onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “personal choices”

11 Feb 2024

Just a member of a community and also on a dance floor

Yesterday my nephew got married! Congratulations to him and his wife! And hooray for me to get a night of dancing like when I was young and wild and living in the city!

I brought my own food to the event. It was part of my RSVP, and I had discussed it with the couple before hand. I let the waitstaff know. I told ours that I had everything I needed for myself and she should just pretend that I didn’t exist. (And even still the waitress kept asking if I was sure I didn’t want the salad, the palate cleanser, the after dinner palate cleanser…”oh right. Pretend you don’t exist…tee hee hee.” Sigh. ) 

But the other wonderful thing about the night was how much I didn’t need it to be about me. 

Now you may think, “Kate, it was your nephew’s wedding! How could it possibly be about you????” And that is how I know you are not an addict.

For most of my life everything was about me. It’s common in this culture and society. The importance of the individual. The sanctity of the person. And what person could I care more about than myself?

When I went anywhere socially before I got my eating under control, if it wasn’t about getting high on food and drinking or drugs, it was about getting high on attention, and attraction and the possibility of personal pleasure.

Last night, I wanted to be a part of a celebration of love and commitment. Not as an individual, but as part of a community. And as the member of an even smaller community, my family. My nieces and my nephew, my mother in law, my brother and sisters in law. And my partner in crime was my youngest sister in law. (It turns out we are both former party girls who married men who don’t dance…) We got to be the groom’s two hot old aunties making a scene on the dance floor – in the good way, not the dramatic way.

I learned to put things in their proper place and perspective when I got my eating and sugar addiction under control. There is a lightness to not being so important. A freedom to being one piece of a bigger machine. A joy in being wanted but not needed. 

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04 Feb 2024

The luxuries of 18 years

One thing about having my eating under control for 18 years is that I’m well into the life stuff. The relationship stuff. The dealing with stuff stuff. 

In the beginning all I could do was focus on keeping my eating under control. I had been addicted to sugar for almost all of my 28 years and I spent all my beginner energy making foods that fit my boundaries, and distracting myself from the foods I used to binge on. With books and manga, and that one anime (Fushigi Yuugi) that I watched on a loop for like a year and a half.

But this shit works. Putting down the sugars and things that turned into sugar in my body, and then taking responsibility for my actions. And living my most authentic life.

It has been a long, slow and unsteady process. It was worth every uncomfortable and insecure second.

The truth is now I have a healthy fear of the food. As one might have a healthy fear of the Ocean. But avoiding it and preparing to resist it does not take up my time at the moment. A true blessing and miracle.

But I am in some life lesson place and I feel a little crazy. A little stupid. A little frazzled. And I have been literally walking in circles.

And then this morning I was telling this to my best friend and she said “you’re the one who always talks about my ‘spiral staircase.’ You’re on yours. Plop your ass down on the steps and have a look around.”

(I mentor food addicts and one thing I talk about is how we are always coming to the same problems on a new level. Like a spiral staircase.)

Ah! I keep getting my own advice turned back on me. The joy and curse of being a mentor and knowing that means being available for mentoring…sigh

So I am reminded that it’s life on Life’s terms, not on Kate’s terms. That time will pass whether I wear a hole in my Luxury Vinyl flooring or sit my ass down.

I keep my eating boundaries a day at a time, and I get to contemplate luxury problems between luxury meals. Truly a life beyond my wildest dreams. 

But let’s be honest. Still uncomfortable, difficult, and scary. Makes me want to get up and walk around in circles.

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28 Jan 2024

Feels like a shame but probably isn’t

I am almost a full month into my “Peaceful Purposeful Joyful Creation” journey and I am still learning and shaky. But also still plugging along. 

One of the things that I had to learn early in getting my eating under control was time assessment and management. Because shopping and chopping and cooking and packing and eating took time. And I had to actually know how much time I needed. I had to learn to be practical about practical things.

And I got pretty good at that. Certainly good enough that I figured out my priorities and how to implement them in my life.

There is a saying that I think about a lot. “You can talk about priorities all you like, but your schedule doesn’t lie.”

And my schedule clearly says self-care is a priority. I take care of myself with my eating boundaries, my workout and sleep and meditation schedules, my skin and hair care. 

But all of this scheduling and routine maintenance has made a nice tidy place for my head to go chaotic. Rush through step 1 to get to step 2 while simultaneously preparing for steps 3-8 in my mind. My brain is full. No room for anything but the rest of my planned out time.

