onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “self-care”

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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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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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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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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