onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “peace”

15 Jun 2025

Get in line

I saw a video on social media this week that I have been thinking about. It was about how to spot and stop manipulators. But the point was that the hardest person to manipulate is the one who is in alignment with themselves.

The person who knows what they want, what they stand for, what they want to achieve and create, and who they want to be in the world, isn’t going to be swayed by anything other than something even more in alignment with their heart and head. 

I spend a lot of time worrying I’m doing life wrong. And will probably never entirely grow out of it. But this was a nice little reminder for me. 

Because getting my eating under control is how I learned to listen to myself. I had so much noise in my head when I was eating compulsively. Most of it was about food and eating and craving, but it was also about shame. What I did wrong. What I failed to do. How I was lacking. How I was broken. How I was ugly and wrong.

When I was in the food, I could not see what I wanted. And if I thought I could, but the world didn’t agree, I assumed I was wrong, not the world. 

But here’s the thing. The world often doesn’t agree with me. I’m not particularly interested in its conventions. And once I made friends with that, it was easier to be authentic. After all, the world doesn’t really want me to quit sugar and grains. It upsets a whole group. People who have zero stake in my eating have had all sorts of opinions about it. Strangers! And there is a whole ultra specific group that thinks that what I do is not only useless but harmful. People on the internet insisting that sugar addiction isn’t a thing. That it is about food morality. That I am a fatphobe monster because I assert that I have a problem with sugar and that sugar can be addictive. 

Look. Just to clarify, I don’t think every fat person is an addict. I don’t care if a person is fat. I don’t think fat people need to lose weight. I don’t think that anyone owes anyone else any explanations of their food or their body.

But I was getting drunk on sugar from childhood and it was ruining my life. And want to help a compulsive eater and sugar addict who still suffers. (P.S. Not all sugar addicts are fat. I want to help them too.)

But that is part of how getting my eating under control helped me align myself and my principles and my past. It was only in putting boundaries around my eating that I could separate my fatness from my addiction. Come to love my body in all its iterations. To feed it nourishing foods. And not worry about health or weight. Just worry about not doing my drug foods. Just worry about not using. Take the morality *out* of food.

And every time I make a choice that makes people who are not me look at me funny, I remember who I am, what I want, what I want to create and what legacy I am leaving. And I have enough clarity of mind and purpose to actually know the answer. And all of that is the culmination of 19 1/2 years of keeping boundaries around my eating. 

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11 May 2025

Probably not the last time either

This past week has been enlightening for me as a person looking to continue to grow. I always forget that most real spiritual breakthroughs in my life happen through breakdowns. I always think about the joys of the other side without remembering the absolute physical, mental, and emotional misery of the catalyst for it. 

The 2 month period that led up to me quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating was emotional torture. But people who saw me then said I seemed fine. Perfectly normal. 

The months that led up to me no longer weighing my body and no longer judging my life based on the size of my body were riddled with uncontrollable weight gain, nightmares and stress hormones, and crying jags I couldn’t control.

This week it took some time to get me out of my woe-is-me-feelings. But they say to do service to feel better. So I did some stuff for other people. Which got me out of my head. And I decided on my amends. (I ended up donating to the GFM for Burn the Cape by Dr. Raquel Martin.) So that I could move on. Because I hurt someone by accident and then I got terrified that I would do it again. And I made myself as small as I could be. Made as little movement as I could. Froze right in place and stayed as still as possible. 

Because that is how it goes for me. I be whatever I am. And I get bigger. Weirder. Sillier. And then make a mistake and hurt someone. Again. And I freeze. Then I flee. And I go and hide. 

Getting fatter was absolutely a way for me to get smaller when I was still eating compulsively. More invisible. A way to have less impact. To be less seen. To hide in plain sight. I definitely did not know that intellectually at the time. And the being high on sugar helped me not know.

This is a difficult thing to explain. If you know me you may already think I’m “big and weird and silly.” You may think I have a gigantic personality. Which I do. But even that is still a stifled little girl doing a cha cha dance of trying to never ever make a mistake and then making one anyway and then quitting the dance and then 5-6-7-8… 

And that is the lesson here for me. That the shutting down and the woe is me and the hiding away is not authentic. It’s a way for me to stop and regroup and figure out what is palatable. What’s a tolerable dose of Kate? Let’s get it in that range. 

