onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “sugar addict”

11 May 2025

Probably not the last time either

This past week has been enlightening for me as a person looking to continue to grow. I always forget that most real spiritual breakthroughs in my life happen through breakdowns. I always think about the joys of the other side without remembering the absolute physical, mental, and emotional misery of the catalyst for it. 

The 2 month period that led up to me quitting sugar and putting boundaries around my eating was emotional torture. But people who saw me then said I seemed fine. Perfectly normal. 

The months that led up to me no longer weighing my body and no longer judging my life based on the size of my body were riddled with uncontrollable weight gain, nightmares and stress hormones, and crying jags I couldn’t control.

This week it took some time to get me out of my woe-is-me-feelings. But they say to do service to feel better. So I did some stuff for other people. Which got me out of my head. And I decided on my amends. (I ended up donating to the GFM for Burn the Cape by Dr. Raquel Martin.) So that I could move on. Because I hurt someone by accident and then I got terrified that I would do it again. And I made myself as small as I could be. Made as little movement as I could. Froze right in place and stayed as still as possible. 

Because that is how it goes for me. I be whatever I am. And I get bigger. Weirder. Sillier. And then make a mistake and hurt someone. Again. And I freeze. Then I flee. And I go and hide. 

Getting fatter was absolutely a way for me to get smaller when I was still eating compulsively. More invisible. A way to have less impact. To be less seen. To hide in plain sight. I definitely did not know that intellectually at the time. And the being high on sugar helped me not know.

This is a difficult thing to explain. If you know me you may already think I’m “big and weird and silly.” You may think I have a gigantic personality. Which I do. But even that is still a stifled little girl doing a cha cha dance of trying to never ever make a mistake and then making one anyway and then quitting the dance and then 5-6-7-8… 

And that is the lesson here for me. That the shutting down and the woe is me and the hiding away is not authentic. It’s a way for me to stop and regroup and figure out what is palatable. What’s a tolerable dose of Kate? Let’s get it in that range. 

That is a problem. For me, anyway. Because what got me here to my sugar addiction and compulsive eating being arrested, and loving my life, and being in a loving and happy marriage, has been an uncovering of who I am. Very much *not* the making myself easier to digest. My life is better because I care about my authentic self. 

I understand a few things. 

My ego is not particularly big but it is fragile AF!

My impact in the world, and not my intention, is what I am responsible for. So that ALSO MEANS I don’t have to have a whole emotional breakdown about being a scourge on humanity because I made a joke that landed a way I didn’t mean for a person I really like. I can make it about my integrity (a thing I can do something about) and not my ego (an amorphous blob of ever changing and impossible standards.)

I just want to say that over these past 2+ years I have seen an incredible transformation in so many aspects of my life. My breathing health. My mental health. My physical strength and wellbeing. My balance. My willingness to see the doctor regularly and to get blood work done.

I am clearly changing for something. Into something. And I expect it won’t be the last time either.

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27 Apr 2025

I would do anything for my homemade ice cream, but I won’t do that

A few months ago I stopped eating eggs. They were expensive and I was lowkey worried about bird flu. Yes I know if you cook them through they should be fine. It’s not that I didn’t understand. I was just still bothered. Enough that the relief of quitting them outweighed missing them. I don’t miss them. Other people in my house still eat them. I have the option. I just don’t. 

But now I have to consider if I want to continue to drink milk and eat yogurt since the FDA is suspending milk quality tests. 

Milk and yogurt are a huge part of my diet. Butter too. Plus meat. Another food that is important to have standards for. And let’s not forget how many foods that get contaminated and recalled are vegetables. Lettuce pretty regularly. Cucumbers pretty recently. 

I eat real fresh food. Most of it was recently alive. And that is dangerous if it is not handled properly in a mass production environment.

I am worried about my food. I am worried about your food too. I am worried about food safety. I am worried about food transparency.

Am I just going to have to be sick occasionally? Do I just have to accept that?

Or am I supposed to trust that Kroger and Albertsons would never do anything sneaky or inappropriate to sell me their product? Am I supposed to trust in the free market?

