Full.

Several commenters have mentioned that they think I need a hobby.  Okay, so they were more tactful then that, but they needn’t have been.  They’re totally right.  I need to get myself a life.

Back when I was in THERAPY (I always have to say that really loudly and dramatically when I’m around my mother because it makes her visibly cringe — I’m a bad daughter!), the therapist recommended a book/workbook thingy that was all about reawakening your creative spirit.  At the time, I was all, “Thanks, Dr. New-Age-Hippie, but can we focus on me not killing myself?”  But because I’m a Pleaser, I got the book anyway so she would think I was a good patient, even though I stuffed it into a closet and never opened it.

But, here I am at a fairly good distance from wanting to off myself, and you know?  My creative spirit needs a swift kick.  She has been beaten down by real life and social work and vacuuming and paying bills and shoving medicine down dog-gullets and The Crazy, but I don’t think I’ve completely suffocated her.  Creative Meegs* is in there somewhere.

So, I decided this weekend that if I can spend weeks (fine, okay, years) on end to changing my body, then I can give that same level of time and commitment to changing my life and remembering what I loved before I found out I was fat.

This morning, I was up at 5 to work on some of the exercises in the workbook.  Just spending that 30 or so minutes was…prepare for my lame-itude…exhilirating. 

I have ideas!  I have things I get excited about!  I am even starting to remember how it felt to do things just for sheer pleasure even though I kind of suck quite hard at them!

All day long, I kept having these little frissons of excitement, thinking about what classes I could take or places I could go or things I could try.  And as a result, I thought almost not at all about food, becauseI was already full.  I’d forgotten how it felt to feel sated by something other than food.  And I thought only about my body in terms of how it could carry me on my adventures, not how it would look while getting there.

I sometimes want someone to come along and fix everything for me, make everything easy, save me.

But you know what?  I can be my own white knight.  I can save myself.

* “Meegs” is what I call myself when I’m giving myself a pep talk; it’s short for Megan (pronounced meeeeeeegan), which is my name.  Hi.

Sometimes you get what you need.

After Friday and yesterday and the accompanying hurtiness and teeth-gnashing and what-not, the universe gave me a little gift of an excellent Sunday.

There was easy grocery shopping that was finished by 7:15 AM, an effortless 5-mile run completed before 10 AM, a delicious lunch of fish tacos with my parents. S’more Cookie Bars  were baked and then taken over to my parents’ house where we drank good coffee while we ate them and watched golf.  I even saw my nephew who gives the World’s Best Hugs and got at least three out of him before he had to go home. 

All in all, today was a gift.  And I enjoyed every last minute of it because I wasn’t sucking all the joy out of everything Dementor-style with my anxiety about food/exercise. 

It was all so balanced.  There was exercise, but not too much.  There was risky food, but I chose exactly what appealed to my appetite and ate the exact right amounts, not so little I felt deprived but not so much I felt sick.  There was some socializing, some solitude. 

And now I’m facing a heck of a week (I have about 20 appointments scheduled this week which very well may kill me and my lady-time is expected), but I feel very Zen about everything right now. 

Thanks, universe.

Line forms to the left.

I can either live a life that has joy or I can live a life where I wear size-4 pants. 

There it is.  That’s it in a damn nutshell.

Yesterday I spent the entire day fully-engaged with my disordered eating/exercise.  I logged 103 minutes of exercise, consumed 1,405 calories, lied to no less than two people about what I was (well, wasn’t) eating, made 4 excuses about why I couldn’t have certain foods (upset stomach, just had a snack, the moon is in the wrong cycle, that sort of stuff).  I read on a blog that someone became bulimic when she learned how to make herself throw up even though she couldn’t do it with her fingers (which I’ve never been able to do either), and, God help me, I actually searched the internet so I could find out that little trick.  I spent 53 minutes last night planning every meal and snack for the upcoming week. It’s all typed up and sitting here on my desk.  I weighed.  I measured.  I weighed again. 
Oh, it was on. 

I woke up this morning and started my day the exact same way.  Portions have been measured, calories have been counted, session one of exercise done, session two planned. 

But here it is, 2:30 in the afternoon, and you know what?  I cannot do this.  Not just because it’s so depleting and painful and humiliating, but because it’s just flat-out miserable.  I haven’t had any fun all day, because the anxiety inside me has pushed aside everything but the fear.  I just feel terrified. 

