangle these messy feelings. For example, I had to give up any notion that I could convince someone to do what I do with food, or that I knew better. I had to give up any notion that I was helping anyone by forcing my story on them with the expectation that it would save them. I had to give up the idea that fat me and straight-sized me were different people. I had to learn to love and appreciate my young fat self for all of the things being fat taught me and created in me. And I had to forgive the mean girl I was when I first got my eating under control, who fought so long to hate that fat Kate. 
But being in my forties, and very happily married, and so much less self-conscious than the skinny 30-something woman who was getting so much attention, while getting used to fitting into a socially acceptable body for the first time, has given me a new perspective on what it is to be a fat woman. And not being skinny, but still feeling sane, happy, and beautiful, has changed what I want for fat girls and women. 
I do have a dog in this fight. I have a little girl/young woman inside me that could still use some healing. And my guess is she always will. Because she was hurt a lot, by others and by myself. I wish my young, fat self had been available to be liked and loved. But I was not. I wish my young fat self was told she was amazing as often as she was told she was lacking. And I wish that for all of the men who were attracted to me then, some of them would not have acted like it was a shameful thing. But I should take some responsibility for that as well. Because just because I was offered crumbs, doesn’t mean I had to take them. I wish my young, fat self knew her worth. 
It’s a mine field out there for fat women. And there are more and more fat women out there, and they are facing discrimination. As soon as someone tells them they are OK, someone like Bill Maher says, “Fat shaming doesn’t need to end it needs to make a comeback.”
Being shamed is a part of life for fat people. And perhaps the Bill Mahers of the world will never entirely go away. (Though a girl can dream…) But I am not going to be one of the people talking about the shamefulness of being fat. Did I hate being fat? Yes. Do I love keeping boundaries around my eating so that I can maintain a weight I am comfortable in? I do! I absolutely love it. But I am nobody but myself. And I think how much better my life would have been if I had not been ashamed. So I am not interested in shaming, myself or anyone else . I want to be an example of love. Self-love, and love for my fat sisters. 
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22 Sep 2019

Your brain is in your hands…wait…not literally

Someone asked me last week how I deal with eating compulsively when I am not hungry. And it’s a great question. Because I didn’t eat because I was hungry before I put boundaries around my eating. I ate to soothe my difficult feelings. I ate to get high. I ate because it was something to do, and it was my favorite thing to do. I ate because I had cravings, and the foods I ate when I had cravings were foods that gave me more cravings. I am addicted to sugar, grains and starches, and eating them sets me up to “need” more.

But it was more than just a physical craving for me. I spent my life thinking and acting in certain ways, and in doing that I wired my brain for more of the same. In other words, I was wired to think about food and to eat constantly. It took something to rewire myself differently. It took, and sometimes still takes, *actively* changing my thoughts. Though if course it is much easier now. When I have a thought, I have the power to stop having that thought. I have the power to stop a thought in its tracks. It takes practice and intention, but it is possible.
I used to have this experience where I would think something like “I want chocolate cake.” And I would have to tell myself that I don’t eat that anymore. And then not 10 minutes later I would have that same thought. And I would have to tell myself again. And sometimes, my brain would be so insistent that it would phrase it for me like a brand new idea. “Oh hey, I know! Why don’t I have some chocolate cake!?!?” Like I hadn’t just had the same thought over and over. 
It takes time to retrain your brain. It takes effort. It takes doing something that you weren’t doing before.
Eating 3 meals a day with nothing in between is a huge part of how deal with the behavioral part of my eating boundaries and how I don’t eat compulsively. There are times to eat: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every single other moment is not time to eat. That makes it uncomplicated for my brain. It makes it easy to rewire my brain to those ends. It takes away the grey areas and the sneaky thoughts. It’s simple, even if it’s not easy to do in the beginning.
For me sugar addiction is very clearly physical. Eating sugar makes me crave sugar. But my being an addict is also about behaviors that my physical addiction made me do compulsively too. I could not have stopped eating compulsively if I did not change, not only what I ate, but when, and how, and how often. I had to change the ways I thought. 
But I will say that this rewiring comes slowly, and in baby steps. And the best way to change yourself this way is to start. To change one thought. To take one action. To not take that bite. 
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15 Sep 2019

On making friends with a new devil

I consider myself pretty good at change. I have a lot of experience with it. From all of the kinds of jobs I have had, to all of the moving I have done to different homes and different cities and towns. And I have learned to give up things. Like simple sugar and carbohydrates. And smoking. 

