onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “self-care”

05 Nov 2023

Kate, what game are you playing?

I have a complicated relationship with “all or nothing” thinking. For one thing, I have an all or nothing relationship with simple sugars and carbohydrates, and that is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. 

But that relationship, for all of its black and white, (no you can’t eat that, yes you can eat this and this is how much) also taught me boundaries, doing the bare minimum, and “working the system.” Which are things other people like to look at as lazy or cheat-y.

I remember someone years ago asking me why I was going all the way across town to get apples. And I explained that I could have 1 apple for breakfast, and whatever market had apples that weighed more than a pound. This man who barely knew me told me that was “cheating.” Because I was obviously supposed to be on a diet if I had that many rules around food.

He thought I was cheating because he didn’t know the game I was playing. I was playing “make the food you eat so delicious and satisfying that you can withstand the appeal of chocolate cake.” That’s not the kind of game people understand. I don’t need them to. I am satisfied in my food life.

This week I decided to join NaNiWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month.) It is a thing lots of writers and authors do. The idea is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days of November, with a daily goal of 1,667 words. 

Well I woke up Wednesday and decided I was going to try to write a romance novel that has been rattling around in my head for a year-ish. I signed up and wrote over my 1667 word goal. But the next day I had a bunch of things to do. And I only got 900 words in before it was bedtime. And Friday was cleaning for company and then company. Saturday was weekly errands and husband time. So two days in a row that I did not write my novel. And here it is Sunday and I am writing this blog. Because I always write a blog on Sunday. Because it is truly a priority in my life.

But will I write my novel?

And what if I don’t?

And what if I just do it when I have time?

Will I fail at life?

My first reaction is to quit. Not because I want to, but because I have already shown that I am not taking this seriously. I’m not willing to do the work. I don’t have what it takes. That I am not good enough for my inner Good Girl.

My Good Girl and her needs – to do it right, to be perfect, to show you *how good* she is, how smart, how disciplined, how well she pays attention and follow directions – are making this NaNoWriMo experience a whole lesson. As far as she is concerned, we have already failed! FAILED!!!

But I did not choose to try it for my Good Girl. I did it because I don’t know what comes next in my life and I just want to put a whole bunch of the best of myself and what I love into Life, and see what Life offers back.

So I guess I have to ask myself “what game do I want to be playing with NaNoWriMo and this novel?”

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29 Oct 2023

Gross sack of meat grace

When I was fat, I used to relate to my body as if it were not really me. Like it was the loaner car the dealer gave me while my real one was in the shop. In my mind I was my mind. I was my thoughts and feelings and words. I loved being my words! But I hated my body and I didn’t like to think about it. I tried to both disassociate, and dissociate myself from it.

But when I got my eating under control, I could not do that anymore. I could not get numb enough without my drug foods to not experience my body. It was right there. And it was yelling at me that it was me and I was it. So I had to change the way I dealt with it, thought about it, talked about it, talked *to* it, treated it.

When I was in my early thirties, I danced with a modern company in Brooklyn. And one day one of my fellow dancers, also 30ish at the time sighed and lamented “remember when you were 16 and your body was perfect and the world was yours?” And I laughed because no. At 16 I was worried about who was climbing the stairs behind me and how big they thought my ass was. (And not in a good way, like now.)

But one advantage I think I got from having my story be my story, is that I know how to deal with a changing body with grace. And I have the lived experience of getting better, not worse, with age. I am not talking about my weight. Since I put boundaries around my eating, I have been chubby and I have been skinny, but I have still consistently been getting fitter, stronger, and more physically attractive (at least to myself!)

I feel (I probably really am) stronger at 46 than even at 30, dancing on stage and throwing around and catching the smaller girls. I think I get better with age because I am constantly learning to be more myself. To settle further down into my most authentic self, and settle ever more comfortably into this fascinating machine/gross sack of meat.

