onceafatgirl

Peace is better than chocolate

Archive for the tag “weight gain”

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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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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24 Sep 2023

They’re all still just me

The weather turned cooler this past week, and I didn’t have any cool weather pants that fit me so I went out and got some jeans and pants. And I am down another size to a U.S. size 8. This is the smallest I have been in the last 10 years. 

I have spent the past 10 years actively separating my self-worth from the size and weight of my body. Mostly because I was forced to. Because I had already given up man-made sugars, grains and starches, and my eating didn’t seem to have any great impact on my size. Eating grilled chicken on big salads didn’t make me any skinnier than fried onions and bacon. So I ate the bacon, obviously. 

And it was an amazing lesson in my own beauty, my own personal value of myself, and the way I could change my world just by loving my body exactly as it is. I had my sugar addiction arrested, and I could trust that the body I had was the right body for me. The size was incidental.

But now I’m in a more socially acceptable body, and it’s hard not to think “better” or “good.” It’s hard not to think of it as a reward for something. Patience? Commitment? It’s hard not to think “finally!”

This, though, is when I get a glimpse of my own contrary and non-conformist tendencies. It’s like I also don’t want to be more conventionally attractive because I worked so hard on loving my bigger body. And it worked! I did. And I was proud of and inspired by my size 14 gorgeousness. I was beautiful and sexy and happy.

But isn’t loving my body unconditionally also loving it when everyone else “likes it better” too? Of course it is.

I guess what it comes down to is that I am a little resentful of the way we treat bodies in our society. As if they are an out of fashion hand bag and the one carrying it should do better, as opposed to the holy vessel of another spiritual being. My size 14 body was still a channel for all of the experiences of life. Joy and pleasure and pain and sorrow. And a size 8 body is too. And both and everything in between, are all still me. Just like that 300 pound 19 year old girl was me too.

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20 Aug 2023

Can’t get my body out of my head

For all of 2022 I was either sick or injured. And so far, for all of 2023 my body has been shifting and changing.

I started walking stairs for exercise late last year because it was a workout I could do even when I was having trouble breathing. I would go slower for longer than if I were jogging, but I was still getting my heart rate up and sweating.

And then I got my breathing taken care of. And it turns out that a high energy workout on stairs will build your butt muscles. Quickly. And since then, I have been absolutely loving my workout. I am not miserable and gasping for air. I am loving the way my body is changing, and the shape my exercises are creating. And I naturally get faster the more weight I lose and lighter I am, which increases the number of steps I can take in my 30 minute workout, which again increases my muscle.

But the other thing is that currently I am just this side of obsessed with my body. And I don’t love that. It’s great to love my body. But I am an addict. And my love can go real bad, real quick.

In April, when I got my mini-stepper, I got weird about results. One day I could see them, the next they were all in my head. (They were never all in my head. My head is just a weird funhouse.) And in going about my day, I was stopping what I was doing to go look at my butt in the mirror. A lot.

Then I had a thought. That I should do one of those “picture a day” things, to track my progress.

Friends, I want to be less obsessed with my body, not more. And I realized that I do not want to do that to myself. Take a bajillion pictures of my butt to scrutinize and analyze and evaluate and judge. Not because I don’t adore my new butt. I do! I am absolutely in love with it in a way that I never could have been if I didn’t really work for it. But because I don’t want to “romance” my body obsession.

When people first start to do what I do with food, they have to change their language, in their minds and in their mouths. We have to stop saying chocolate is our “favorite” and start remembering that it is poison to us. And when the people I am responsible for mentoring start thinking longingly about sugar and carb “drug foods,” I tell them they have to learn to “change the channel.” To stop thinking what they are thinking and think something else. To stop “romancing” the food in their heads. Because it’s not a love affair. At the very least it’s an abusive relationship.


When I “romance” my body obsession, I start to think of all of the ways I could possibly get myself a “better” body. By which I mean a “thinner” body. Because when I obsess I am not obsessing about my health. Or my stamina. Or my flexibility. Or my strength. I am obsessing about my weight.