Because I won’t do that…

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20 Apr 2025

Shameless food shameless body

I have been having a little bout of body dysmorphia this week. I looked in the mirror yesterday and I looked very fat to myself. And I had some kind of judgment about it. Not positive. But also sort of disconnected from any real physical sensation. There was not the pain of hating myself. There was not any despair or dread. Just a kind of mean thought like if I saw a really unfashionable woman at the mall. (Yes. I am judging your fashion, people!)

I need to say that I am objectively the same size I have been for months because I am wearing clothes that fit the same. If anything I may be slightly smaller. But my body dysmorphia is not rational. If it were they would call it something else.

So I kept looking at myself until my body lost its already minimal emotional charge. 

Even in that moment that little judgment didn’t go away entirely, but I don’t expect it  ever will. All of my addictions and disorders are just reined in for the time I have my eating under control and I’m taking care of myself, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. 

One of the strongholds of my body dysmorphia when I was still in the food was eating foods I was ashamed of eating. Shame feeds the body dysmorphia. (Which is not to say that they were bad foods. I’m not the food police. I’m a sugar addict.) 

I (we all) had been told what good women with good bodies ate, but I wasn’t eating those things. So I was fat. Plus I hated my body. Plus I was ashamed of the foods I was eating. So when I looked in the mirror and saw something I hated, even if it were objectively untrue, it made sense. It *felt* real. 

Taking the morality out of food loosened the grip of my body hate. And that blunted the majority of the agony of the body dysmorphia. Sugar is a drug to me. My body is a still. It turns sugar and grains to alcohol on its own. I don’t need to eat skinless chicken breast and steamed broccoli to be a good woman with a good body. I do need to quit and stay away from foods that will get me high and kick off cravings. And also stop caring about whether someone else would call me a good woman with a good body…

I have eating rules. Foods to eat and foods to abstain from, weighed and measured portions and timeframes.  But with the *understanding* that I should be eating foods I LOVE. Every day. Every meal I can! I belong to a community that is for abundance not deprivation. It’s how I can do it for over 19 years. It’s how I still love it 19 years later. It’s how I feel good in my body. Because when I don’t feel shame about my food, why should I feel shame about my body?

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13 Apr 2025

Practice makes me proud of myself

I watched a video on social media this week about how if you want to truly be an activist a great step to take is to start some slow hobbies. To learn how to continuously work and wait with hope.

Not results.

And I looked at myself, which I do when I am confronted with something that I want or am afraid that I lack, and I realized that that is what having my eating under control has been teaching me, a day at a time, for over 19 years. 

In fact, it was in getting my eating under control that I not only returned to crochet, but for the first time in my life, had the wherewithal, the attention span, the patience, and the cognitive capacity to significantly advance my skills. Then I had the desire to take on yet another craft, knitting. Then embroidery. Weaving. All the while still learning new crochet techniques. New knitting. Trying new things. Designing! Designing crochet dolls. Designing crochet doll clothes. Designing accessories for dolls. 

I can make things that only existed in my head before! Things that were once just yarn and stuffing and my imagination are now art.

But that took time. So much time. So many years of trials and failures and biting off more than I could chew. And sometimes managing to succeed anyway! And sometimes just not. And having to take 2 steps back. And having to take 200 steps back! Years, coming on decades.

Addiction and instant gratification have a lot in common. And there are many ways that they overlap. When I was in the food, actively in my sugar addiction and eating compulsively, the instant gratification of sugar always got me too high to really be able to advance in learning much of anything. And any project that didn’t come out the way I expected was a miserable failure. And anything I did had to be done in a frenzied burst, before I got too high on sugar and sort of ran out of steam.

I did creating but it was always long on idea and short on execution.

When I put boundaries around my eating, first thing I had to learn was to wait at least 4 hours between meals, plus over night for breakfast. That felt like an eternity to me. It was literally painful sometimes. It sometimes felt like I was going to die. That’s not hyperbole. It’s addiction.

So learning to wait to eat was a lesson. Then doing something to pass the time was a lesson. Then rediscovering my love of learning was a lesson.

Keeping my eating under control is a practice. There is no end goal. It’s an ongoing lifetime goal of authentic living. It’s a lifetime commitment to process. And I only have that because I happen to be a sugar addict, who is now in recovery. A happy outcome to a shitty situation.