That is a problem. For me, anyway. Because what got me here to my sugar addiction and compulsive eating being arrested, and loving my life, and being in a loving and happy marriage, has been an uncovering of who I am. Very much *not* the making myself easier to digest. My life is better because I care about my authentic self. 

I understand a few things. 

My ego is not particularly big but it is fragile AF!

My impact in the world, and not my intention, is what I am responsible for. So that ALSO MEANS I don’t have to have a whole emotional breakdown about being a scourge on humanity because I made a joke that landed a way I didn’t mean for a person I really like. I can make it about my integrity (a thing I can do something about) and not my ego (an amorphous blob of ever changing and impossible standards.)

I just want to say that over these past 2+ years I have seen an incredible transformation in so many aspects of my life. My breathing health. My mental health. My physical strength and wellbeing. My balance. My willingness to see the doctor regularly and to get blood work done.

I am clearly changing for something. Into something. And I expect it won’t be the last time either.

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13 Apr 2025

Practice makes me proud of myself

I watched a video on social media this week about how if you want to truly be an activist a great step to take is to start some slow hobbies. To learn how to continuously work and wait with hope.

Not results.

And I looked at myself, which I do when I am confronted with something that I want or am afraid that I lack, and I realized that that is what having my eating under control has been teaching me, a day at a time, for over 19 years. 

In fact, it was in getting my eating under control that I not only returned to crochet, but for the first time in my life, had the wherewithal, the attention span, the patience, and the cognitive capacity to significantly advance my skills. Then I had the desire to take on yet another craft, knitting. Then embroidery. Weaving. All the while still learning new crochet techniques. New knitting. Trying new things. Designing! Designing crochet dolls. Designing crochet doll clothes. Designing accessories for dolls. 

I can make things that only existed in my head before! Things that were once just yarn and stuffing and my imagination are now art.

But that took time. So much time. So many years of trials and failures and biting off more than I could chew. And sometimes managing to succeed anyway! And sometimes just not. And having to take 2 steps back. And having to take 200 steps back! Years, coming on decades.

Addiction and instant gratification have a lot in common. And there are many ways that they overlap. When I was in the food, actively in my sugar addiction and eating compulsively, the instant gratification of sugar always got me too high to really be able to advance in learning much of anything. And any project that didn’t come out the way I expected was a miserable failure. And anything I did had to be done in a frenzied burst, before I got too high on sugar and sort of ran out of steam.

I did creating but it was always long on idea and short on execution.

When I put boundaries around my eating, first thing I had to learn was to wait at least 4 hours between meals, plus over night for breakfast. That felt like an eternity to me. It was literally painful sometimes. It sometimes felt like I was going to die. That’s not hyperbole. It’s addiction.

So learning to wait to eat was a lesson. Then doing something to pass the time was a lesson. Then rediscovering my love of learning was a lesson.

Keeping my eating under control is a practice. There is no end goal. It’s an ongoing lifetime goal of authentic living. It’s a lifetime commitment to process. And I only have that because I happen to be a sugar addict, who is now in recovery. A happy outcome to a shitty situation.

So many of the best and most fulfilling aspects of my life are a direct result of getting my eating under control and thereby gaining the ability and possibility of choosing delayed gratification. The possibility of practice. Of doing something just because I do it.

Because if I am goal oriented, at 4:30 in the morning, my butt is not going to be as good an incentive to get out of bed. But I am going to get out of bed anyway, because I work out with my husband at 5, so I may as well get that butt. It’s the workout that is the practice. An hour a day, 5 days a week, to practice loving movement and strengthening of my sacred vessel.

My workout, my meditation, my sleep, my skin care, and my eating are all ways that I take care of myself every day. And any results are from consistency and are a bonus. I do them because the practice makes me proud of myself. Period.

It is a blessing for me to have learned the lesson of patience, of growth, of worthwhile things taking time to build, before the pervasiveness of things like Door Dash and Amazon Prime. Because I cannot imagine how much less patience, or how little capacity for change I would have now if I had not put boundaries around my eating 19 years ago. 

It’s worth the reminder for myself that worthwhile things take patience and time. And that the things that I want and want to be a part of, are going to take, not just work, but work, plus time and hope. 