I am still very much in my head about my body. And I think that for as long as the changes continue to be noticeable in the mirror, I will continue to be more focused on my body than is comfortable. 

But I know from experience that this is temporary. That eventually things change. They even out or calm down or become irrelevant. And I know that I have been obsessed with my body before, many times for many reasons. Weight gain. Weight loss. The shape of some part or another. I am, after all, a sugar addict with eating and body image disorders. So I trust that this will pass. And I can have some room for my body obsession. And some room for my body to be its very lovely 46-year-old self.

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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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04 Jun 2023

Ups and downs and how little control I have over them

I don’t weigh myself. I haven’t for about 10 years. I used to. Once a month. Most people who do what I do with food weigh themselves on the first. 

But when I quit smoking over 10 years ago, I gained a bunch of weight. I was keeping my eating boundaries and gaining weight anyway. It was really difficult. I was having nightmares about my weight and getting on the scale. And I would weigh myself on the first and be relieved that I didn’t have to do it again for another month. But the relief only lasted a week, tops. And then I was obsessed with what I could do to not gain more weight by the next time.

But I was not overeating. I was not doing any of the things that conventional wisdom tells us make us gain weight. I was eating less and less calorie dense foods and weighing more.

I started losing weight about 6 months ago. And since we have moved back home and I got a mini stepper two months ago, the weight loss is quicker. The other day I put on a dress that I bought 5 or 6 years ago and that used to be just the right amount of snug on me. Now it hangs off of me. Pants that used to be tight are now way too big and I have to roll the waistband down twice to get them in a comfortable position.

A lot of people who do what I do talk about how they still wear the same clothes from years ago. But that is not my story.

My story is that my weight has changed many times in the past 17 years. Not just when I quit smoking. And that I personally don’t have any answers as to why. I have gained weight eating all salads. And I am currently losing weight eating ridiculous amounts of bacon and pork rinds. Weighed and measured yes. So there is a limit. But bacon and pork rinds don’t weigh all that much.

I decided years ago that I would concentrate on keeping my food addiction under control and not worry about my weight. That whatever weight I am when I am weighing and measuring my food is exactly the right weight for me to be. 

But I still live in our society. And I am most definitely conditioned to think that getting smaller is always automatically good. So I keep an eye on those thoughts. I don’t entertain them. And I won’t make any major lifestyle changes, like longer or more intense workouts, without talking to a trusted person about them first.

I want to be strong and healthy. I want to love my body. But I don’t want that love to be contingent to my weight or size. I don’t want that love to be contingent on anything.

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05 Jun 2022

If you can’t be in a body you love, love the body you’re in.

Ten years ago today I smoked my last cigarette. I had decided that I didn’t want to be a 35-year-old smoker. (Tomorrow is my birthday, in case that wasn’t obvious. And I turn 45 this time around.) It was about vanity for me. Quitting smoking felt like a really grown up thing to do. It felt like getting my shit together. So I did it. And it mostly felt great. 

Except in less than 6 months I had gained 30 pounds. Weighing all of my food. Eating quantifiably less food than I had been before quitting smoking (I know because I was weighing my food, and had already been doing so for years.) Eating less of foods like bacon and starchy vegetables. And still growing out of my clothes. 

I felt crazy! I was terrified! I had literal nightmares about stepping on the scale, about my weight going out of my control, about being fat again. Was I going to go right back up to 300 pounds again? Even with my eating boundaries?

I did not, of course, go back up to 300 pounds. My weight eventually stopped growing. But also, I have never been thin again. Ever. No more size 4s and 6s. No more tiny little dresses. No more little jeans that I held up thinking *these will never fit me*, but I was skinny, so they did. After the weight gain, I had to get rid of most of my clothes. It was hard. I cried a lot. Over the clothes, over my body, over my hormones going crazy trying to heal me after decades of being a smoker.

If I had known how it would go, I guarantee you I never would have quit. Because I cared so much about my weight. I had hated being fat and hated myself for being fat. When I had lost weight it felt like such an accomplishment. And people reinforced that idea. They were “proud” of me. They were “impressed.” They wanted me to “keep up the good work.” 