On the outside I look calm and confident. I know this because people say it all the time. “You have such a peaceful presence. You always seem so together.” Inside I am panting and panicking and focusing on perfection.

This past few weeks of trusting that my life will work out even if I don’t run around like a crazy lady is…frankly hard. There is a level of superstitious thinking to the way I live that stems from my childhood thinking. That the “magic” is in not stopping, not looking, not hesitating. Not giving life, or bad luck, or karma, or the devil or WHATEVER, a chance to get me.

But the thing is that I already know that the real magic is in slowing down. It’s in the stillness. It’s in the trusting. It’s in the space between thoughts.

Because ultimately that is what my brain chaos is. It’s me not having to trust. It’s me not having to look too closely at my dreams and my wishes and what I really want for my life. It’s me not having to expect that things will work out for the best for me in the end. So I can use that time and space to go into survival mode and “prepare for any eventuality,” instead of being excited, interested, involved, curious.

I guess what I am coming to recognize is that all of that mental busywork is a way for me to burn off my creative energy without having to create anything. 

And that sucks. I hate that! I’m annoyed at myself. I’m frustrated that I have taken so long to get here. I am impatient to grow faster and be better now!

But I am reminded, yet again, that these big changes come a little at a time. I do not currently have the capacity to bridge the gap between what I am and what I want to be. And the only way to get there is to continue. At life’s pace. Not mine.

Which feels like a real shame but probably isn’t.

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07 Jan 2024

Pretty sure my dreams are in the stillness

Over the past few years I have noticed that my New Year’s Day has set the tone for my coming year, though not intentionally. Which made me decide to be intentional about it this year. 

I chose to have an intentional day of joyful peaceful productive making, including crochet projects, comedy bits and improv jokes and snippets of singing on social media, and a delicious dinner to enjoy with my husband. 

And I noticed something in my intentionality to be peaceful; even when I am not upset, when I have plenty of time, when all is well, I am amped up to go go go. I am never really peaceful about being and doing enough. 

I want to crochet that row quickly and efficiently to get to the next step. I want to get the wording perfect but still get that quip out quickly in case someone else makes a similar joke! I want to salt and pepper the steaks quickly and efficiently to get them in the sous vide. So I can quickly and efficiently get to cooking the vegetables!

And I don’t just mean physically, though physically too. I am rushing in my mind. RUSHING ALL THE TIME!!!!

And I want to change that for myself. Because I know intuitively that the gifts of abundance, the life beyond even this life beyond my wildest dreams, are in the stillness. I know it. And I fear it. But perhaps I could notice because I am actually ready to be still anyway. Even if fear of success has always been on my list, just as much as fear of failure.

It occurs to me that that is why I spend so much time rushing. So I don’t have any space between thoughts of perfection in the now. I be careful what I think I can have. I be careful what I think I am worth. I be careful what I wish for. Or I don’t wish at all.

Because getting what I wish for means work. It means being great. It means trying and failing to be great and then being embarrassed about it. It means stretching and struggling. It means pain. 

If I ate over it instead, there would be no pain. 

But I don’t eat over things now. I don’t put sugar in my body to drug myself. And I have the benefit of 18 years of work, and trying and failing to be great and being embarrassed about it, and stretching and struggling and pain. And I know first hand that there is magic in the trying.

(Oh HEY! On January 2, I celebrated 18 years of having my eating under control! Yay!)

Now, when I notice my brain rushing, and telling me to go go go, I purposely slow down. I make every thought and movement deliberate and smooth. I trust that it will work out just fine. And so far it has. And has also brought me more peace daily.

My time on this planet has been a long slow lesson in easing into this life. 46 years in, I may be getting the hang of it.

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31 Dec 2023

Ice Cream Week > Cheese Week

One of my favorite things on social media is that this week between Christmas and New Year’s is “Cheese Week.” Nobody knows what day it is and everyone is full of cheese.

I find this particularly hilarious. And part of why is the connotation that cheese is a guilty pleasure, a “sometimes food.” The idea is that this week all of the structures and routines are suspended and the rules are out the window. Cheese all day every day!

For me it has been ice cream week. I have eaten (my homemade, fits in my boundaries) ice cream every single day. And on a few days, I even opted to have it twice, once for lunch and once for dinner.

My husband often teases me that I have the palate of a 4 year old. He’s not entirely wrong. I am still a food addict. 

Getting my eating under control only works for me because I can do it while sometimes indulging in the foods that make my inner 4-year-old happy, while still having no sugar or drug foods and therefore zero guilt. And I am a 46-year-old grown ass woman. I can eat what I want. So I choose to eat foods that don’t make me high. But I still want foods that make me giddy!