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09 Mar 2025

Do the next thing and hope it’s the right thing

Throughout my life I spent a lot of time being told “the way it is” about so many things. And really just not believing. Just deciding that I was going to do it my way and see what could happen. 

I definitely did not choose the path of least resistance. Kind of ever. 

But when it came to my body I *never* believed there was any other possibility than the very narrow one I felt confined to. I was fat. I had a certain shape. That was just the way it was.

When I quit sugar and carbohydrates and started to weigh my food 19 years ago, that was the very first time that I felt like I had any control over my body. Before that my own body had felt like a curse and a force of nature. I could lose weight, but I could never really stop eating. Every weight loss felt like a lie. I KNEW that it was unsustainable. Until I stopped putting my drug in my system. 

So ok. That was amazing. I could stop eating sugar and I could be “not fat.” But I still had a very specific shape and it was “weird.” I had to dress to “hide my flaws.” My weight distribution was all up front. I had  big belly. I had wide hips but no butt. My shorter right leg (from when I was born with a club foot and they put me in a full cast from hip to toe) was bigger and stronger and so was/is my right foot. I carried almost all of my weight on it all the time. My right hip hurt constantly. It was just the way it was. And it was still a more comfortable and easy body than when I was eating compulsively.

And then I started walking stairs and as my butt got bigger my center of balance moved way back so I was no longer balancing on my toes. And my belly got smaller as my balance shifted back. But as my legs got stronger and stronger my back started to get tighter and I had to spend a lot of time stretching and massaging my leg muscles to open my back up.

So a couple of weeks ago I started using a lift in my right shoe to accommodate the full one inch difference between my left and right legs. And that ended up making a huge difference in my back. 

In less than 2 full weeks it has reduced my back and hip pain and significantly increased my range of motion backwards. 

None of these things ever felt like anything I had any kind of power over. They felt predestined and set in stone. But I just didn’t know anything. And when people or media or movies told me about “how it was” with bodies like my body, I just believed them in a way I didn’t for almost anything else.

I was ashamed of myself and my body when I was in the food. Ashamed of my fatness, ashamed of my shape, ashamed of any anomalous aspect. And that kept me from even thinking of simple fixes. I would have to be worthy of that. I would have to just be in need of a little help. Not irrevocably broken…

But now that my eating is under control, I love my body. The beautiful, the weird, and the weirdly beautiful. And by loving my body I have a shot at taking an action that leads to me loving it more. Like putting a lift in my shoe. 

I am trying to remember every day and in all things that there is no “way it is.” There is only the way it has been and my choice of what to do next for myself and my community. And I’m trying to remember that I did not know what was possible before I started any of these things. I just did the next thing and hoped it was the right thing. 

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02 Mar 2025

Connection collection

I don’t spend a lot of time with people other than my husband. And I like it that way. I have certainly set it up that way for myself. We often live in a different city every year or two and I am not out and about making friends. 

I am at the grocery stores and the craft shops or at home cooking and crafting. I talk to my friends on the phone who are mostly out of state anyway. 

But my husband turned 50 this week! (Yay!) And his grandma turned 90 the same day! (Wow!) So we flew from SLC home to Chicago for a few days. We drove to Indianapolis to visit his grandma. Plus he got to reunite with his step daughter and meet his step grandson for the first time. Not to mention hanging out with the usual suspects when we’re home for a few days. And the neighbor cat was convinced to love me again with (multiple) treats!!! So there was a lot of face to face interaction. With lots of people. Some new.

But it was easy. And the reason is because when I have my eating disorder and sugar addiction under control I don’t spend my time worrying about what other people think of me. I like me. I act and think and behave according to my own heart. And when I don’t I apologize and make amends. You either like me or you don’t. It’s not really my concern. 

And that leaves lots of room for connection. The people who love me and whom I love are MY PEOPLE. And I don’t have to do anything to make them like me. I don’t have to contort myself. I am just the most authentic that I can be. And in all that freedom there is so much room for friendship, camaraderie, community, laughter, mourning, and love. 

When I got my eating under control 19 years ago, I didn’t have a lot of sense of community. Actually I felt like I knew what community was. I came from a big family. But they felt very unwelcoming to me. And I had friends, but in retrospect, many of them were also unwelcoming. Jealous or snide or mean. And I was some side of that coin with many people. There are very few people from my past that I am friends with. (I have new friends. In my food program and out.)