So many of the best and most fulfilling aspects of my life are a direct result of getting my eating under control and thereby gaining the ability and possibility of choosing delayed gratification. The possibility of practice. Of doing something just because I do it.

Because if I am goal oriented, at 4:30 in the morning, my butt is not going to be as good an incentive to get out of bed. But I am going to get out of bed anyway, because I work out with my husband at 5, so I may as well get that butt. It’s the workout that is the practice. An hour a day, 5 days a week, to practice loving movement and strengthening of my sacred vessel.

My workout, my meditation, my sleep, my skin care, and my eating are all ways that I take care of myself every day. And any results are from consistency and are a bonus. I do them because the practice makes me proud of myself. Period.

It is a blessing for me to have learned the lesson of patience, of growth, of worthwhile things taking time to build, before the pervasiveness of things like Door Dash and Amazon Prime. Because I cannot imagine how much less patience, or how little capacity for change I would have now if I had not put boundaries around my eating 19 years ago. 

It’s worth the reminder for myself that worthwhile things take patience and time. And that the things that I want and want to be a part of, are going to take, not just work, but work, plus time and hope. 

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06 Apr 2025

I (over)stepped in it.

I violated a friend’s boundary this week. With no malice or ill intent. And I didn’t even think I was in the moment. But I did. And shit, did that suck!

My immediate internal reaction when she called me on it, even though she was so sweet about it, was defensiveness. All of these rebuttals flashed through my mind! *But you said! But I thought! But I didn’t mean it and you can’t blame me.* 

But years ago when I wanted to find my husband and fall in love, the best advice I got was stop looking for a husband and start *being* the kind of partner I wanted to find. And that is just great life advice. Be the kind of person I want in my own life.

How would I want someone to react to a generously set boundary? 

So I did what I have heard called “fall forward fast.” I immediately apologized, assured her of my good intentions, but also acknowledged the harm I did. I asked for forgiveness and immediately set to make it right based on her desires. 

And how she came back to me later was with so much additional generosity. Coming up with ways that she could accommodate me and keep her own boundaries. And that was amazing. And I feel even closer to her! Which is a joy! 

But I also want to say, I had a hard time forgiving myself. I slept uneasy that night. And I woke up still a little ashamed. 

Part of me thinks that this stuff is supposed to feel good. A weight off my shoulders from knowing I have honored another person. And usually it does. But right now it just makes all of the relationships in my life feel more important. And maybe more fragile. And like the stakes of being a person who can be trusted and counted on, are higher than ever.

I learned to set boundaries at all when I learned to set them around my eating. But they have turned out to be one of the best tools for living I have. Because boundaries aren’t to shut people out. They are to keep people in our lives. 

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30 Mar 2025

The barest of minimums

You are getting the barest of minimums today. I am writing this while scarfing down my breakfast before a 2 day 20+ hour trip back home.

I have all my meals packed for the next 2 days. I have some audiobooks downloaded and I am ready to go! Ok, I’m not. I still have to clean out this refrigerator. Any way, next week, friends!

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23 Mar 2025

The only way out is through

I have had an ever changing body throughout my life. My size, shape, muscles, weight have all shifted and transformed based on the ways I shifted and transformed.

Physical changes, even ones I consider good changes, often mean short term physical pain for an adjustment period. Generally more acute than the pain it is correcting. Like when I got my wisdom teeth pulled and my bite shifted, my teeth no longer fit together the same, and the readjustment of different teeth banging together gave me headaches. When I quit sugar, my body was so used to only eating processed foods that I had bad digestive issues for over a year. When I quit smoking I got sores in my mouth and on my gums from the healing and new growth where the smoke had damaged my tissues. When I have changed my center of gravity because of something like weight changes or new muscles, I will bang into things for a while and get bruises on my hips and thighs. The list goes on. But the lesson for me is clear: Change is worth it, but it hurts. 

The lift in my right shoe has been transformative. Muscles and joints that have plagued me for decades are pain free. There was a knot in my butt, just below my hip that I haven’t felt or had to massage for weeks, and a tight area in my groin that is now just easy and comfortable. I don’t limp first thing in the morning anymore. I don’t have any doubts that I need to be walking with a lift in my right shoe all the time. The pressure I am relieving on my joint and all of its connections is a blessing. I am so grateful for the relief.

