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.

This week’s question for Aunt Fattie has gotten me thinking about how I define Health At Every Size for myself.  As best I can tell, it usually goes something like this:

Today, I practiced HAES. 

I woke up at 6, which meant I got about 8 hours of sleep last night. I function best with 9 hours, but it’s not always possible.

For breakfast, I had a toasted whole wheat English muffin with peanut butter and strawberry jam, coffee, and a glass of milk.  I usually have something with more protein at breakfast, but I wasn’t feeling it today and I no longer believe in eating things I don’t want just because I think I should.  And my English muffin was awesome.  I drank two more cups of coffee as I read the paper.

I then showered and got dressed for work, making a point of putting on sneakers because my feet are achy from running yesterday; I probably need new running shoes, so I’ll pay attention to the signals my feet are sending and go shopping this weekend.

At work, I drank a glass of water and took regular breaks from my desk (usually to head for the bathroom, tiny-bladdered-freak that I am).  Around 10, I snacked on some carrots and hummus, and two squares of dark chocolate.  Tasty!

Lunch was pretty typical: ham and cheddar on whole wheat, a huge banana, a cookie (today was double chocolate chunk), and coffee.  I took the stairs back up to my office because it’s faster than the elevators.

Mid-afternoon, I got peckish, so I had a granola bar and deeply regretted not packing cheese and crackers this morning because that’s what I really wanted.  Oh, well.  Sometimes I just have to eat what’s available when I’m hungry; I don’t always make perfect food matches.

I got home a little later than usual because it was my on-duty day at work and I had to see all the walk-in clients.  It’s always super stressful and when I got home, I wanted nothing more than to pull on my comfys, pour a glass of wine, and spoon Little Dog.  During my dieting days, I’d usually force myself to run even though I didn’t feel up to it, but these days I know my health isn’t just about my body; my spirit counts, too.  So, a glass of shiraz, a Sudoku, and one sleepy wiener dog were healthy choices for me today.

Neither my husband nor I felt all that inspired at dinner, so we grilled some chicken and had it with brown rice, veggies, and a few fantastic strawberries.  After dinner, I played a little Wii and then had my nightly ice cream.  This week’s flavor is Turtle Brownie, and while my husband wasn’t looking, I dug out a few extra brownie chunks for my bowl.  I felt pretty calm and centered today because I managed to eat all day without counting calories one time.

Today I took care of myself: by eating foods I liked, not foods I thought I should eat; by wearing comfortable clothing and shoes; by passing on formal exercise because it felt more punitive than pleasant; by getting enough rest; by engaging in activities that reduce rather than elevate my stress levels.

HAES, for me, means taking good care of myself regardless of the physical appearance of my body.  It doesn’t mean eating in a certain way or working out X number of times per week.  It doesn’t mean perfect food choices or textbook intuitive eating.  It doesn’t guarantee that cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s won’t find me in the future (the only guarantee of that would be, like, getting hit by a bus tomorrow.  I’ll pass, thanks).

Good caretaking is acknowledging what my body and spirit are asking for today and meeting those requests to the best of my ability as often as I am able.  It’s treating myself as valuable and my needs and preferences as real.

So, today I practiced HAES.  I’ll practice it tomorrow, too, though it may look like a 5 mile run and tacos for dinner, or maybe yard work and a grilled cheese sandwich.  What exactly I do changes day to day, but the goal always remains the same.

Whatever you did today that made you feel happier or stronger or calmer or more like yourself, that felt good in my body and your soul?

That’s HAES.  You’re doing it exactly right for you.  And good job.

I ran outside today for the first time since last fall.  I twisted all through our neighborhood, breathed in warm spring air, listened to birds singing, coveted brilliant jewel-box flower beds.

But none of that is the exciting part.

The exciting part is: I ran in shorts and a sleeveless tank.

Okay, so that doesn’t sound like Big News.  But here’s the thing:  the last time I ran in shorts was almost five years ago.  I was just learning to run (that sounds…weird.  But you know what I mean), it was one heck of a hot summer, and I only wore the shorts because I was running at 5:30 in the morning before it was light out. 

I’ve never felt comfortable exposing my pasty, chubby thighs to the world;  even at my thinnest, I didn’t wear shorts out of the house.  It didn’t matter if it was 100 degrees out; I was running in track pants and a t-shirt with sleeves.

But I’ve decided that I’m not going to continue to treat my body like it’s shameful in this one area of my life.  After all, my legs deserve air and sunlight and balmy April evenings.  And for the love of baby-flavored doughnuts, running feels best when I’m comfortable and shorts are comfortable.

And you know, anyone who doesn’t like looking at my chubby thighs? 

Well, they can survive the five seconds it takes me to leave them in my dust.

The weatherman promised me 84 degrees today, so I found myself in my closet this morning facing last summer’s clothing.

I tried on a lot of pants.

Some things were snug; they weren’t necessarily unwearable, but a few were tighter than I generally like my clothing unless I’m, you know, cat-burgling or jewel-heisting.