But then all of a sudden I had a food program and these women (and men but mostly women) who wanted to help me keep my commitments to myself. And they were willing to give me their time and energy and wisdom, because someone had done it for them. And I was expected to do it as well when called upon. 

And the thing about community, even when there are people I don’t like, because there are definitely people in my food program that I don’t like, is that it makes for quality connections. And connections make us feel necessary. Seen and acknowledged. And that feels good. It even feels good to do something helpful and generous for the people you don’t like sometimes. Very proud, at the very least. 

It has been a joy to be around these people this week. Laughter and tears and intimate conversations and stupid stuff too. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m exhausted. I can’t wait to go hide in my SLC apartment and craft like the goblin I am. But this week has been a wonderful reminder of how much love there is in my life. And I only have it and feel it because I am not compulsively eating drug foods.

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23 Feb 2025

Is this growth? (Probably not but it is different.)

I have been rationing Sweet n Low since yesterday when I realized that I didn’t have any more in the house than what was on my counter (unheard of, frankly) and I didn’t want to leave the house to go get more. In fact I don’t want to leave the house until tomorrow. So I divided it up and I have been using it wisely. 

I need you to know that when I was in the food I absolutely would have left the house in the middle of a blizzard on foot to get ice cream. And maybe even have eaten all or most of it on the way home. So I probably got a lot more than just ice cream.

But now I keep my eating boundaries the way I chased sugar. So if I think I need some artificial sweetener or I don’t know what I am going to do, you’re damn right I am going to get me some artificial sweetener. 

But today, 19 years into having my eating under control, I can just ration out my artificial sweetener. I don’t need to go out in a blizzard, or even just when I don’t want to, to get my pacifier. I can manage.

If you think I am going to be ashamed or embarrassed by my “pacifier,” please think again. I do whatever it takes to keep my sugar addiction under control. And almost 2 decades of being in control doesn’t make me less of an addict, it just makes it harder to remember how desperate I was at 28, not being able to stop eating, and doing all sorts of awful things to my body to try to keep my weight down. 

But it feels kind of good to not NEED to leave the house. And honestly, I have not felt deprived using less. Perhaps I planted a seed for myself. To cut down (someday), or even let it go (eventually.) 

But not today.

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26 Jan 2025

Not the same person anymore anyway

I recently started doing my meditation practice as a walking meditation with a mantra. The mantra is Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

I made the change because I felt like my mind was wandering during sitting meditation. It has definitely been a good experience so far. My mind doesn’t wander nearly as much. Plus I am getting an interesting look at how many “programs” I have running at the same time in my head.

I don’t know if changing my meditation will change anything else, but my experience is that small changes *can* cause huge unexpected transformations. 

When I got sick in early 2022 I got adult onset asthma. But I didn’t know because I hated doctors. And I am deeply stubborn.

I couldn’t breathe to jog, but I had a commitment to workout 5 days a week. A COMMITMENT! I take that shit seriously. So for as long as I could I still jogged. And it was brutal. I was making myself sick and dizzy regularly. And then like NINE MONTHS LATER I started walking stairs instead of jogging. 

Stairs changed so many things for me. First by butt. I started to have a butt. Which changed my entire outlook on skinny. Because I *wanted* a butt. I was actively trying to get bigger not smaller for the first time in my life. For anyone who was ever a fat girl, you know this is monumental. And my daily cardio is still stairs, though now on a fancy stepper where I regularly step a 10 minute mile which both makes me deeply proud and keeps my butt getting bigger!

And somewhere in there, yes also with the desperate pleas of my husband who likes me very much it would seem, I even waded my way through first using urgent care, then getting myself a doctor and actually taking care of my asthma and the rest of my health. Like blood work and mammograms and the whole nine. Decades of terror and trauma dealt with in less than a year. 

How??? I don’t know. But I wasn’t the same person anymore anyway. 

I don’t know if walking meditation will change anything. But I can’t say that it won’t. The truth is I am ready for change. And I’m telling Life by making some changes of my own in my time. 

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19 Jan 2025

Worth every boring moment

I made another very cool pouch! A Taco Pouch, with a zipper and a taco fabric lining. It’s amazing! I love it!