So I weigh 145 pounds.  So freakin’ what.  I’m healthy at this weight.  My body physically feels okay, and 99% of the time, I think I look just fine.  My husband tells me repeatedly I don’t need to lose a single ounce, that he loves the way I look with these new 15 or 20 pounds.

I don’t want to hurt myself anymore, and what I’ve allowed myself to do for the last 36 hours?  It hurts. 

I don’t need to see my ribs again.  I don’t need to have a flat stomach.  I don’t need to burn 800 calories a day in exercise or eat less than 1,500 calories a day or any of those completely arbitrary numbers that say nothing about what’s actually happening in my body, about what my body actually wants. 

Initially, my little relapse felt incredible, felt like hope and excitement and love and control all wrapped up in a fat-free, Splenda-sweetened package.  But if after a day and a half it’s already making me sad again? 

Then that’s all it’s ever going to do.

I want more for myself. 

I can be skinny* or I can be happy. 

I choose happy. 

*Not saying skinny people can’t be happy.  Just that for me, being skinny isn’t a natural state and requires obsessive and unheathly behaviors, that prevent me from ever getting to let my guard up and enjoy my life.  I’m not hating on skinny people here–I’m just not built to be one of them naturally.

Act v. React

First, much love to those of you who responded to my existential crisis post of yesterday.  It helps ginormously to know that I am not alone.  And not in that ‘misery loves company’ kind of way.  I sometimes feel like I’m kind of crowd-surfing through all this and you guys are the hands holding me up, keeping me from falling.  Wow, my simile just placed us all at a Pearl Jam concert circa 1993.  Sorry about that!

As a good faith effort for myself today, I made lists: things I’d like to try, how I want to feel about my life, upcoming classes I’m interested in, etc.  I have dedicated an entire notebook to the task of getting involved in my own life.  And because I sometimes lack follow-through, I broke the lists down into actual concrete steps.  This weekend, I tackle three things: pick up class schedules for the continuing ed program at a local college, find a play to attend in the next month, and eat something exotic.  My husband doesn’t like anything other than Tex-Mex and Italian, and there are are all these Indian and German and Thai and Lebanese and such places I never get to try, but guess what?  Husband ain’t here.  And I’m eating something wacky!

I am being Action Girl!

 Now.  The reaction.  I learned today that my sister and my only girl-cousin are officially Weight Watchers.  Wait, check that.  They’re Weight Watchers again.  For, I believe, the fourth time.  Clearly, the program works. 

What really bugs is this:  my sister, whom I talk to quite regularly (as in YESTERDAY) has been keeping this secret from me for weeks.  My sister who has witnessed my behaviors and is the only person who actually said she thought I was getting unnecessarily skinny, is on a motherfrickin’ diet.  I feel…I don’t know.  Hurt?  Betrayed? Jealous?

It’s about 85% jealousy, to be honest.  She gets to diet and I don’t.  And while I know she’s wasting her time and her money and her self-esteem, I wish I got to go on a diet and be part of their little diet club and talk about Points and get gold stars and all that stuff.  Instead, I sit over here, GAINING weight, all alone.

I skipped my afternoon snack today even though I was hungry, came home and worked out hard for 90 minutes, then ate a 1/2 cup of lowfat yogurt with a handful of blueberries as my dinner.  I then showered and had to leave the house so I wouldn’t get back on the treadmill. 

I know I can make a choice right here.  I can continue to take actions that are all about making myself better and stronger and happier and healthier or I can react to my sister’s damn diet by plunging right back to where I was four months ago. 

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted.  I have a little notebook and pen ready to go for tracking my numbers tomorrow, but I’m believing in myself and trusting that I’m not going to do that.  It’d be throwing away the hard work I’ve put in over the past four months, and I don’t think losing 15 or so pounds could make that worth it for me. 

But no secrets about this stuff anymore, so there it is.  This is where I am right now. 

Act or react.  It’s up to me.

Purpose.

I miss the act of losing weight.

I am freaking out because I am thirty years old and I still don’t have a clue what I want to do with my life.  Like, at ALL.  I have no ambitions, no dreams, no goals.  I don’t even know what I think I’d be good at doing.  I am passion-free.  And I am so disappointed in myself.