Except people didn’t want me to keep up the good work. They wanted me to stay thin. They didn’t care *how* I got there or maintained it. And in fact, a lot of them were freaked out or repulsed by the “good work” I actually did do to keep my eating under control which is what maintained the weight loss they were so “impressed” by.

And here I was *doing* this thing people wanted me to do (quit smoking) and it was making my body do this other thing people really *did not* want me to do (gain weight.)

So I did the only sensible thing, which, from the outside, to a lot of people, looked like a very stupid thing to do. I stopped caring about my weight. I made friends with the body I have. I started to dress the body I have. I started to exercise the body I have. I made a point to actively love the body I have. 

Obviously I am not sorry I quit smoking. Since 10 years later I am still a non-smoker, and I still keep my eating boundaries, even though I am not skinny. Because Life must have known what it was doing. Gaining weight with my eating under control was an excellent first step to dismantling my internalized fat phobia. It has let me see how we as a society shame and cow and control women with our body and beauty standards. And it let me heal a lot of the self-hatred that I had because I was fat in a world where fat is the worst thing a woman can be. It taught me in a practical way what no theoretical lesson could. That not all bodies can be shamed, cowed, and controlled into socially acceptable ones. At least not without the harsh and harmful methods I was now unwilling to subject my beloved body to. And that all I really need is to love the body I have exactly as it is.

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23 Jan 2022

Vanity, Pride and wanting to be skinny enough to be loved

I was talking to some friends who do what I do with food the other day. And I was reminded that the difference between me as a kid eating compulsively and me as an adult with boundaries around my food is much bigger inside than outside. I did lose a lot of weight. And that is one thing. But most people I still have in my life didn’t care about my weight when I was fat. And they really think that I am basically the same as I ever was. Only not fat. And they don’t care about that.

This is interesting to me because I feel like an entirely different person. On the inside. And not just because I don’t think about my weight or my body anymore, which is HUGE, because when I was eating compulsively I thought about my body and my weight all the time. I worried about what other people thought about my body. But more importantly I worried about who was going to humiliate me because of my size and shape. Because people loved to humiliate me. People love to humiliate fat people in general.

But aside from not having that constant nagging fear and shame, I feel entirely different than I did when I was in the food. And it is about having my addiction under control. I have a clear head. I have a clear conscience because I have done my best to clean up my past messes and to “clean as I go” in my relationships now. I have a peace around not only my actions and words, but also my circumstances. I have a new relationship to what happens to me and how I react to it. One where I assess what is the reality of the situation, accept it, and act (or abstain from acting) according to who I want to be in my life.

Here is the deal. I believe whole heartedly that the people in my life would still love me if I were fat. I believe my husband would still love me. I believe my friends and family would still love me. That they would not see me as all that different.

And if what I do with food were only about being thin, and I knew that people would still love me fat, I would have quit. A long time ago. If it were about my body, and my weight, and I knew that my husband did not really care about my weight, I would have said screw it. I would have gone back to cake. Because when I got my eating under control, it really was to be skinny enough to be loved.

But now I do what I do because when I do it, I love myself. And I do not love myself because I’m skinny. I am not skinny. I love myself because I do what I say I am going to do. I be where I say I am going to be. I tell the truth and I honor myself. These were not things I could do before. Because how could I have been honest about anything when I could never be honest about food? I have sometimes heard “how you do anything is how you do everything.” And I was a liar about food. How could I not be a liar in any other aspect of my life?

As time goes by and I get more clearheaded, I know that weight is less and less important to me. That I don’t keep my eating boundaries for physical vanity. Though I’ll admit it is a kind of vanity. I like looking like I’ve got my shit together. But also, I like that I actually have my shit together. So maybe that’s more pride than vanity. (Do I sound like Mary Bennet now?!?) Either way, I am grateful that my happiness is not all tangled up with my weight anymore. Even if it is still tangled up with my food.

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