Good With Cheese

It’s Public Service Employees Recognition Of Willingness To Be Paid Peanuts And Get Yelled At Week, or something like that, so the office party-people have planned events for each day.

They all involve food.

I like food.  Like, a lot.  But it’s such a semi-painful experience to be in an office filled with disordered eaters and watch them navigate the minefield that is a box of donuts. 

Should they?  Shouldn’t they?  Perhaps just one?  Perhaps just that harmless, glaze-glistened yeast one?  That’s a better choice than the chocolate iced, right?  Or the one with the lemon filling and drifts of powdered sugar?

It goes on and on, and then my head falls off and rolls under my desk.  Or I wish it would.  Either way.

Today was Cake Day.  At precisely 2 PM, the cake was due to arrive.  The Weight Watchers began discussing whether or not they would be having said cake at 1 PM — yes, a full hour before it got there.  They asked if I’d be having cake, and I told them I had no idea if I’d be hungry or even want cake in an hour, so I couldn’t say.  And the cake arrived and a while later I got hungry, but for yogurt and crackers, so I had that instead.  I don’t have to eat cake just because it’s there and/or free.  They were befuddled by that.  I remember that befuddlement.  I’ve been there, too.

Honest truth is, I’ve been feeling sorry for myself for a couple of days because my brain has been spreading rumors that my body is lumbering and awkward, that it is Too Fat.  And I’ve been kicking myself rather endlessly, both for being such a tool for believing that “Too Fat” is a Bad Thing, and for being such a sap for believing my giant ass is anything but revolting.  Kick, kick, kick — for falling short in every possible way.

But these two days of watching my coworkers turn pastries into morality plays reminds me of what I have to treasure.

Hard days happen.  Even the most deeply rooted belief can shake if the wind blows hard enough.  But even on those hard days, I know my value isn’t dictated by my menu or my jeans.  I’m lucky, because even when I don’t like what I see in the mirror, I still get to feel love for it in my heart.

Happy International No Diet Day, everybody. 

In the last few weeks, something has begun shifting for me.  It’s been a revelation, because I wasn’t aware how super-secretly I was hanging on this idea.  But I get it now.

I’m not going to lose any weight through the power of intuitive eating.  I’m just not.  And it’s okay.

Because honestly?  I’ve still been clinging to a tiny, shredded hope that my weight was going to “settle” lower than it is now.  I thought this stop in the high 140s was temporary, just a response to feeding 5.5 years of denied cravings.  I was secretly convinced that when things settled, I’d end up in the mid-130s.  After all, I’d maintained there for several years with only moderate restrictive eating and fewer than 5 hours of exercise a week.

Yeah, the fact that there had to be “moderate restrictive eating” to keep me there should have clued me in that 135 wasn’t a natural weight for my body, but I’m not always Ms. Self-Aware.  Also, I’d stopped taking BCPs before I got into the really disordered dieting and then resumed them the same month I stopped dieting, so I rationally should have expected some new weight as a side effect, huh?

But I didn’t.  I still believed that 135 would be my number, and I stubbornly held on to certain clothes and checked my body against them periodically to see if I was back to that size yet.  I wasn’t going to do anything to try to get my weight back there; I simply believed it was going to happen.

And then…some part of me (a part that I’m awfully grateful to and probably ought to pay more attention to) began rejecting that.  I started looking at myself in the mirror and not comparing this body with the 135-pound body I was waiting on.  And more and more, I found myself thinking it was time to get on board with what I’m seeing now because this is what I look like.  This is my body.  It might be skinnier or fatter or exactly the same in the future, but that doesn’t matter –  right now is all that matters.

It wasn’t, like, a big epiphany with a heavenly choir and rays of light shining down or anything, but my body just became real to me.  The whole thing felt like my spirit just shrugged and said, “Okay.  This is what I look like.”

It’s what made me able to give away those too-small clothes.  And it’s made me comfortable wandering around the house in my underwear, because I have nothing to hide (I’d always claimed modesty, but it was really shame).  I’m happy to find that I’m not disappointed; this is the first time in my life I have a (mostly) healthy relationship with food and exercise, so this is the first time I’ve ever had a chance to see what healthy looks like on my body.

It looks perfectly okay.  And it’s nice not to be waiting anymore.