Without my disordered behaviors, I am left with only myself.  I can’t blame things on my body; I can’t distract myself with the ongoing renovation of my physical self.  I am stuck with the inside person, and the inside person?  Total loser.

Okay, so I don’t think I’m a total loser, but when I look at my life all spread out in front of me, I’m not entirely sure what gets me out of bed in the morning.  Job I love? Uhm, no.  I suspect it’s making me a Grinch-hearted cynic.  Social life? Also a no.  I come home each day to dogs and TV.  Hobbies? Again, no.  I have a family I adore, but it’s not like I can insert myself into their daily lives because I’m lonely, and I love my husband, but our marriage lives in the spaces of telephone calls and weekend visits.

I know none of this is about my body, but I’m realizing how I’ve used my body as a way of avoiding my real life, a real life that I kind of hate living.  I directed all my energy into changing my physical self because it was real and tangible and it felt good to be successful at something.  All of my discipline and focus laser-beamed right onto my body.  Like an ascetic looking for God, I transcended myself.  I counted blisters and stress fractures and tendonitis as battle scars, proof of my sacrifice.  I ran my fingers down my sides and counted my ribs.  I rubbed my hipbones like worrystones.  I curled in my bed at night and felt hunger twisting inside me and it felt holy.  It felt…pure.  I was strong.  For years, I was strong.

But I’m the same person now; I’m still strong.  Reserves of discipline and focus are available to me; I know that, and I know I have the capacity to use them for my benefit instead of my destruction.  I have the power and ability to create whatever kind of life I want.  I can go back to school, I change jobs, I can move out of this narrow little life I’ve built.

But I don’t know how to start.  Do you just jump, or should you at least have an idea of where you want to land?

Reframing.

I am not “gaining weight at an alarming and inexplicable rate.”  I am “finding my natural weight.”

I am not “squishy and ripply.”  I am “soft and curvy.”

I do not have“a beer belly worthy of NASCAR.”  I do have “a feminine, adorable tummy.”

I am not “terrified that even though I’m eating with an eye toward health and nutrition and my actual hunger cues, I’m never going to stop getting fatter.”  I am “apprehensive, but very trusting of my body and its knowledge of where I am supposed to settle.”

What doesn’t need reframing:

I am going to eat when I’m hungry.  I am not going to make myself spend 2 hours on the treadmill again (I had a slip-up last night, but I’m not doing it again today).  I am not going on a diet.  I am going to let my body gain as much weight as it needs to because I’m eating in a mindful, balanced way and working out regularly, so I’m healthy regardless of what size my jeans are or what the scale says.

It’s really hard to sit here and spectate as I gain weight when I know exactly how to stop it.  But I’m going to keep reminding myself I’m not slipping up or screwing up right now; I’m just finally taking care of myself. 

Deep breaths. 

Know better, then do better.

My husband got to come home unexpectedly this weekend.  We had a lovely visit and he should get to come home again the middle of next week for a few days.  Yay!

We went to the grocery store together yesterday morning, and we were in line behind a fat man doing his shopping.  It’s hard not to look at what people buy when you’re piling your stuff on the little belt behind their stuff, but I’m pretty good at making no judgments about groceries.  Grocery purchases say nothing, after all.  The week I’m buying only lettuce and fruit might not mean I’m Super Nutrition Girl that week; it might mean I’m planning on thinking outside the bun for seven straight nights.

My husband, though, was apparently wearing his judge-y britches and they must have been riding high.  As we were walking to the car, he commented that he didn’t think that guy ahead of us needed the Twix he was purchasing.

I just looked at him.  I then looked at the sack he was carrying from the in-store McDonald’s that was filled with his hotcakes, sausage, and hashbrowns.

I then broke it down for him thusly:  First, FAT WIFE STANDING RIGHT HERE.  Second, that Twix?  No one, fat or thin, needs a Twix.  It’s not full of vitameatavegaminy goodness.  It’s candy.  Fat people should get to enjoy candy, too, and also?  That might have been the first Twix that guy had bought in 10 years.  Or it might have been the 10th Twix he was eating that day.  But happily, until that guy asks us to pay for his Twix, we don’t actually have to care.  I then pointed out that, if my husband were fat instead of skinny with a hummingbird’s metabolism, someone might point at the bag o’ pancakes he was carrying as the reason for his fatness, and that it’s hardly fair that he is judging someone else for eating the exact damn stuff he eats every single day.  An inefficient metabolism does not grant moral authority.