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22 Oct 2023

Daily amends to this spectacular body

There is a concept I learned years ago that has changed the way I see the world and people. That when we, as individuals, do wrong by someone, we have one of two options: 1) we can acknowledge it and make amends, or 2) we can refuse to see our part in it, but then we *must* make the other person the bad guy in order to justify our wrongdoing.

I did this to my body for most of my young life. And what it meant was that I started to believe that my body was wrong, broken, evil. I hated it for being fat. I hated it for being ugly. I hated it for letting everyone see my “problems” instead of them being invisible like other addictions. My addiction was written all over my body and it was (and for the most part still is) totally acceptable to judge me for it and let me know that the mere existence of my body was unpalatable.

I often think that if I had not gotten down to a socially acceptable size through crazy and unsustainable eating and exercising practices, and then unsuccessfully tried my hand (and toothbrush) at bulimia, I would have probably just been fat, and angry at life, the universe, and everything about it for the rest of my days.

Bulimia really lit a fire under my ass. I couldn’t look at myself and think I didn’t have a problem anymore. But I didn’t care about anything but not being fat.

Even getting my eating under control started as a punishment. Since throwing up was clearly “after school special level” messed up, I decided I was going to starve my body into thinness.

That was what I planned/expected when I put boundaries around my eating.

Except I don’t starve on my food plan. I eat so much food. Vast amounts of whole foods. And I learned early how to work the system. One apple could be, and is whenever possible, a 1+ pound apple. (This morning’s apple was 14 ounces.) I had an 11 pound honeydew this week that yielded over a pound and a half of melon every morning for breakfast for 4 days. On top of 4 ounces of bacon and eggs and whole milk in my coffee.

I treat my body with loving kindness now. From the way I eat to the way I work out to the amount of sleep I get. I don’t judge my body or my beauty or my health by the size of my pants. It’s a living amends to myself, and this amazing body that has gotten stronger, healthier, and more comfortable as I have aged. And ever more beautiful, not because of thinness, but because of genuine care. Perhaps this is what they mean by growing old gracefully?

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15 Oct 2023

You can take the fat out of the girl (but the damage was probably already done)

I was talking about this blog to some friends who do what I do with food. Many of them don’t read it, or didn’t know I wrote it. So I was telling them the name. But it was hard to hear or understand on the zoom call. So I said “It’s Once A Fat Girl, as in ‘once a fat girl, always a fat girl.’” And this bunch of women who have had their eating under control for years, some for 25 to 30 years, all nodded sagely.

My relationship to food and my body is the defining characteristic of my life, and the filter I see absolutely everything through. Even now, well over 17 years of having boundaries around my eating.

I come from a big (number of people), fat family. And because of that, I can see that even when I was not actually fat (yet), fatness was projected on me.

And then I really was fat.

You might think that being fat in a fat family would mean the family could see the beauty in fatness. But that was not the case. The “pretty” girls were the few thin ones. (Ok, but in retrospect, I was a stunner!)

Also, I was fat in the 80s and 90s when fewer people were fat. I was one of 2 or 3 fat girls in the schools I went to. 

Existing in a fat body took up at least a third of my brain space at all times. And if I was in a “danger zone” of humiliation, (a group of attractive people near by, a group of mean boys or girls, a wardrobe malfunction, an event where eating was expected, sharing seats when your butt hangs over your allotment) it was taking up way more space than that. And it was all terrifying, terrorizing, and exhausting. 

I was once in a conversation on social media where fat people and people with the experience of being fat talked about the fat shaming moments in movies and TV shows we saw growing up that still haunted us. And we all had them. So many of us had the same ones. The casual cruelty towards fat people is ongoing. (Fat Thor, anyone?)

I am grateful for the totality of my experiences. If I had not gotten my eating under control, I never could have begun to separate the fat hatred that I internalized from the real and debilitating addiction to drug foods that I needed to deal with. I was so desperate not to be fat I was willing to give up sugar entirely. And that turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. But why did I have to be desperate to just get a modicum of respect?

