Vacation.

I’m off work until May 29th.  I’m delighted. 

 I’m lucky that I have a job with good benefits and generous leave, a job that doesn’t demand extra hours or endless travel.  It’s strictly a 40-hour kind of thing.

 But it’s a social work job, and as such, some days I feel as though I’ve been beaten with a stick wrapped in entitlement, cyclical dependence, and a whole lot of resentment.  Poverty can cause rage and that rage seems to get directed at me quite a bit.  And I’m a fairly good social worker; I’m consistent and responsive and compassionate without being fake about it.  And I even get called a bitch pretty often.

 So, 10 consecutive days of not being yelled at by a client?  AWESOME. 

My mom and I had planned a rockin’ little roadtrip for the week, but she has to have surgery next week instead.  Poor thing.  So, we shall not be Thelma-and-Louiseing our way across the midwest.  Instead, I’ll be serving as her butler, nurse, and companion while she’s recuperating. 

I’m looking forward to cooking meals for her and my dad, as the only person who usually gets to enjoy my cooking is me, and I need praise, damn it! 

It’s not a dream vacation, but I’ll take it.  10 days of sleeping in, hanging out with the dogs, working in my yard, cooking yummy meals, and maybe shopping for rocking shoes (right now, as my body is working on finding its way to a healthy weight for me, I’m scared to buy clothes–who knows what size I’m going to be??)–all in all, it should be a great time.

Thoughts on turkey burgers.

I had to make a trip to the grocery store on the way home today to stock up on all the foods that had slipped back onto my ‘bad food’ list.  I’ve been mostly successful at making all foods equal for a while now, but the past week I’ve been kind of blue and anxious.  As a result, I’ve been treating food like a dieter.  You know, good foods, bad foods, can-haves and can’t-haves.  It’s an old, familiar way to deal with anxiety–exert control over my food.  So, right back into my old pattern: I was eating according to my ideas of what was appropriate and not what I was hungry for. 

So, to the grocery store!  I’ve stocked up on a handful of formerly forbidden foods (the usual suspects: ice cream, chips, the biggest box of Whoppers they sell), but when I really gave it serious thought, I figured out that what I wanted most for dinner was a turkey burger on a kaiser roll with avocado and tomato.  A turkey burger.  With avocado and tomato.  It’s crazy when you think about it–here I am, not trusting my appetite to guide me to nutritious, satisfying foods, and when I give it a voice, it asks for a turkey burger.

 Man, I owe my appetite an apology.  I always treat it like it’s a wayward child who will lead me straight to the candy shoppe, but in reality, it’s just an extension of my body whose only goal is to function and function well. 

And my turkey burger was awesome.

Bookworm.

When I first decided to address my disordered eating and compulsive exercise, I surrounded myself with books.  I’ve always been a book girl; I believe that the more information I have, the better prepared I am for any situation.  Books can’t give you the journey, but they can give you the map.  And this was uncharted territory–a map would be greatly needed.

 One book I’ve become very fond of is this one.   I particularly like the idea of demand-feeding; I’ve been a clock-eater with highly ritualized meals and snacks for years now.  It’s the only way to be a really successful dieter, you know?  But I want to be a normal eater, not an awesome dieter. So, learning to eat when I’m actually hungry and to eat what I really want has been exciting and scary and overwhelming and confusing, but I think it will ultimately be worth it. 

Like I’ve said before, I’m still having a little trouble figuring out what I really want to eat when I’m hungry, and as a result, my little lunch box I carry back and forth between work and home each day has become emptier and emptier.  I just put in a couple of snacks and a lunch, but don’t really give myself a lot of options, and as a result, when I’m hungry at work, I often don’t have anything I want.  This leads me to random snacking and then feeling overfull because I’m eating too much trying to get some satisfaction.  So, I picked up the book again tonight, re-read the demand-feeding section again, and have packed a lot of food for tomorrow: tuna casserole, carrots, apple, fontina cheese, pickled mushrooms, Cheerios, 1/2 of a strawberry jam sandwich, and a couple of cookies.  Oh, and this amazing summer sausage from this little Italian grocery we drive two hours to shop from.  I’m sure I won’t eat all of that tomorrow but maybe having lots of choices will make me feel more satisfied by what I do eat.

I’m also a big menu planner–each Saturday night, I plan my menu for the week (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and then do my big shopping on Sunday morning.  I think that may be doing more harm than good.  It’s really nice not having to go to the grocery store a million times during the week, but it also leads me away from my appetite as I eat whatever is on the menu with no regard for what I really want.  Next week, I think I’ll buy staple items, but shop for specific meals as my hunger tells me to.

But one thing I do know? My appetite is definitely screaming for sushi, so my sister and I have a big girls’ day out planned on Saturday.  And there’s definitely going to be sushi!!

Come on, weekend!

Dinner for one.

I live alone with two dogs*.   Sometimes I like the solitude of coming home and getting to arrange my evening according to my moods: my dinner choices, my television choices, my music selections, all the good parts of the newspaper just for me when I want them. 

Some days, like today, I really just want to be taken care of.  I’m ashamed of that impulse sometimes; it doesn’t seem like an appropriate thing for a 30-year-old woman to crave.  But today, I wanted to come home, sit on the sofa, and have someone else make me dinner and bring me iced tea and then do all the dishes.  And pack my lunch and give me a foot rub and feed the dogs and I wouldn’t have to do anything more complicated than operate the remote control during American Idol. 