And I have an experience. That life will always give you the opportunity to go back to the way it was before. It will always let you choose to go back to the *you* you were before. Because when you make a commitment, you change your life’s trajectory. You set yourself on a new, unknown path. 
When I was single, and it didn’t work out with a man, he would inevitably show back up in my life just when I had moved on. Within a week of the day I quit smoking, I had a neighbor stalk me and I had to call the police and my landlord. It was very stressful. Exactly the kind of emotional upset I used smoking to soothe. 
It comes back to that old saying: “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” I find that life always gives me a chance to escape the unknown and return to that comfortable misery. 
Now, I don’t believe that the devil you know is better. And I have known plenty of devils. When it comes to change I agree with Mae West. “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.”
There was the devil of significant weight gain when I quit smoking. And wow was that difficult and painful. And there are, of course, lots of devils to keeping boundaries around my food. There is the time it takes to shop, prep, cook, and pack. There is the navigation of the feelings and expectations of people who don’t understand. There is the planning involved in having my meals be complete and accounted for daily, while still having a life. There is all of the extra work involved in eating out, when for most people, eating out is when they *don’t* have to do any work. And there are all of the *feelings* that can be painful, overwhelming, scary, uncomfortable, unwelcome, or just plain yucky.
But when I was eating compulsively, I already knew a lot of devils, and they were shame, self-hatred, self-doubt, crippling anxiety, an inability to move forward with my life, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, regular emotional paralysis, and physical pain and difficulties.
I promise, those devils were worse. But if you asked that Kate, who was suffering under all of those devils, she would most certainly have told you the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. And if you had told her that she would spend a huge portion of her time shopping and prepping and cooking, and also feeling uncomfortable feelings, she would have said that sounded like the worse devil! Who would want something like that?!?!
But now, I have reached a point of no return. I am not saying I could never go back into the sugar. I am still an addict and it is still as dangerous to me as it ever was. When I put sugar in my body, it sets up a craving for more. That is biological and inescapable. But I know all of the devils now, and I’ll never be able to think of the difficulties of food boundaries as worse than the prison of self-loathing.
I hated myself when I was eating sugar and carbohydrates. And I hated myself so much and for so long that I didn’t even know I hated myself until it stopped. But the point is, it did stop. And I found that in doing all that work, and feeling all of those feelings, I came to love myself, to like myself, to trust myself, to enjoy my life, to have fulfilling relationships, and to respect myself and others.
And I want to say something about this regarding fat acceptance. I hear a lot on social media about how society has socialized us to hate ourselves if we are fat, and to internalize that bigotry. And I don’t think it’s necessarily untrue. There is certainly an aspect of being taught that we are less than. But I want to note that after quitting sugar, grains, and starches, I did not loose weight all that quickly. And there have been many times in which I have gained weight keeping my boundaries. But my self-hatred has been stilled ever since I started. And when I was thin, but eating compulsively, I hated myself as much as when I was fat. Perhaps more, because I felt like the body I was in was a lie. I don’t want fat people to hate themselves. I don’t think it’s healthy, or helpful, or right. And it is certainly my wish for you to love yourself in whatever body you are in. But for me, it is very clear that my eating, not my body, or my weight, is what made me miserable and ashamed. And in taking care of my eating, I learned how to love my body and my life. So consider that just maybe there are angels hanging out with the devil you don’t know.
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