Because he’s not an idiot, he said I was right and that he wasn’t intending to be a jackhole, but acknowledges that he was.

My husband is a smart guy.  He’s got an advanced degree, he’s trained in critical thinking, and he’s, at heart, a good, kind, decent person.  And you would think the 6 years he’s had a front-row seat for my disordered weight-control behavior would have at least demonstrated that fat is about so much more than food.

But that kind of thinking, it just goes so deep, you know.

And that’s why we have to keep disagreeing with it, especially with those who should know better.

Real women eat food.

Some fine women have been talking about demand-feeding lately (or intuitive eating, if you prefer, though I think there are some subtle distinctions), and it’s a subject that is quite close to my heart. 

I couldn’t have stopped dieting without wrapping my semi-starved little arms around the idea of demand-feeding and really committing myself to it.  I took it very seriously; my grocery bills were nutty those first few weeks as I stocked the pantry with all the foods that were forbidden. 

Every night, I’d pack up this huge lunchbox (really, it was a small cooler) with everything I might want to eat during the day because I didn’t know what kind of things I really wanted, having so distanced myself from my body during years of dieting.  And every evening, I’d unpack the huge lunchbox of everything that hadn’t be eaten, and repack it for the next day.  It was a chore, but no more so than the chore of packing my diet food–my 10 grapes, my 1/4 cup of fat-free cottage cheese, my 6 baby carrots.  And it was really a lot more fun, too.

My lunch box has gotten smaller these days, because I now have my appetite kind of figured out.  I know I get hungry 2 hours after breakfast, usually for something bready or crunchy, and usually again for fruit about an hour later.  Lunch is simple, a sandwich and fruit and veggies or cheese and deli ham with crackers.  I like sweet, creamy things in the afternoon around 3 (full-fat yogurt!  Woo!) and then I don’t usually get hungry again until 6:30, when I have dinner. 

I didn’t know my body had these rhythms until I started paying attention, but now they’re very consistent and I look forward to getting hungry now, instead of fearing it.

I still have all those “forbidden” foods in my pantry, and when my supplies get low or when I find myself thinking of a certain food in a more than passing kind of way, I go stock up.  I usually then eat a little of whatever it is, then the rest gets put away and I usually don’t even think of it again.  I don’t feel driven to eat it just because it’s there, because it’s always there.  The cravings, the deep, painful, consuming kind, have gone away because I know that I’ll give myself whatever I want whenever I want it. 

Taking care of myself in this most basic way?  Well, it feels so much better than wearing a size 4 ever did.

Reunited and it feels so good.

Today was a rough day.  I actually got threatened by a client.  It was surreal; I actually asked him, “Are you threatening me?” and I may have snickered a little.  I mean, dude.  I’m a freaking social worker for the state.  Save threats for people who at least have something good they can give you.

But I also ate a delicious plum at lunch, so things balanced out.

I’m over the Twinkie Incident of yesterday because, like the awesome commenters pointed out, it was one Twinkie, I recognized why I was eating it before I even took the first bite, and in that way was perhaps even providing a little tiny bit of self-care.  Twinkies don’t fix things, but sometimes they provide a soft, cream-filled place to land.

Today I wore my Whore Pants* and, while I frequently don’t wear them because they sort of emphasize my sizeable booty, I actually found myself checking out my smoking hotness while walking past windows and mirrors. 

I think I’m back in love with myself, folks, and it feels awesome.

*The Whore Pants manage to unzip themselves every few minutes.  I suspect they have loose morals.  They probably also wear red lipstick and rouge, and cut their hair into bangs.

Twinkie, deconstructed. Then consumed.

I just got off the phone with my husband.  Because of a work assignment he volunteered for (though he wasn’t informed about the scheduling at the time), we won’t see each other again until the last weekend of August.  That will make it 5 weeks between visits.

Immediately after hanging up the phone, I walked to the pantry and ate a Twinkie. 

I wasn’t hungry.  I was sad and lonely.  But I ate the damn thing anyway.

Weird how one Twinkie can feel like a binge.