onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “self-care”

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! 

What else is catching up with me?

Life has felt like it has been speeding by lately. My entire year has been a whirlwind from the beginning. And here, before the official end of Summer, I (yes “we,” but “This isn’t about him”) have bought a condo, sold a house, paid off all debt and have moved. MOVED moved.

This may not sound particularly exotic if you know me from real life or my blog, and are aware that we move all the time. But that is different. A kind of home away from home. Those places are never meant to be permanent. The “home” is always the stuff in it that has been used in the last place and the last. It’s the sameness of dishes and utensils, sheets and towels (and each other) that make life on the road its own kind of home. 

But this is Home. “Capital H.” 

And it is entirely different. I moved from a two story suburban house with all the trimmings: attic space, a two car garage with a refrigerator in it, a shed with lawn tools, a lawn, a patio, patio furniture, a swing in my back yard and fancy trees in the front. Yes even a picket fence but ours was black.

And now I live in a 2 bed 2 bath high rise with a balcony, a doorman, elevators, a pool, and minimal storage. As I was forced to look at my life through new lenses, and I was forced to examine, yet again, my ever evolving priorities. 

This move is a huge culture shift. One that feels so right for me, and also changes so much about my day to day life. 

From the outside all this happened between the beginning of May and the end of August. And in terms of actions and logistics, yes. At least I sure did have my fair share of panic attacks in these past 4 months. But I don’t think changes like this happen in the moment. 

I have been changing. And for longer than four months. It’s just now my home caught up. 

I wonder what else is catching up to me.

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.

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!!!

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

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. 

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.

No FO cause I’m not MO

I am alone in my new condo eating a delicious lunch while my husband and his family are eating at a restaurant a few miles away and I am exactly where I want to be. No FOMO here. In fact, it would have been the other way around. If I were there I would be wishing I could have my crunchy cheese and my spicy pickles.

I used to love to go out to eat. But now, it is more likely that I will eat better at home than at a restaurant. Because having great vegetables is not a high priority at most restaurants.

So when I was told the place my husband’s family were planning on eating, I looked up the menu and it was clear I was not going to be able to order directly off the menu there. And when that is the case, it generally means I’m not going to *enjoy* any meal there. If I have to get it made specially, it will probably be plain. It will be steamed and boiled. It will be something cobbled together. And not include spicy pickles.

Instead I ate a super delicious meal that I made that was filling and flavorful and I knew I would like. 

Also, I love to be alone with my food. To eat by myself is a great joy for me. I hope everyone else is having just as nice a meal as I am! 

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.) 

Whatever it is, it’s not a moral issue

There is a way of thinking about life that I chose after well over a decade of having my eating under control. And it is that whenever I don’t get what I think I want, I choose that Life or God or The Universe is protecting me from something I will never know. And it has changed everything in my experience.

Now, if I drop or mis-weigh some expensive food, I assume it would have given me food poisoning. It’s actually easy to “give up” poisoned food. When I missed my exit driving back home this morning at first I was super annoyed. And then I decided I got saved from an accident or an emergency. Driving an extra 11 or 12 miles to avoid pain and harm is a no brainer. It would not make me feel bad. But missing my exit because I made a mistake? That would have been my “fault.”

Nothing changed about the circumstances. The only thing that changed was my framing. But what that framing does, is take morality out of the equation.

Because it “feels bad” to make a mistake. And that makes me feel bad about myself. But there is no real morality in it. It is just an unmet expectation. I expected to get home 20 minutes before I actually got home. Sometimes I expect to eat some particular tomatoes, but then I drop them and those tomatoes end up at the bottom of a dirty garbage disposal. I’m not going to eat them either way. So I can feel bad about it or I can reframe it.

I used to go looking for the meaning and morality in all things. And now I trust that as long as I keep my eating under control and don’t eat my drug foods, the meaning will find me. I trust that Life is looking out for me. And that as long as I am living according to my conscience, whatever it is, it’s not a moral issue. 

And as for the reality of the actual individual situations, I can’t prove that I was spared something , but you also can’t prove me wrong…

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