Good With Cheese

I am an anxious person.  I’m prone to fits of panic, waves of anxiety that roll over me and pull me under.  I was medicated for a while and that allowed me time to learn new ways of talking to myself that didn’t involve cruel words and threats of harm.  But eventually, I stopped the meds because I felt too flattened by them and wanted just to see how I could cope now that I recognized normal.  And I mostly cope fine.

But when the panic and anxiety comes, it’s almost unbearable.  Tomorrow I have an appointment I’m incredibly nervous about.  I was trying to find something appropriate to wear and spent 2 hours tonight shopping and did not buy a single item of clothing.  Because…wait for it…I’m too fat.

GOD. 

It’s like such a stupid default setting in my head.  I’m freaking out about this appointment, I’m feeling nervous and unprepared and twitchy, but I don’t talk to myself about any of that.  I don’t address the feelings.  I instead focus on the fact that my thighs make pants fit weird.  I call myself fat, I kick myself for the handful of candy I ate today, I despise myself for letting myself go.  

I talk to myself in body language because it lets me avoid the real issue.

The real issue?  I don’t want to go to this appointment tomorrow.  I regret agreeing to, I realize now that it is not a direction I want things to go, I am annoyed with myself for being rash.  I wanted to come home tonight and have someone here to talk things through with me, but my husband doesn’t live here.  And that pisses me off on a whole other level. 

He’s not here to support me, to make me dinner and give me a foot rub and reassure me.  He’s not here to give me a hug.  And I’m so angry about that.  I feel so abandoned by him.

The week after he comes home for a visit is always like this.  But this time it’s magnified by the anxiety that overwhelming me.  Tonight I essentially hung up on him when he called.  Because I have nothing to say that isn’t angry.  Because I’m so sad and scared and panicked.

So, I call myself fat.  Because that’ll fix things, right? 

 I just want to stop hurting myself because I hurt.  I just want things to be easier. 

Heck of a day at work today.  I actually lost track of how many people I saw, though it seemed like every last one of them had three kids.  Is three kids the new 2.5 children and a dog? 

Dinner was quick and with minimal cleanup, and then I played with Pete (the mini-doxie who owns my soul), and now I’m planning on doing some reading before my husband calls.  I picked up this book last night at the library, and while it’s very anecdotal, it still gives me the same feeling I get when I surf the body-acceptance blogs: that I am part of a community, that I’m not fighting alone.

I’m a little less in my head this week because being busy interferes with that (thank heavens!).  And I have a kind of stressful appointment on Friday afternoon, so right now, I’m very much focused on that and not thinking quite so much about  my body.  And honestly, that in itself is a fairly positive change; normally, outside stress causes me to get more rigid with myself, really crack down on the food and increase the exercise.  This time around, I’m going with extra coffee, lots of word puzzles, and comfy pants. 

I prefer dealing with stress this way.  Now, if I can just get Friday over with…

Last night, we went over to my sister’s house for a holiday weekend cookout. While there, we watched some home movies from when my nephew was small, around early 2000 - 2002. My First Diet Ever didn’t begin until November 2001, so it was interesting to see myself on video back before I found out I was fat and my body unacceptable.

My husband is coming home this weekend.  In fact, he’s driving right now and is about 4 hours away. 

This will be the first weekend he’s been home (we saw each other the first weekend in May, but we weren’t here at home) since I’ve stopped dieting.

Oh, my poor husband.  He’s been very kind and patient with my years of dieting and he’s always tried to gently nudge me away from the least healthy of my behaviors.  He’s one of those hummingbird-metabolism people and doesn’t really understand what it’s like living in a body that doesn’t burn everything up, but he’s tried to understand and I appreciate that.

I’m looking forward to spending the weekend with him without having the food and exercise anxiety I used to have.  I don’t have to worry about squeezing my workouts in around his visit, no getting up at 5:45 so I can work out before he’s even awake.  No worrying about what I can and can’t eat.  There can be spontaneity.  We can go out for pancakes, or make a big pasta dinner together, or share dessert.  We won’t have to talk about what I “can” have.

It should be fun.  Now if I can just stay awake the four hours until he gets home…

There’s a white, frosted party cake sitting in my kitchen. 

I’ve had three pieces since I brought it home.

I feel okay about that.