I can see that a lot of people look at what I do and think it looks punitive. So many rules. So much restriction. No sugar. No carbohydrates. No potatoes or pasta or rice.

But what I eliminated with sugar and my “drug foods” was guilt. So I can have ice cream every day of every week of the year and not have to think twice about it. (I would quickly get annoyed watching my husband eat filet mignon and shakshu without me, so I won’t.)

I may not know the day of the week, and I may be full of ice cream, but at no point did I think these were bad things.

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10 Dec 2023

Not another quit in me

Today I am going to write about quitting. It has come up twice this week, once just this morning, so I guess I will take that as a sign. 

There is a very big practical difference between quitting, and having quit. It is harder to quit than it is to stay quit. And I am pretty sure I do not have another quit in me. Not for sugar. Not for cigarettes. Because both of them sucked so bad.

17 years and 11 months ago, I quit manmade sugars, starches and almost all grains, along with some foods so naturally high in sugar that they kick off sugar cravings. I think it’s worth noting that all of the natural foods I avoid (potatoes, grapes, corn) are all easily made into alcohol. My body is a still.

It took a full year for me to start digesting food properly after I quit sugar and carbohydrates. When I was in the food, everything I ate was so processed that my body didn’t even know how to break down whole foods. And then another 6 months on top of that to come out of the food fog I had been in for the majority of my life.

For that year and a half I wore fuzzy pajama pants everywhere because I could not handle anything rough or restricting on my skin. I was afraid of binging so I would go to the Manhattan flagship Barnes and Noble (in said pajama pants) and stay and read until it closed at midnight, and then take my time getting home so I wouldn’t eat in the night. I watched the same 3 DVD anime (Fushigi Yuugi) on a loop just to obsess over something that wasn’t food.

When I quit smoking cigarettes I got a side effect that affects about 3% of people who quit smoking. The top layer of skin in my mouth started to loosen and peel off. I had open sores all over my gums from having basically smoked the inside of my mouth like a salmon for 20 years. I had already been off sugar for over 6 years but I started gaining weight uncontrollably. And I mean uncontrollably. My food got cut. I was eating quantifiably less food and fewer calories and I was gaining weight. I felt crazy. I was miserable. And it is only over 11 years later, at 46, even after years of working out 5 days a week and keeping my eating boundaries, that I am *almost* the same size I was at 34.

If I had known how these things would look, and feel, and work out, I would NEVER have done them. Were they worth it? Ten thousand and a half percent! But I am afraid of exactly those things I had to get through. Pain. Weight gain. Feeling out of control. Sickness. Lethargy.

I don’t know how, knowing what I do, that I could ever choose it again.

Maybe I am not being fair to my very powerful and committed self. Because I have certainly learned to lean into choosing the practices of delayed gratification for the purpose of long term contentment. But I still think it’s asking a lot of the girl who went through all of that to do it again. And for what? A smoke at a party? A bite of cake?

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03 Dec 2023

Retroactive love

Someone posted on social media the other day that they used to think they had a high pain tolerance, but then they realized they are just excellent at disassociating from their body.

That is how I got through a lot of the physical pain of being fat. And for me personally there was a lot of physical pain that came with my fatness. Foot pain. Back pain. Period pain.

Well right now, perimenopause is kicking my ass. I am not disassociated from my body anymore and my periods are as bad as they were when I was eating sugar compulsively. I have been in pain for the last few days. And none of the pain medication I have taken has worked well or for any prolonged amount of time. And I am reminded of what a gift it is to live the majority of my time in an easy body. 

I am grateful to be in communication with my body. I am grateful for a relationship with my body based on gratitude and grace. But more than that, I am thankful that I don’t have to live with pain every day. Because for as much as I take care of my body with nourishing food and water and gentle loving exercise, much of that is still luck. 

I used to think of and treat my body like my own enemy. It was fat and I blamed it for being fat. It was always hungry and that was shameful, so I blamed it for the uncontrollable need to eat. It was an easy target, so I blamed it for being the easiest joke in the room. It was the problem. It was the root of all my problems.

I gave up sugar to lose weight so I could get rid of the ugly body I hated and get a new, better body I didn’t think I deserved, so other people would stop being able to target me.

But giving up sugar let me get to know this body. The old body. The same one that I hated and pushed away so it would just work like a machine, even while in pain. I wanted to shame it into perfection, and instead I learned to like it and love it and be grateful for all of the ways it took care of me while I was hating it. To love it for being me. To love it retroactively, all of my iterations and presentations.

