onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “peace”

13 Sep 2026
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New becomes normal quickly enough.

Bad news: There are so many personal changes coming at me from my move that I have to sit in a lot of really big emotions. Good news: Who I am becoming is kind of fascinating. Bad news: Fascinating is not boring or easy.

My nervous system is on high alert. None of this is known or safe or expected. 

But also I am very peaceful. I am very clearly where I am supposed to be. I love this home. My husband and my cat love this home. The future is now. 

But nothing changes if nothing changes. And I am already on the other side. I have stepped into something new. Which means that things have already changed. Past tense. In a bunch of ways I had not really noticed until the move was done. 

And in many ways I have not yet caught up. 

I need new protections for my peace. I am making new choices about my accessibility and availability. About what I am willing to be held accountable for and to whom. New choices about the energy I will take responsibility for. I already keep my phone on Do Not Disturb after 7:45 at night to keep my peace. I can choose something like that for my inner peace as well. 

I knew that this move would change me and that I couldn’t know how until it was done. And I am so grateful that I knew to have my panic attacks one little one at a time over the past six months so that I could get here and look square at my life, rather than having a crisis of change now, before I can get to enjoy this new view, literally and figuratively. 

But again, this isn’t exactly the road well traveled for me. It’s scary to consistently confront the changes to the way I see myself deserving to be treated. It takes something to say that my peace is more important than my making other people peaceful. 

So I remember that the fact that it’s uncomfortable just means it’s new. And that new becomes normal quickly enough.

Literal new view
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06 Sep 2026

I’m too old for the bandwagon. But not the soccer mom wagon!

I have a soccer mom wagon for my new condo city life and it’s one of my favorite things in the entire world. Because it makes grocery shopping about 73% easier. And grocery shopping is the single most important adulting I do. It is the first thing I do to give myself even the chance to adult. 

If I love my food, I have a better chance of keeping my eating boundaries. If I keep my eating boundaries I have a better chance of keeping my word. If I keep my word I have a better chance of keeping the lights on. If I have kept the lights on, I have a better chance of keeping my eating boundaries. A virtuous cycle.

The ability to keep my word is absolutely on the table when it comes to food for me. And that’s a big deal. Being able to be counted on is reputation. And reputation is important in the kinds of communities I am part of and want to be involved in. 

So back to my wagon. I can keep it folded up for my walk to the store but then I can use it as a cart in the store, I already know how much room I have! I put it on the belt and right back into the wagon. (Note to self to put my bag of reusable, washable bags in my wagon.) Then right back to my building, up in the elevator, and home to put away! No dragging them in two arm loads at a time. No trips to the car! No pressure marks on my arms because I WILL carry all of the heavy bags at one time! DAMMIT!

Grocery shopping will always be important for me. I want to pick my meat and my produce. I want to read ingredients. And getting this newer, easier version of it would absolutely be the cherry on top if I ate cherries! 

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23 Aug 2026

Hip to the new style

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with time. I have had a pulled hip flexor so I couldn’t do my workout. 

And it gave me a chance to play with my schedule. I have had the same morning workout routine for many years. I want to break out of old patterns. Not because they are bad, but because I want to shake up my life and what better way to do that than to disrupt my routines. To do something different.

I am always looking for the next part of my life. Some new growth, a new understanding, new perspectives. I don’t love the experience of change. But I love having changed. Like a lot.

This willingness (however begrudgingly in the moment) to change is a direct result of having my eating under control. Not eating my drug foods forced me to look at reality. The reality of my integrity and my behavior. And with my hormones and emotions not being influenced by sugar and carbohydrates, it was hard to talk myself into continuing a temper tantrum and insisting on being dragged kicking and screaming. It was easier to be a grown up. Also less embarrassing.

The more time I spend with my sugar addiction arrested, the better I am at life. I am more peaceful, have a good sense of (not religious) faith, I know how to be a good friend, and a good community member. And the more I understand what I care about, the better I can use my time going forward into a new life.

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16 Aug 2026

Loving all the places I live

By the end of the month, my home buying and selling saga will be done and I am so overjoyed! I love my new home. I am so happy to have our old home sold to a family that loves it. (I designed that kitchen with so much loving intention!) I am so relieved to not have a mortgage anymore before the end of the year. I am so glad that it didn’t take months and months to find a buyer and have to deal with stagings and showings and two tax bills.