You see, I’ve been thinking about white, frosted cake for literally days.  Daydreaming about it.  Thinking about how sweet and soft the frosting is, how the crumbs would gather on the back of my fork. 

And then I realized how lame I was being.  Hugh Laurie is somewhere out there in the world and I’m fantasizing about cake?  To heck with that!

So, I went to the store, bought the cake, and ate three pieces.  It was awesome.  Now it’s sitting in the kitchen and I’m not thinking about it anymore.  There’s lots of it left and I may eat it or I may not, but at least it’s no longer getting my attention and energy to a degree it doesn’t deserve.

I think I’ve secretly de-legalized a lot of really yummy foods and they’re taking on that gleam of the forbidden.  So, looks like I have some stocking up to do and then I’m free to devote my mental energy to once again to one Gregory House.

The urge to restrict my eating has been really strong for several days now, and while I’m not really giving in, I am giving myself the third degree about everything I eat.  You know, the “Do you really want that?  Really?? Are you sure??” questioning with every morsel that comes in front of me.  It’s, like, stealth restricting.

I’ve got to nip this right now.  I feel a slide happening and, damn it, I’m not doing this again.

A shake-up and a wake-up is in order.  So, here’s your reminders, babycakes.

1. You cannot live the rest of your life writing down everything you eat. 
2. You can’t go back to tracking your weight daily to the ounce on those damn little notecards. 
3. You don’t want to go back to turning down social invitations because you don’t know what you’ll be able to eat there or because you need to get in a workout.
4. You can’t be scared of being fat all the time, because fat isn’t the problem.
5. Birthday cake at parties, breakfast out with your husband, Sunday lunch with the family.  You miss these things when you diet because you isolate yourself.  You not only don’t eat, you don’t even let yourself show up.
6. Cake is really good and so are apples and you should get to eat either or neither or both and feel okay about that.
7. There is no weight at which you’ll feel magically happy about your body because the world is constructed to make you feel not good.  Be happy now instead and to hell with ‘em.
8. When you die, no one will care how awesome a dieter you were.  Be more.
9. You have a finite amount of attention and energy available to you on any given day.  Do you really want to waste it on something that says nothing about the person you are or the life you lead?
10. It hurts to work out hours every day, remember? Remember stress fractures and pulled muscles and blisters and limping and feeling so tired you thought you might die if you spend one more mile on the treadmill but you had to do it anyway?  Oh, honey.  You can’t do that anymore.

You can lose all the weight you want.  You can.  But it doesn’t make you feel fixed on the inside, remember?  Because it’s about meanness and punishment and pain, remember?

You can’t do that anymore.

I just can’t.  And I just won’t.

I’ve got to get my head on straight.

I have been catching myself doing head-math.  You know, adding up calories of a meal or snack.  It’s very mindless and I’m halfway through the calculations before I realize what I’m doing.  I stop then, and resist totalling up an entire day’s worth of calories, but OH.  HOW I WANT TO.

On the drive home from my parents’ home tonight after spending the day playing nurse to my mom as she recuperates, I was torn between two competing desires.  First, I wanted to go straight to the grocery store for a box of those ice-cream sandwiches that are made with the M&M cookies–you know the ones?  I’ve never had one, but for two days now, I’ve been thinking about them.  Second, I wanted to go home and place myself on the treadmill for a good 90 minutes. 

Overeat or overexercise.  Those were the choices.  Not, like, a hot shower or a Sudoku or a good dog-snuggle.   Food I wasn’t hungry for or exercise I didn’t need (having already done my designated workout for the day this AM). 

Why?  Why is that where I go when I’m feeling anxious?  Why can’t I just go home and put on the pjs and pour a glass of iced tea (or wine, as needed) and watch American Idol and just relax?  Why do I go for the pain?

When I decided to give up the disordered eating and compulsive exercising, I typed up a little contract with myself of the behaviors I wouldn’t engage in.  And I signed it with the stipulation that I would give myself precisely three months to try living without my rituals.  I’m roughly five weeks in and it’s still very hard and sometimes I think that when the three months wraps up in mid-July, I’ll still have time to “get things under control” (horrible phrase, but the one my internal voice is using) before the summer is over. 

I miss dieting.  But I don’t miss feeling hungry and sore and really, really terrified all the time. 

Maybe by the time 7/16 gets here, I’ll have found other ways to soothe myself. 