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26 Nov 2023

Available for the cascade

Years ago on (I think) the public radio show RadioLab there was an episode where they talked about the way kids start to understand numbers in a more complex way; and learn to differentiate quantity beyond 1 and more than one. And they said that a kid experiences a leap of faith moment and then a cascade. I was probably 30 ish when I heard this. I would have had my eating under control for a few years. I didn’t really get it at the time.

Years later, as I was trying to improve my crochet skills, my husband bought me a book of symbol patterns for crochet. And I had one of those moments. I don’t know if I thought of it as a leap of faith, but I definitely had the experience of a cascade of all of these pieces tumbling into place, and then suddenly I had a brand new frame of reference for the world. This has happened to me over and over again since having my eating under control. As a writer, as a knitter, as a designer, as a person who wants to learn to do things.

I often think that I should be “farther along” in my life purpose, I mean, 46 is no spring chicken, and that if I were good enough or smart enough or whatever enough, that I would be.

But I keep being reminded lately that innovation is built on past innovations. That knowledge requires a basis of previous knowledge. And why would that be any different for my life?

I couldn’t learn much when I was eating compulsively. Maybe because I was too high. Maybe because I was too busy eating. Maybe because I didn’t have a lot of capacity for faith or leaping. But now that I have boundaries around my eating and I am able to keep moving forward, I am available for the cascade.

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19 Nov 2023

The closest to Enlightenment I have ever come

When I was young, late teens and early twenties, I was always looking for something like “answers” or an “owner’s manual” for life. And I tried a lot of different religions and practices. I felt that my life was missing something.

I wouldn’t understand until later, when I got my eating under control that I was trying to “fill a God-sized hole.” It was, surprise surprise, also why I ate drug foods the way I did.

I was telling some friends the other day that when I was in my 20s and looking for contentment and peace, I tried to get into Zen Buddhism. One of the practices is called sitting Zazen. It means to sit very still in a rigid posture and think of nothing. 

If you know me, it may not come as much of a shock to you that I was very very bad at sitting still and thinking of nothing. The other thing that I learned at that time was that Zen Masters believe in many roads to Enlightenment, and 20-something Kate was *positive* that my path to enlightenment was *suffering*! Maybe it was why, at 28, I was willing to give up what I expected to be the only joy in my life: sugar.

Now, at 46, the idea that I was made for suffering is hilarious to me. Hilarious!

The closest I have ever come to Enlightenment is the pure peace and calm of having my eating under control. The only thing I actually gave up was the high, and the subsequent shame that I could not stop eating.

Because I still love food. I still love to eat. I still get excited about meals and particular dishes. I still do little dances. I still sing little songs to my meals. I still talk to my food. I even talk to it at the grocery store. “Oh! You’re a pretty baby! Are you mine? Yes you are!”

Giving up foods I am addicted to and keeping within my eating boundaries frees up so much space in my head. It helps me prioritize my relationships and goals. It makes me like myself enough to make hard choices. It gives me the fortitude to choose the practices that will make me truly happy in the long term, not the ones that will make the moment feel better momentarily. 

Keeping drug foods out of my body lets me think straight, and feel my feelings. It helps me make honest and honorable decisions that I don’t have to worry about or backtrack on. And if I do make a mistake, I know how to take responsibility and make amends. 

Yes simple. No not easy. But the closest to Enlightenment I have ever come.

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12 Nov 2023

Grocery store blues

Kroger bought Albertsons, and I am kind of freaked out about it.

I swear 28 year-old Kate did not know this was the path she was going down when she put boundaries around her eating 17+ years ago, but here we are.

If you don’t know what that means, it means one grocery store chain bought another and now my groceries are going to change. And that is terrifying to a person who really cares and kind of worries about what she eats. It means a new level of vigilance in reading labels. It means brands and products I used to buy might no longer be sold there.

For over a week already they have been out of my very particular favorite pork rinds that fit into my eating boundaries. And they are also rearranging the ENTIRE grocery store. So for all I know, they will stop carrying them entirely. 

I have had to mourn foods before. On this blog, in real time. Remember when Frontier started to put alcohol in their vanilla flavor in 2014???? I cried real tears for that. Did I mention I am still obsessed with food?

I survived then, and I will survive whatever happens now, with my boundaries intact. But food, groceries, are a huge part of what I think about. What comes into my home and goes into my body is the top priority for me. It’s an aspect of my life that is worth all of the time and effort and energy that I put into it. It is the most important thing in my life, because it is the ultimate first step in self care for me. 

But damn if it isn’t stressful.

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