I have a home beyond my wildest dreams. I already had a life beyond my wildest dreams.

That was a promise I was made by people who were already putting boundaries around their eating 20 years ago when I started. They said “weigh and measure your food and your life will get better.” “Stop putting drug foods in your body and you will change your life.”

And I changed my life. Not just my body, which did change, but my very experience. How I felt about myself. How I thought about myself. How I talked to myself. And therefore how I felt about the world.

The foods I am addicted to and abstain from DO things to my body. To my hormones. To my brain. More than just nourishment, they affect my moods and my pain receptors, and my anxiety levels. 

And I have never been so clear about it as since I stopped. I am a 49 year old woman, and I love my skin. I love my body. I love to do my workout. And I love myself enough to rest it when I need to. This vessel is the only one I exist in. And it’s my job to understand that that was not a mistake, it is a gift. 

There is so much the same about loving the body I am in and the home that I am in. I had to love my body *before* I could change it. (Well, change it for the better…I tried bulimia but it was hard…do not recommend.) I had to love the home I was already in before I could get a new dream home. There is something to the idea that gratitude is key to abundance. To be able to change the filter in your brain to see the gifts and the joy and the winks from the Universe. 

So here’s to the next unexpected gift from being this grateful for my new home! 

Goodbye to my amazing kitchen! I hope you make the next family as happy!!!
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26 Jul 2026

Even today of all days

Yes, I woke up at 5:30 on a Sunday to prep food for the next day and a half and tidy the kitchen. And now I am in the truck pre moving some weird odds and ends to our condo before the movers come in a week and a half. Then we head to the house we are selling, where the dumpster is sitting in our driveway and we get to get rid of a bunch of stuff I am not sure how we got!!! Somewhere in there I have to call to get my internet set up, and see about some IKEA furniture. And then I will stay overnight at that house so the village can inspect my sewer in the morning.

Yet here I am writing my blog. 

It’s so funny that sometimes there is nothing going on and I have to really dig deep to find a topic. And sometimes I have so much going on and it’s changing everything at warp speed and I barely have time to write. 

How downsizing has changed my thinking.

How having a dream come true in an unexpected way has changed my expectations. 

How not meeting certain expectations has been a blessing not a curse.

There are certainly more things like this rolling through my head. More than I can grasp at a time. I guess when this move is done the whole thing will shake out and the next new normal will begin. And I can sort through it all then. But for now, I am just writing this blog because it’s what I do. Even today of all days. 

But now I’m done. Phew

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19 Jul 2026

I’ve been down that path. It sucked…

I heard recently that there is link between telling girls they are fat and them becoming fat. Not girls who were already big or trending toward weight gain. Girls across the body spectrum were 60% more likely to become fat if they were told they were fat as children. And NOT because of their diet. It is through a cortisol path. Hormones. That the shame of being told this *literally* instructs the body to store energy as fat. 

It is a self fulfilling prophecy that we blame the girls/women for.

I actually had heard about this many years ago from Gary Taubes, who wrote The Case Against Sugar. He said that “calories in calories out” isn’t true because some foods affect our hormones, and fat storage is essentially a job for hormones. He also noted that sugar, especially processed sugar, affects our hormones as much as it nourishes. This of course made perfect sense to me. Because after I stopped eating compulsively and quit sugar and grains, and I lost a lot of weight, those calories never added up. I ate SO MUCH FOOD! High calorie and decadent. And I was a skinny!

And then I quit smoking and gained 30 pounds eating less and lower calorie. Quantifiably less. (Remember, I weigh all of my food.) And the answer was that smoking also affects your hormones. 

We have used weight as a moral issue for decades; centuries. By insisting it’s the actions of the individual alone that create fatness, without any understanding of why or how our bodies work. And we have brought it into being by shaming girls, any girl.

There is an uptick in anti-fat sentiment that promotes disordered eating right now. There is woman who posted a few months ago that if you weigh more than 160 pounds you don’t have the right to give her attitude. Ma’am, if I’m going to give you attitude, your opinion about my body is irrelevant to me. My attitude isn’t based on the holy vessel of another being. For you, it would be because you’re an ass. 