Back in the dieting days, I’d frequently go to bed at 8:30.  See, I talk on the phone with my husband every night from 7:30 - 8:30 (”talk” sometimes meaning “watch TV together”).  After our conversation, I’d feel adrift.  Alone, untethered, anxious.  And I wanted to eat. 

 I didn’t think of myself as an emotional eater, because pre-dieting, I’d never engaged in that sort of behavior.  But I recognize now that dieting turned me into one.  I would feel anxious, and eating in a really aggressive, face-stuffing kind of way calmed me for a moment.  It distracted me from those pesky feelings that sometimes rise to the surface when you get really tired of living 600 miles away from your husband, when the dogs won’t stop fighting with each other, when your checkbook balance has gotten insanely low (thanks to overspending, my answer to restrictive eating), when your ankle is throbbing but you know you have to get up in the morning and run.

Stuff, stuff, stuff…that will shut things up.

So, I’d go to bed to stay out of the kitchen.  That really makes you feel like you can’t trust yourself, you know? 

Tonight I want to eat, eat, eat.  I don’t care what.  I want large quantities and I want them now.  I’m not going to indulge, because I get that I need to deal with the feelings, not the anxiety.  Treat the illness, not the symptoms, right?

It’s hard, though.  Tonight is really, really hard.

I’ve been thinking about health these past couple of days.  I’ve never really thought about my health. I’m lucky; I’m tremendously healthy.  I rarely get sick, and when I do, it lasts a matter of days at the most.  I’ve had strep throat once, the flu twice, and haven’t visited the doctor for anything more serious than poison ivy in years.  

But I do have borderline cholesterol.  It finally dropped out of the 200s (to 197) at the end of 2006 and that was when I was eating an incredibly spartan diet and running every day. It’s hereditary; my mom’s cholesterol is almost the exact same number as mine even though our eating and exercise habits are completely different.  I don’t worry about it too much; I don’t have that c-reactive protein, my HDL is very high, I have a good ratio, and no other issues like high blood pressure.  So, it’s just one way in which my body doesn’t function perfectly.  I can live with that.

But the honest truth is, I don’t really know how to be healthy.  I’ve never exercised or eaten for health, only for weight loss.  So, now that I’m trying to escape a weight-loss mentality, I’m really kind of scared of trying to focus on being healthy.  Because ”healthy?”  Totally code for ”how to get skinny.”  

I’d like to work on my nutrition, because my eating has been all over the place since I’ve stopped dieting and I’m eating things that, physically, don’t make me feel my best.   You know, high sodium, unhealthy fats, things that are pretty far from nature.  As part of valuing my body and treating myself with love and respect, I know I should pay attention to how I eat, but I’m afraid in doing so, I’ll end up dieting again.

There’s got to be something between food obsession and disordered eating, and absolutely mindless eating.  I’m sure there’s a book out there that could point me in the direction I should go, but as I discovered at the library today, in order to find even a basic nutrition book, you have to look past volume after volume that tells you how to lose weight. 

I just want a fit, functioning body and someone who can tell me how to get there without also telling me that my chubby thighs can be slim before summer.  That’s not so much to ask, is it?

I’ve become hyper-aware of my stomach this week. 

When I was at my thinnest, my stomach was flat; I even had a so-called ’six pack.’  I’ve never carried a lot of weight in my stomach.  I’m more of a hip-and-thigh girl. 

But as I’ve put on a few pounds, I’m having to get reacquainted with a normal belly.  Even the word ‘belly’ is tricky for me.  That implies a curviness, a lushness, that wouldn’t have been applicable to my flat, washboard stomach.  But my new stomach?  Totally a belly.

It curves outward.  It presses against the waistband of my pants when I sit, sometimes startling me; I think, “Are my pants too tight??”  But no.  It’s just my belly, quietly asserting itself. 

I didn’t realize how much of my life I went around with my stomach muscles pulled in.  Clenched, really.  It was rigid and tight, just like my behaviors.  Discipline and control, always the watch words.

Now I’m working on consciously relaxing my belly, letting it curve forward.  I like the shape of it, though I feel confused by that; I’ve worked incredibly hard to see every muscle in my stomach, and to let those muscles sort of blur, to lose that definition, is scary.  But there’s something so feminine about the new, soft, curvy belly–I find it irresistible. 

Now I’m just working my way towards finding my thighs equally lovely.