But on Wednesday this past week I did not love where I was. All of the creative part was done. All that was left to do was assembly. So lots of detail work. 

My husband is a kind of construction worker, and he runs jobs where they build and install machines. And we sometimes talk about “show steel” which is the part of the job that looks impressive. Like if yesterday there was nothing but an empty space there and now there’s a bunch of machine standing up all over the factory. But for the next few days, the work will be detail work. It will be tightening bolts and putting up handrail, etc. Which still needs to be done, but doesn’t look like anything. And it doesn’t impress anyone.

So all I had left on Wednesday was detail work. And I had a great new idea for a cheeseburger pouch! So I didn’t *want* to iron fabric and make and cut out patterns on graph paper, and impale myself on straight pins while trying to cut and sew. 

But I did. Because crafting is not only about the creative part. For me it’s about details. About my own fastidiousness. About craft. About my understanding that a job worth my time and energy is worth utmost care and attention.

And I’m so glad I did. Because it’s a real masterpiece. I am so proud of it!

And then about 1/3 of the way through the cheeseburger, I needed a break. I had exhausted my creativity. 

So for the past few days I have been not creating. I’ve been cleaning. Doing mindless knitting that is all hands and rhythm and no brain.

I think if I had not finished Taco Pouch, I would not be able to. It would have been lost in the creative void with the pieces of a bunny and the head and body of a discarded character doll and a handful of other projects.

But I did complete it. And now when I am filled up again creatively and ready to make again, I can get back to my cheeseburger. And know that I have a history of completing these pouches, even when I am at the boring part. 

There is pride in knowing I will do what it takes to make something to completion. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s something I have had to cultivate. And it’s worth every boring needle pricked moment.

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29 Dec 2024

The sanity, but also really, the vanity.

This week a young person mistook me for a fellow young person. (Cue that Steve Buscemi gif.) And when she asked for my skin care routine, I told her. (Cosrx hyaluronic acid serum and moisturizer. Sunscreen every day.) But I also really felt the need to say that it *really* is the no sugar no alcohol. 

When people come to do what I do with food, almost all of them come to get skinny. They come for intentional weight loss. It’s why I came in January of 2006.

But it’s kind of a trap. A nice, gentle trap. Because I have not been skinny the whole time I have had my eating under control. But I have always been peaceful. A kind of peace I have never had before quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating. 

We call it “coming for the vanity and staying for the sanity.”

But here is the other thing. We are GORGEOUS! We are stunners all the way into our 60s, 70s and 80s!!!! I’m talking about women I know personally. Women who lived fast and wild in their youth! Women who ate themselves into wheelchairs before quitting sugar and becoming beautiful. Giving up sugar and alcohol is a kind of fountain of youth. 

I don’t miss sugar. I don’t miss alcohol. I don’t miss worrying about becoming diabetic because I can’t stop eating. And I don’t miss worrying about and hating my looks!

I spent the first 28 years of my life constantly simultaneously hating myself and worrying about what other people were thinking about my body. And now I don’t think about my looks except to assume that everyone thinks I am beautiful. It’s never on my mind. That’s so much extra room to do things that make me happy!

It’s a miracle. It’s the vanity and the sanity. 

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22 Dec 2024

No void to fill this Christmas

I am in Chicago for a few days for some pre-holiday celebrating. But not actual holiday. We are headed back to our apartment in SLC on Christmas Eve, and we will celebrate Christmas by not really doing much of anything. Yay!

‘Cause I don’t really care about Christmas.

Here’s part of it: I love my life every day. I’m not anxiously anticipating a special day. I like my regular days. And in fact, these special days are often exhausting if you do the bells and whistles. 

So I don’t do the bells and whistles. And I don’t want to. And I thankfully married a man who doesn’t want to either. 

Having my eating under control makes it possible to be unapologetically myself. I don’t feel pressured to do things to please others. Or to meet other’s’ expectations. (And the truth is half the time I was just meeting what I assumed others’ expectations would be.) But instead now I already like myself. I don’t need to try to make everyone happy to fill that void. 

So this year we are keeping holidays low key. Seeing family. Spending time. Enjoying company. And then leaving and enjoying peace and quiet.

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