onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “self-love”

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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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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10 Sep 2023

Get you a partner who grows!

There are all sorts of big changes going on over here. My plumbing works like a dream, and my patio, which had to be dug up to replace some clay pipe, has been reinstalled, but with a handy-dandy new access point so we won’t have to dig it up again. The shrubberies in front of our house have been removed. Plus, new siding has been ordered, and hopefully that and the porch will be replaced by the end of the month.

But even bigger than that, my husband and I have started a new morning routine working out together. And it’s pretty amazing. 

The truth is it’s nothing crazy. He has a rowing machine and I have a mini stepper. We wake up at around 4 in the morning and do half an hour of cardio. I do some floor exercises and stretching while he showers. I see him off to work and go about the rest of my day. By 7am I have drunk my water, worked out, showered, done my writing, meditation, and written my gratitudes, and had a big, delicious breakfast. 

I love that my husband has made this choice for himself. I did not ask him to, I did not need him to, I did not think he “should.” He told me he was thinking about it. I asked him if he would like me to join him if he did. He said he would. 

But phew if it isn’t sexy as hell. It’s not about bodies or attractiveness. (I sent him a screenshot of an ad with one of those fitness couples and captioned it, “It’s us!” And boy did we laugh. Friends, it will never be us…) It’s about having a partner who wants to grow. It’s about having a marriage that is so good we both want to be around for it longer. It’s about being a better version of myself so I can be a better wife. And having a husband who sees that and thinks “ok. Bet.” 

I’m still in limbo in terms of what comes next for me in my work and money life. But I have a good feeling about this new routine. Fingers crossed that this new way of life shakes something loose for me.

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03 Sep 2023

No time to need to know

I can’t find my car keys. I have *a* set of keys to my car, but not *my* set. 

I ran errands on Wednesday. I didn’t do anything Thursday that required leaving my house. And then on Friday, the plumbers called to say that they were on their way to dig up and replace my pipes, so I needed to move my car. But I couldn’t find my keys.

After a very long time looking, I finally decided to just use the spare set to move my car. And then I used the spare set to run more errands.

But once I got home, I was back to looking for the keys. I would partially do some task, thinking about where my keys could be, and then stop what I was doing to go check some really ridiculous place. At one point on Friday, I was literally wearing one sock with my hair half braided because twice I felt compelled to stop getting ready for my workout to go look in my underwear drawer or my laundry hamper or under the bed.

I didn’t want to keep looking. I knew that it didn’t matter. I had the spare set. Surely the keys would turn up eventually. But I could only wonder if I put them in the fridge when I put the groceries away on Wednesday. Did I go upstairs to get yarn at some point? Did I leave the keys in my yarn closet?

My brain is obsessive. I already know that. And there was a time when I could, and sometimes did, lose whole days to looking for something I lost. But when I got my eating under control I *had to* eat my meals three times a day. That meant stopping what I was doing. It meant making and eating my portion-controlled, sugar-free meal, no matter what obsessive thoughts I might have. It meant getting the distinction of “priorities.”

When I got my eating under control, I was told I had to call someone every day and tell them what I was going to eat the next day. Over 17 years later, I still do that. Every single day. (Ok, occasionally I text or leave a voicemail. But still every day.) It taught me that there is power in telling another person my intentions. 

Finally I called my best friend and I told her “I need to tell someone that I am going to let this go because I am obsessed with needing to know what happened to them. And I don’t have time to need to know!!! I have to workout and eat lunch! I have shit to do!” 

My bestie said that it was clear that I was not done looking. (She was right.) And that that was ok. But that now was not the time. It was time to workout and eat lunch. (Right again!) Did I already know that? Yes! Could I get there on my own? No!

Days later and I still don’t know what happened to the keys. And I still take a moment occasionally to look in ridiculous places. (The box where we store the outdoor cushions? The countertop behind the microwave?) But the truth is, missing the set is barely even an inconvenience. And I expect the keys will turn up eventually. And even if they don’t, if it becomes a problem in the future, I will deal with it then. But I was probably on track to lose a whole day. When all I needed was a little help to reset my brain.

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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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23 Jul 2023

The slow crawl to spectacular

I saw a pulmonologist this week and it could not have gone better.