Today was just generally a hard day.  I felt out of sorts, and sort of greasy and homely and dowdy and even though I know this is my pre-period week talking, I also felt lumpy and sad about my body. 

 I’m trying to remember, though, that those feelings of being unattractive and plain are more about what’s going on inside me than outside, because I also feel lonely and kind of blue, and it’s easier to talk about how bad my skin looks today than how much I miss my husband and how hard it is coming home to an empty house. 

Learning to talk about my emotions without talking about my appearance–that’s something for me to work on, I think.

*My husband lives in another state because of his job, because trust me, if I’d chosen to live alone, I would only have one of the two dogs.  One is enough.

Learning Normal.

There’s a lady at work who decided a few months ago that we were diet buddies.  She’d stop by my desk every morning, tell me what the scale said that AM and what she would therefore be eating (or not eating) for the rest of the day, she would lift her shirt above the waist of her pants to show me that her waistband was loose.  That’s what you want to see before your second cup of coffee in the mornings–a 60-year-old coworker’s stomach. 

She’d call me skinny and talk about how fat we used to be and try to engage me in some pretty open fat-bashing.  I never bit, but it was hard to navigate those conversations–to acknowledge her pride in her ability to starve herself even though I suspected we both were doing damage to ourselves in pursuit of our weight loss.

 She hasn’t stopped by my desk in 2 weeks, right around the time I started wearing size 8s again.  Apparently, our friendship is over.

 Just as I’m learning how to live in a world where I’m beginning to be perceived as a failed dieter (which is a new experience, in that I’ve spent more than five years only heading down the scale or holding steady, never going up) and even though my body, while getting curvier, still wouldn’t rank as actually fat at this point, I’m also discovering I don’t have a damn clue what I like to eat. 

Really.  Isn’t that odd?  I know what foods I’ve been eating and I can tell you the calories in most anything you could think of (plus how long I’d have to run to burn them off), but as for what I like, as for what foods make my mouth water and really satisfy me?  No clue.  Initially, I thought it would be junk food because that had been the stuff of dreams for these many years, but I know now that I only wanted that because it was forbidden.  Now that I can eat whatever I want, it’s a struggle sometimes figuring out what that is.

 It’s frustrating sometimes, because I find I frequently end up eating more than I’m comfortable with because I’m trying to get to what will make me feel satisfied.  I’ve apparently become so good at denying anything food-related occurring in my body that I’ve forgotten how.

I know I’ll get there eventually and become a “normal” eater, but I wonder if it will always be something I have to work at. 

Un-diet.

In November 2001, I suddenly found out I was a little bit fat.  I was a size 16, I weighed 187, and apparently, this was not acceptable for a 5′5″ woman.   News to me, which considering I grew up in the US of A, the fact that I could be fat and not realize it and be relatively shame-free about my body, says something about my utter obtuseness.  So, at 24 years old, I embarked on my very first diet.

You know what I’m good at?  Dieting.  I am an A+ dieter.  Oh, the enthusiasm of those early days.  The excitement of realizing I could be incredibly disciplined with myself, the thrill of shopping for smaller sizes, the smug sense of superiority to people who were not successful with dieting. 

Flash forward 5.5 years: I defied that statistic that said most people who lose weight gain it back within five years.  As a matter of fact, I discovered in January 2007, that I could actually get as skinny as I wanted.  After several years of settling in the mid-130s and a fairly normal but not at all skinny size 10, I decided I wanted to be a size 8.  It started out as being “more careful” in my food choices, but after a while, it took on a life of its own.  I adopted highly ritualized eating patterns, I exercised twice a day, I dropped to a size 4.  I could see every bone in my chest and count my ribs on my back.  Hot, no?

I also felt more anxious, more ashamed of my body, more terrified than I’d ever felt before.  I kept setting lower goals, lower weights I wanted to see.  I kept exercising harder and started lying to the people who love me about what I was eating because, while I realized that I was doing harm to myself, I didn’t want anyone stopping me.  I turned down social invitations and took my lunch to work every day because I couldn’t risk eating foods that weren’t known quantities.  I became isolated and sad and all the while, I got more praise than I ever had in my life.  And being praised for hurting yourself?  Confusing as all get-out.

Then something finally snapped inside me.  I cannot be on a diet for the rest of my life.  I don’t know what a healthy weight for me is, but I’m planning on finding out.  Pre-11/01 I wasn’t at a healthy weight for my body because I had exceptionally poor nutrition and didn’t get any exercise at all.  At the height of my disordered eating and compulsive exercise, I wasn’t at a healthy weight either because my periods had actually ceased and I was hungry all the time and had constant hip and back pain from hours on the treadmill.

But I really, really want to be healthy, on the inside.  Whatever the outside looks like at the end of all this?  Well, that can’t matter to me right now, because I found out that even when the outside looks just look society says it should, if you’re sick on the inside, it won’t matter, because it will not be enough to make you happy or make you stop.

It’s been a month since I’ve stepped on a scale, and three weeks since I’ve counted calories.  I thought losing weight was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I’m finding out that this is harder.  Because losing weight is easy if you think you already suck to begin with–it’s easy to punish yourself if that’s what you think you deserve.  But taking care of yourself when every impulse is screaming that you have got to earn your value with penance and pain?  This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.