But it means there are other muscles that are not used to their new work. And they are tender. I am sometimes bruising myself with my massage roller to loosen them up. And they tire quickly. 

I guess that’s the good news, right? Working to exhaustion is the best way to build new muscle. But it does not FEEL good. It just is good. Delayed gratification.

This too shall pass. But I am happy for the reminder that change is painful; and also the only way to get all the things I want out of life. So I am stretching and massaging when I need to. And taking some naproxen sodium to relax my muscles when I need that too. But moving forward with the lift. Because the only way out is through. 

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16 Mar 2025

To trust and be trusted

Today is 12 years with my husband and our 9th wedding anniversary. He was my only boyfriend ever. And he didn’t come into my life (back into my life – we were childhood friends) until I had my eating under control for 7 years. 

SEVEN YEARS! And I was GORGEOUS! And 35 and single that whole time. And that sort of frustrated me, and made me angry at Life. Like I did the thing to be socially acceptable and I wanted my “reward.”

But as I mentioned earlier, I had had my eating under control for years. And those years really do accumulate in terms of clarity and self-trust. So I knew better than to decide that just anyone would do. 

I chose a partner who would grow with me. Maybe not at the same time or at the same rate, but by their own standards and choices. And I could do that, see and choose that, because I was growing the whole time I wasn’t eating compulsively and high on sugar. And he was either going to like that and choose to stick around. Or he was going to be disappointed and leave. 

That is what I have learned the most clearly from having my eating under control: My life is the most fulfilling when I am unapologetically myself. I attract MY people. I repel people who are offended by me or the fact that they cannot change me. 

I won’t imply that I am not physically beautiful, because I certainly am. But I am also weird. And loud. And ridiculous. And purposely annoying. And I live 300+ days a year in yoga pants and an oversized men’s hoodie. And I leave a trail of either yarn or hair or both positively everywhere. And I sob until I’m dehydrated, sometimes because I’m desperately sad and sometimes because the character in the audiobook I’m listening to has been grievously betrayed and humiliated. And I am also not a spectacular housekeeper. 

But I AM a quality partner and friend. A person my communities can count on. Honest, honorable and generous. A person of integrity. An empathetic and loving companion. Because I have my sugar addiction and my compulsive eating under control.

When I was eating compulsively I only thought about how things would impact me. How they would hurt me. I didn’t care about the impact I had on others. And I would throw anyone under the bus to “take care” of myself. I would not have been a good partner. I would only have been looking at myself. But I was still very upset that I was not a “girlfriend” or a “wife.” That I had not been chosen!

Being a member of the community of men and women who support one another in keeping our sugar addiction arrested taught me that being of service is its own kind of self care and spiritual nourishment. And because of being active in my community I know that allowing someone to be of service to me is also part of love and community.

When I asked a friend in my community how she found her partner, she said she stopped looking for a partner and became the kind of person she wanted to date. Basically, don’t wait to be someone’s partner to start to learn how to be a good partner. A sort of spiritual Be Do Have. 

I am very grateful for my husband. And for 12 years of partnership. And for all of the ways we have inspired each other to be better for ourselves. But also very much for my own willingness to trust and be trusted.

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09 Mar 2025

Do the next thing and hope it’s the right thing

Throughout my life I spent a lot of time being told “the way it is” about so many things. And really just not believing. Just deciding that I was going to do it my way and see what could happen. 

I definitely did not choose the path of least resistance. Kind of ever. 

But when it came to my body I *never* believed there was any other possibility than the very narrow one I felt confined to. I was fat. I had a certain shape. That was just the way it was.

When I quit sugar and carbohydrates and started to weigh my food 19 years ago, that was the very first time that I felt like I had any control over my body. Before that my own body had felt like a curse and a force of nature. I could lose weight, but I could never really stop eating. Every weight loss felt like a lie. I KNEW that it was unsustainable. Until I stopped putting my drug in my system. 