A little over 2 months ago, I got sent for a lung function test. Afterwards, a doctor called me and told me that my lungs were fine and to stop taking the medication I had been taking. And I was upset. Because my lungs were very clearly not fine.

It was more of the same thing that I had always felt about doctors growing up. That nobody was listening to me. That the relationship was about power and submission. And that I was always the small one expected to submit. They were the doctors. They knew everything. I knew nothing.

But I was feeling panicked and crazy and scared. And I called a friend crying and she told me that she had to learn to advocate for herself with doctors. That it was a skill. And that I should figure out what I want for myself. Which is so not how I have ever thought about doctors.

So first, I took the doctor’s advice, knowing I already had a pulmonologist appointment, and I stopped taking the medication. And then I started taking notes on my lung function every day in my journal. And how often I had to take a different medication (fast acting instead of long lasting.) And then I psyched myself up to duke it out with this pulmonologist to get back on the medication that had been helping. Because no matter what that test said, there was something wrong!

But I walked in and he looked at my test results – the same ones from months ago when they told me my lungs were great – and he said I have a very specific kind of asthma. That the tests look great because I seem to be at the highest level of lung function, but that it’s misleading because actually, there is too much air in my lungs. I am getting air trapped in there and then breathing more air on top of it. And then he asked me how I felt being on the original medication and I told him “spectacular.” So he put me back on it. I didn’t even have to make the request. 

But wait. There’s more! He then told me that this particular kind of asthma often goes away on its own and that we will revisit it in 6 months, but there is a good chance that this too shall pass. 

Then he said I could take a blood test and they could see if I had certain markers for asthma. But I told him that I have a really hard time with blood tests and that if it was necessary I would but I would rather not. And he told me that it was not necessary at this point. So we wouldn’t do it.

Before I got my eating under control, life happened to me all the time. I was powerless. I was just dragged along. And I didn’t even realize that there was another way.

When I put boundaries around my eating, I got clarity. I got responsibility. I got the ability to ask for help. To learn a new way to do things. 

But also, I just want to note that it took 16 years of having my eating under control plus a health condition to actually go to the doctor. And the help and guidance of loved ones to begin to understand how to navigate that world. So I’m not saying it’s quick, I’m just saying it’s a slow crawl to “spectacular.”

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09 Jul 2023

Ready to be of service

I have been reminded this week that if nothing changes then nothing changes. It’s a saying I heard a lot when I first got my eating under control. If I don’t do anything different, I won’t get different results or a different life. 

I spent much of my young life wishing things were different than they were, especially my body. I wanted to be thin and I was not. But also, I wanted to be thin, while I simultaneously wanted to eat whatever I wanted. And I wanted both of those things to be true at the same time. And any time I did lose weight, I was eating smaller quantities of the same foods, until I was thin enough, or just not invested enough anymore, to go back to eating the way I wanted to. Which led to me being fat and hating my body again.

But this was true for lots of aspects of my life. I used to be late a lot. If it should take me 20 minutes to get to work, I would leave the house 20 minutes before work. And I would only make it on time about 2/3 of the time. And even if I said I would try to be better, I didn’t really *do* anything different. I just got angrier at traffic or the subway or my job. Like the “trying” was just wishing harder to be on time.

But I eventually got my eating under control because I changed the way I ate. I stopped eating simple sugars and carbohydrates. I started weighing my food. I only ate 3 meals a day with nothing in between. And I only changed because other people had gone before me and told me that if I did what they did, I could have what they had. A body and a life that were different in their joy and freedom than I had ever experienced before. And they were right. I ate differently, I thought differently, I lived differently and I got a different life.

And lately I’ve been changing again because, again, I have been making changes. I have been going to the doctor after 20 years of avoiding it, and I am taking care of my health. I have changed my workout, so my body is changing. And I signed up for The Craft Yarn Council’s Certified Instructors Program to get certified to teach crochet. So I’m acquiring new skills and techniques and learning how to make my passion for making into a shareable product. 

And all of these changes, that already feel pretty big on their own, are combining to make me feel like maybe I am on the precipice of something even bigger. Perhaps something new and exciting that I haven’t even considered before. 

I don’t know what happens next. But I am kind of thrilled. I am ready to be surprised! I am ready to be tickled! But maybe most importantly I am ready to be of service.

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