(Also HOW BIG DOES THIS WOMAN THINK 160 POUNDS IS???? And any height? Like if she’s 6’ does that count? Where did she get this number? Is she 157????)

Then I saw a MAN get on the internet to say that size 14 is plus sized. Bitc- ahem, Sir! You are not part of this conversation. This is for women to decide where to shop. Not for you to morally dehumanize and degrade the majority of post-pubescent women. If your ideal partner had body is of a teen girl…well, there’s a term for that….

So here is your reminder that weight is not an indicator of health. That you cannot see what a person eats by the size or shape of their body. And that EVEN IF THEY ARE UNHEALTHY people still have the right to exist in peace and love in their beautiful fat bodies. 

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12 Jul 2026

No stoop for you

My threshold for settling or pivoting or accommodating is rapidly diminishing. 

A couple of weeks ago, I reached out to some painters and only one guy got back to me. And then he proceeded to be out of contact for a week. By the time he got back to me, I still didn’t have a painter. But I knew my painter wasn’t him. (I have since gotten my apartment painted by someone else and I love it!)

Then I needed someone to do a repair on the house we are selling. Since my husband and I live on the road in a different town, I had my sister-in-law let a handyman from a service in and ask him to call me so I could get explain exactly what the job entailed. He never called. He wrote up an estimate of “what he would do if it were his house.” 

At first I blamed myself for not traveling all the way there to talk to him in person. My sister-in-law then called me apologizing telling me she tried to get him to call me. That she wrote my number down and handed it to him.

That was when it occurred to me that there were two 40 something women apologizing for not making it possible for this man to do his job. A job he easily could have done if he had just followed directions. The first step was just to call me.

Needless to say, I didn’t even look at the estimate. If I can’t trust someone to listen I should not give them the job. I texted them that I would not be using them. 

But this was scary! Because this company is so well respected in our suburb. These are the 5 star people. So who am I to say they are not for me?

Anyway I have a different guy coming tomorrow to start taking out my bathroom sink and wall. 

Even my husband has felt this change. We were looking at air fresheners the other day, and he picked one and said, if we don’t like it we can change it. So I said ok. But then we got like 5 steps and I said to myself, Kate, you hate that brand and you most definitely don’t like “Ocean” scented stuff.  So I said sorry. Nope. Can’t do it. 

I want to be clear that I am very good at going with the flow. And marriage has taught me that I only need to have an opinion when I really have an opinion. If my husband had picked something tropical, which is not my favorite, but is lovely and is one we can both agree on, I could have not had an opinion. I wouldn’t need to say that I would prefer something more floral. It would have been fine and I would been content.

But I hate ocean. Why does it smell like the worst of the 90s???

I don’t need to settle for something that is just going to make me unhappy. I don’t need to be annoyed when I can just opt out. 

Resentment is poison for me. And it almost always happens because I knew better and I didn’t listen to myself. 

20 years of weighing my food and abstaining from my drug foods, like processed sugar and carbohydrates, has taught me to be my most authentic self. Every day I don’t eat compulsively, or eat to get high, is a day I have a clearer path to my truest heart. 

So every time I see that clear path and choose something else to please someone else, I get resentful. 

The truth is I have always been resentful. It’s just that having my eating under control lets me see that it’s not actually anyone else’s fault. That my resentment is a lack of responsibility. 

I take responsibility every time I say “no, that’s not for me.” And I end up getting what I want with out a bunch of extra steps.

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21 Jun 2026

I can’t have my cake and condo too

As I get close to the end of my home saga, and everything changes, little by little until it’s one giant completed new chapter, I am so grateful that I am not shoving food in my face. Because this whole experience has been and continues to be *uncomfortable!*

If I were eating sugar and eating compulsively, I would be an absolute wreck. This whole process may have gotten done. But it would have come with costly mistakes, important things falling through the cracks, and my very bad attitude making everything worse and more difficult and frustrating and scary. 

And I would have been miserable. And even when the whole thing was done, it would have been filled with shameful memories of ways I behaved. 