Having my drug foods down and having a clear head let me really wrap my mind around how I did not deserve the fat hatred I had been receiving every day all the time. And it let me see how I was also contributing to it, by hating myself. By blaming myself for not being able to stop eating. By showing the people who shamed me that I was properly ashamed. 

The longer I have my drug foods down, the more authentically me I become. And the more me I am, the more capacity I have to see all of the ways I unfairly judged myself, and the better I can love the people in my life exactly where and who and how they are.

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08 Oct 2023

No intuition. Just a routine and some friends.

I love my routine. But on Friday I got food poisoning for seemingly the first time ever. (I literally just said something about never having had it a month ago. And clearly forgot to knock wood.) So normally Saturday is the day I grocery shop, but I was resting yesterday. So now I have to go today, along with all of my other Sunday errands. And I don’t wanna!!!! 

Last night I went to bed without cleaning the kitchen, knowing this morning I would have to wash some dishes before I could eat breakfast. Ugh. And it meant I didn’t have enough fresh milk for my breakfast coffee so I had to use part of my portion from a box of milk I keep on hand. And it meant I didn’t have any grape tomatoes (my favorite dinner salad) so I had to have an orange pepper instead. That turned out great though because the pepper was perfect and sweet. 

But for as much as I hate a break in routine, and I really really hate it, I have learned from getting my eating under control that I need to take care of myself first.

For the most part, my routine is self care. It’s how I make sure I do all of the things I do for my mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. It’s how I make sure I get my workout and my water and my sleep and my meals and my meds and my errands taken care of.

But I am very bad at knowing what is good for me. I am very bad at listening to my body. Because it *always* wants to eat. And it *never* wants to workout or drink water or sleep. So I do the self care I do by routine. But that means I sometimes have to listen to other people when they tell me to take it easy.

And just like there is someone in my life who mentors me with my eating boundaries, I am the mentor of other people. And one came to me last week and said she was not feeling well, but she hoped her body would “snap back” the next day. And I could hear for her what I cannot hear for myself. That “snap back” was a judgement of the worth of her body based on its usefulness.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I felt compelled to tell a mentee that her body deserves gentle treatment and attention, and then, with loving urging from another friend, I was forced to take my own advice days later. 

But I did. And I am grateful. And once I get back from the store today, I can get back to rotting on my couch with a cozy fall audiobook, and some knitting.

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01 Oct 2023

Apologies to my fiercest protector

My mom and I sometimes refer to a study she read about once where they asked men and women what scared them most about the opposite sex. And men said they were afraid women would laugh at them. And women were afraid men would murder them. 

I bring this up because I am afraid of men. No, I am not afraid of all men all the time. But I generally fear men as a group. (Duh.) And when I think about my body, I know that much (no, not all, but a lot) of my fatness when I was younger was a fortress to keep me safe from men. Because, in general, men don’t want to be associated with fat women. 

I have written about my “fortress of fat” before. And how, when I got thin and conventionally beautiful, I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for dealing with unwanted attention, so I built a “fortress of bitch” to keep myself feeling safe.

I have been losing a lot of weight very quickly in the past 6 months. In April I was a U.S. size 14 and now I am a U.S. size 8. There are a few relatively obvious reasons for this. I started a new cardio workout on a mini stepper, as opposed to jogging. Plus I got put on a maintenance inhaler for asthma and can breathe all the time now, including while I exercise. 

Plus, I initially started to gain weight 11+ years ago when I quit smoking. So perhaps it has been long enough that my body/hormones have done some healing. 

But something else occurred to me this week. Yes I gained weight when I quit smoking. But I gained more when I started working in construction. Now I have not worked in construction for 2 years. And I know that I never want to work in construction again.

And the weight is just melting off? 

I am not eating less to lose this weight. I am eating heavier and fattier to keep myself from getting hungry. I am not working out more than I was. I was jogging 30 minutes and now I am stepping 30 minutes. 