So ok. That was amazing. I could stop eating sugar and I could be “not fat.” But I still had a very specific shape and it was “weird.” I had to dress to “hide my flaws.” My weight distribution was all up front. I had  big belly. I had wide hips but no butt. My shorter right leg (from when I was born with a club foot and they put me in a full cast from hip to toe) was bigger and stronger and so was/is my right foot. I carried almost all of my weight on it all the time. My right hip hurt constantly. It was just the way it was. And it was still a more comfortable and easy body than when I was eating compulsively.

And then I started walking stairs and as my butt got bigger my center of balance moved way back so I was no longer balancing on my toes. And my belly got smaller as my balance shifted back. But as my legs got stronger and stronger my back started to get tighter and I had to spend a lot of time stretching and massaging my leg muscles to open my back up.

So a couple of weeks ago I started using a lift in my right shoe to accommodate the full one inch difference between my left and right legs. And that ended up making a huge difference in my back. 

In less than 2 full weeks it has reduced my back and hip pain and significantly increased my range of motion backwards. 

None of these things ever felt like anything I had any kind of power over. They felt predestined and set in stone. But I just didn’t know anything. And when people or media or movies told me about “how it was” with bodies like my body, I just believed them in a way I didn’t for almost anything else.

I was ashamed of myself and my body when I was in the food. Ashamed of my fatness, ashamed of my shape, ashamed of any anomalous aspect. And that kept me from even thinking of simple fixes. I would have to be worthy of that. I would have to just be in need of a little help. Not irrevocably broken…

But now that my eating is under control, I love my body. The beautiful, the weird, and the weirdly beautiful. And by loving my body I have a shot at taking an action that leads to me loving it more. Like putting a lift in my shoe. 

I am trying to remember every day and in all things that there is no “way it is.” There is only the way it has been and my choice of what to do next for myself and my community. And I’m trying to remember that I did not know what was possible before I started any of these things. I just did the next thing and hoped it was the right thing. 

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02 Mar 2025

Connection collection

I don’t spend a lot of time with people other than my husband. And I like it that way. I have certainly set it up that way for myself. We often live in a different city every year or two and I am not out and about making friends. 

I am at the grocery stores and the craft shops or at home cooking and crafting. I talk to my friends on the phone who are mostly out of state anyway. 

But my husband turned 50 this week! (Yay!) And his grandma turned 90 the same day! (Wow!) So we flew from SLC home to Chicago for a few days. We drove to Indianapolis to visit his grandma. Plus he got to reunite with his step daughter and meet his step grandson for the first time. Not to mention hanging out with the usual suspects when we’re home for a few days. And the neighbor cat was convinced to love me again with (multiple) treats!!! So there was a lot of face to face interaction. With lots of people. Some new.

But it was easy. And the reason is because when I have my eating disorder and sugar addiction under control I don’t spend my time worrying about what other people think of me. I like me. I act and think and behave according to my own heart. And when I don’t I apologize and make amends. You either like me or you don’t. It’s not really my concern. 

And that leaves lots of room for connection. The people who love me and whom I love are MY PEOPLE. And I don’t have to do anything to make them like me. I don’t have to contort myself. I am just the most authentic that I can be. And in all that freedom there is so much room for friendship, camaraderie, community, laughter, mourning, and love. 

When I got my eating under control 19 years ago, I didn’t have a lot of sense of community. Actually I felt like I knew what community was. I came from a big family. But they felt very unwelcoming to me. And I had friends, but in retrospect, many of them were also unwelcoming. Jealous or snide or mean. And I was some side of that coin with many people. There are very few people from my past that I am friends with. (I have new friends. In my food program and out.)

But then all of a sudden I had a food program and these women (and men but mostly women) who wanted to help me keep my commitments to myself. And they were willing to give me their time and energy and wisdom, because someone had done it for them. And I was expected to do it as well when called upon. 

And the thing about community, even when there are people I don’t like, because there are definitely people in my food program that I don’t like, is that it makes for quality connections. And connections make us feel necessary. Seen and acknowledged. And that feels good. It even feels good to do something helpful and generous for the people you don’t like sometimes. Very proud, at the very least. 

It has been a joy to be around these people this week. Laughter and tears and intimate conversations and stupid stuff too. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m exhausted. I can’t wait to go hide in my SLC apartment and craft like the goblin I am. But this week has been a wonderful reminder of how much love there is in my life. And I only have it and feel it because I am not compulsively eating drug foods.

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