And all that time I would hate myself. Eating compulsively makes me hate myself.

I don’t hate fatness. And I could be fat and happy. By some standards, I AM fat and I am certainly happy. But I cannot eat compulsively, eat drug foods, eat addictively and be happy. So if I were to let myself eat the way I used to, while I stuffed cake in my mouth I would simultaneously feel better (high/numb) and worse (ashamed) and I would hate myself the entire time. 

It’s not the body. It’s the eating. 

So IF I had the kind of life where I manifested my dream home while I was eating compulsively (doubtful) I still would have been filled with dread. I still would have been filled with bad energy! 

As we get closer to selling our house, and moving exclusively to our smaller condo, I get scared all over again. About space. About downsizing. My body panicks pretty regularly. And if I were in the food, I would be filled with regrets. 

But I am not! I am clear headed, capable, even tempered, genuinely excited and joyful! I know that 80% of the hard part is done. And while I have not enjoyed every moment of the process, all in all it has been a time of wonder. A dream come true. 

(Oh, and also I have been giving away as much stuff as I can when I have a moment. So you know…taking action helps.) 

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31 May 2026

Giving Nature a vaccuum

As of Wednesday, my husband and I are the proud and happy owners of a high rise condo in the South Loop of Chicago. Today we went to just be there and enjoy it. There is nothing there. But it’s beautiful and it makes me so happy.

We also just finished moving from one town to another for my husband’s job because he finished one construction job and started another.

And BOTH places are MUCH smaller than their predecessors.

We gave ourselves a week to move from one work apartment to the next. And it was not the wisest decision we ever made. Because instead of packing efficiently and throwing away the overflow, I just moved everything one car load at a time. And too much came with me. And now I have to cull.

This is actually good. I know. I am reminded that clearing space, internal or external, makes room for what’s next, what’s better, what’s currently unimaginable.

Historically, when I have gone through my clothes to see what I want to keep or toss, there were a number of things that I didn’t like or really want that thought I “should” keep. It’s a basic piece, so everyone should have one type of thing. But I don’t wear plain white shirts. Because I spill coffee on myself regularly. So I would have a white shirt simply taking up space. But I had the space.

I no longer have space, and that is so freeing. I don’t need to keep pants because they are cute and new and I have never worn them. In fact, I NEED to give them away because I don’t have room for them.

Here’s the thing. I know that I always feel better after I get rid of things. But it doesn’t always feel like that before I let it go. It feels like “but what if I *need* it?” Which is how change always feels.

Since I got my eating under control, I have experienced first hand the ways that letting go of difficult things is worth it. Every time. And it still isn’t easy. I just have a past reference that if I give it a shot, it will probably work out for the best.

So the people I know are about to get some free high quality clothes. (And yarn.)

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17 May 2026

At least on par with my wildest dreams

Over the past few weeks, since we started the process of buying our new condo, it occurred to me that at 48 years and eleven months old, my childhood dreams are all coming true. 

I love my body, I am a decade married to the childhood crush of my life who I lost touch with for 20 years, and now I am going to be traveling the country but coming home to a high rise South Loop Chicago apartment with amazing city views, and some of the best public transportation in the world. 

And all of that has me 1) recognizing how powerful I am. And 2) realizing that I don’t know what I want for the future.

I have been asking myself what I want to create for myself, who I want to be, and what that would look like. And frankly I am coming up blank. 

And not just coming up blank. Blocked. It feels like hitting a different kind of glass ceiling. Self imposed, and at least a little opaque. A frosted glass ceiling if you will.

So I have been looking. For directions on how to unblock my creativity. For physical actions I can take to shift my thinking. For solutions, both practical and woowoo.

Because if there is one thing I have learned about my life since I have had my eating under control, it is that if I seek, I will find. Maybe not what I expected, but something as good or better than I asked for.

So I am out here seeking. What I want to put out into space. How to be more authentically myself. How to be of service in the best way for me. How to hold my own joy and peace and also bring joy and peace to the people around me. What my next right move would be. 

I trust that as long as I keep my drug foods out of my body and live my most authentic life, that I will continue to have a life beyond my wildest dreams. Or at least on par. 

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