But I don’t have to navigate men right now. I don’t have to be productive and professional but also feminine and friendly enough make them comfortable. I don’t have to have my work judged against the ego of a man. I don’t have to worry about my attractiveness (either way) to men who have a say in how much money I make or how I am treated or how I am referred to, either in company or when I leave the room.

My weight has always fluctuated, even after quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating. And even once I took my drug foods out of the equation, I have never been able to “eat lighter” into a particular sized body. I was no longer fat once I got my eating under control. But I wasn’t necessarily skinny either. Even when I ate “light,” eliminating things like bacon and pork rinds and eating more raw veggies and less starchy vegetables cooked in fat, I couldn’t make myself lose weight. So I stopped trying.

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my body chose to protect me from that kind of attention and association in my daily work life. Whether or not it was “necessary,” it clearly was necessary. For my own sake.

And it reminds me that I owe my body the living amends of giving it good food and loving care, for the ways I treated it like it was my shameful problem, and not my fiercest protector.

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13 Aug 2023

Up Next: More Authenticity

I keep thinking lately about what comes next in my life. What I want to create for myself. How to do that.

Getting my eating under control was the first step in becoming the most authentic version of myself I could be. It began with complete honesty around my food and my eating. But that branched out into complete honesty about other things. Things like what I wanted as opposed to what I thought I should want. Things that made me happy and peaceful as opposed to the things that made the other people around me happy and peaceful.

When Sinead O’Connor died last month someone posted an interview with her, where she said that people spent a lot of time telling her that when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on TV she ruined her career. But she said that that was not true. There were some record producers who thought her music was going to buy them their vacation homes. She ruined *their* careers.

I want to remember that for myself. I didn’t throw away a job in construction. I chose to leave a job that was killing me, and would have killed me if I had let it.

I am ready to be of service. I am ready to embark on the next phase of my life. I am ready to find a new purpose and a new chapter. But I also know now that it has to be something that aligns with my heart and soul. And sometimes that is just as simple as not allowing myself to be overworked and underpaid.

I will close by saying that since I got my eating under control, I always get better than I thought I wanted. So I don’t know what comes next but I am very clear that whatever it is, it will be in line with the life I want to live and my dreams for my future.

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06 Aug 2023

I’ll think I was cute in ten years

The hardest part of this blog is that there are only so many things to say and only so many ways to say the same thing when it’s such a specific topic. Sugar addiction and the associated eating and body image disorders. I struggle, often, to find something to say that I don’t think is repetitive. I have even considered retiring this blog. But then I remember that I don’t write this blog to be read. I write it to say the truth I need to hear. For me. With the additional hope that it can help another addict.

So with that in mind, I have learned to honor that they won’t all be great posts. I try to remember that making great great art is contingent on one’s willingness to make bad art. So I just keep writing them. I keep committing to the practice. 

Recently I noticed someone reading through the archives of this blog. (Hi person! Thanks for reading!) I certainly don’t remember all of my posts. (It’s 52 a year for over 10 years.) So I went through and read the ones my new reader was reading , and I was happily surprised to find that I thought they were good. Interesting. Thought provoking. Funny! (I’m a lot less funny in this blog than I have been in years past. Part of it may be that I am comfortable enough in the writing that I spend less time trying to impress my readers. I feel like I should work on that.)

Certainly I noticed that there were sometimes points that I failed to make coherently. Plenty of punctuation and grammar errors. (I should probably have an editor. I mean I probably won’t, but I probably should.) But in general, I am proud of this body of work. It’s good work. Some of it is even great. 

In having my eating under control, I don’t have to have doubts about that pride. I don’t have to be falsely humble. I don’t have to ask you if you think it’s good work. I absolutely hope you do! I hope you love it and find it helpful! But I don’t need to know. I don’t need to ask. It’s really none of my business. And I don’t make it my concern.

You know that thing that happens, where someone takes a picture of you, and you think you look terrible at the time, but then you look at it years later and you realize that you looked good, you looked like yourself, not at all the weird troll you thought you looked like 5 minutes after the photo was taken? That is what it has felt like to look back at my words for the past decade. Oh! I was clever. I was wise. 

But it is also really special see the sparks of a change in thinking that would affect the trajectory of my life. All before I knew I was doing those things, thinking those thoughts, changing those patterns. All a record of the process of me becoming the most authentic person I can be. 

And I suppose it reminded me that I feel like I am in the middle of a change now that I don’t fully grasp. That it will only be in retrospect that I will understand what is going on right now with my body and my work life and my health. So perhaps in another ten years, I will look back at this period of time, and see the whole picture. And realize how cute I really was.

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30 Jul 2023
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Coming around again (as long as I am not dead yet)

In my life, both before and after I got my eating under control, my weight has fluctuated. I have lost a significant amount of weight a few times. And a thing that happens every time is I have to figure out what to do about clothes. 

Over the past 4 months I have been losing a lot of weight relatively quickly. Right now, the only things that really fit me are some workout clothes and a pair of linen pants that I bought recently, and a handful of dresses I already had with elastic waist and/or top bands.

I don’t want to buy more clothes right now. I don’t want to spend the money until my body and I find some equilibrium and I can be relatively sure that they will fit me for more than a couple of weeks.

But also, it’s not fun to get dressed in clothes that don’t fit anymore. Even if they don’t fit because I am getting smaller. 

I loved my body in a U.S. size 14. I felt beautiful. I felt sexy and womanly and wonderful. I wasn’t self-conscious or embarrassed. I loved my food,  and my eating was under control. And I love clothes. So I had a lot of clothes that I loved that fit me. 

This weight loss was not planned and it is not really important to me. But it does have these very real consequences. And they can take up a ridiculous amount of space in my head. I can worry about the money and the timing. About whether I should get rid of my size 14s, or keep them in case I need them again in the future. About where to shop and what I want. About how to teach my Amazon account that I am no longer the size it thinks I am, so it can stop recommending everything too big. All while knowing that I am not even going to do anything about it for now anyway.

When I was eating compulsively, whether I was fat or not, I was constantly thinking about my body. CONSTANTLY! It was a program running in the background all the time. But since I got my eating under control, when my weight is stable, I don’t think about my body almost at all. All of my “body crazy“ goes dormant and I just sort of float through life content to be in my vessel. 

But when my body is changing it is on my mind almost as much as before. It’s not as traumatic, and not as dramatic, but it’s there and it’s intense. 

In my life I have a handful of recurring lessons. Things that I have to tackle and retackle, growing a little at a time. And one of them is learning to have a loving relationship with my body. So this too shall pass. And then come around again. And I suppose as long as I am not dead yet, around yet again.

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16 Jul 2023

Less bacon…but still a life beyond my wildest dreams

I was talking to a friend this morning who does what I do with food, and we were talking about how when we were eating compulsively we could never listen to our bodies because we were stuffing them too full with food for them to really tell us anything.

Over the past couple of months I have been losing weight quickly. And since I only eat 3 weighed and measured meals a day, I was eating a lot of high fat proteins like bacon and pork rinds to satisfy my hunger. It allowed me to feed myself enough calories to stave off the gnawing stomach pains. And that really helped. Until last week. When it became clear that my body didn’t need that much fat every day anymore. And it didn’t want it anymore either. 

Over the past few days I started eating more leaner proteins with my meals along with my fatty ones. I am still me and I will always eat bacon. But in smaller quantities for now. 

It’s a miracle that I can hear what my body has to say. That I knew to eat heavier, and now I know to dial it back. That my body is an ever changing vessel and it needs different things at different times and that if I pay attention, it will make it clear to me what it needs. And that I am not shoving it full of so much junk that I have numbed myself and smothered anything it had to tell me.

When I keep simple sugars and carbs out of my body, I keep a clear head, which lets me listen to my body and my life and make choices accordingly. And because of that I have a life that I could never have imagined before I got my eating under control. Truly a life beyond my wildest dreams.

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