There was that moment.  You know the one.  When you stand there and you face slightly-too-small clothing and you think, “I could probably get back into those if I just dropped a couple of pounds.”  In that moment, it seemed entirely reasonable and somehow easier to consider restricting my food intake and exercising until I break instead of buying new pants.

I knew this was coming after the recent Shorts Incident.  I knew a reckoning of last summer’s wardrobe with this summer’s body was headed my way.

Alas, it seems I have to do some shopping and buy a lot of new pants.  And like every woman ever, I struggle with finding pants that fit my unique snowflake of an ass, so having to give up the pants in my closet that actually worked on my body?  Well, that’s kind of angry-making.

But the thing that I keep coming back to is this:  If I had left my body alone, if I had avoided wandering into Disordered Land, if I had let HAES help me find a healthy weight for my body, then most of the clothing I own would be 12s.  And they would FIT ME NOW.  Because the clothes that are too snug?  Are all 10s.  I am not a 10.  I haven’t been a 10 since a brief pass-through as my weight normalized last year. 

In that moment this morning, I had a choice to either punish my body for not fitting the clothes, or to continue to love my happy, healthy size 12 self and just buy new pants.  The decision took less than 30 seconds.

Tell me that’s not progress.

March zoomed by in a blur of reality television and college basketball and many hours of Wii boxing (because throwing wild punches into the air soothes the savage beast that is my soul), and I’ll be damned if it’s not already April.

So, this upcoming Wednesday is the first anniversary of giving up my diet; it was on April 16, 2007, that I wrote my contract with myself to try three months without dieting, overexercising, or weighing.

One year.  And I really am beginning to feel okay.

It sounds a little crazy to me — a whole year, and I’m just to “okay” on the self-love continuum?  Not “awesome” or “completely self-accepting” or “body image rockstar.” 

Just “okay.”

But you know?  That’s good enough.  That’s Megan 1, Diet 0.  The diet is now in the past.  But me?

I’m still here.  I survived the 2o+ pound weight gain.  I survived leaving behind the 4s, 6s, 8s, and most of the 10s, and every morning, I pull on my size 12 britches and the world doesn’t end.  I’m still loved.  I’m still me.

I’m just not afraid anymore.

As for food, I ate the world for a while and then I stopped eating the world and now I just eat.  I pick what I like and what makes me feel good; my food choices are no longer little dances I do with my disordered body image.  I don’t have to go hungry now.  It remains such a tiny ecstasy, this eating-to-fullness — it still sometimes takes my breath away.

I’ve been working out consistently, intensely, thrillingly, these past several weeks, and it’s been an actual pleasure.  I run hard, I sweat, I push my limits — but I don’t have to do it.  I do it because I can.  Because I am strong. Because I am powerful. 

I stopped feeling those things when I was abusing my body, but now?  I feel like a force of nature.  I didn’t know I could be so proud of my body in a way that doesn’t even consider how it looks in shorts.

It all sounds better than “okay,” doesn’t it?  But in all honesty, there are still moments when I miss certain items of clothes that don’t fit now or when the Weight Watchers talk about that thrill of a lost pound.  In those moments, I hear echoes of my old self-loathing.

But they are just echoes.  And every day, they sound farther away.

So, one year.  I can’t really sum it up in any way that sounds profound, so I’ll just steal this quote from Winston Churchill:

“Every day you may make progress.  Every step may be fruitful.  Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path.  You know you will never get to the end of the journey.  But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and the glory of the climb.”

Yeah…happy anniversary to me!

I was thinking yesterday, if I could back to how I was before November 2001, before I ever went on that diet, before I ever decided that fat was a bad thing to be, would I?

You know?  I don’t think I would.

I do miss my blissful ignorance about the unacceptability of my fat ass.  And I would like to have back some of the awfully cute size 16 clothes I had then, as well as the ability to look at my thighs and ass without only seeing cellulite.

But while I was accepting of my body then, I didn’t take very good care of it.  Honestly, I didn’t even thinkabout my body; I lived from the neck up.  HAES was something I’d never heard of, and as a young, living-in-my-first-apartment, no-clue-how-to-cook, hot-damn-food-costs-money girl, I ate a lot of quick and cheap prepared foods.  I also didn’t exercise, because I’d never thought of myself as someone who could be athletic.

Now here I am, 6 years and 4 months away from that decision to make myself smaller.  My weight has stabilized 40-odd pounds below my highest-known weight, but 20 pounds above my lowest.  I have a belly and squeezable thighs and broad hips.  I also can run harder and farther than I could at either my highest or lowest weights.  I don’t get lightheaded every time I stand up (as a side effect of not eating enough), nor do I get as tired as I did when I never moved and ate nutritionally inadequate food.

I am healthier than I was at 187 or 126.  I feel better.  My body never feels like it’s breaking down these days; my limp is gone.  I don’t find myself wondering how many more miles I can get out of my ankle before I damage it too much to run at all, because I don’t push through injury now.

More importantly, I think I love my body more than I could have if I hadn’t dieted.  Dieting (and eventually overexercising) made me aware that what I do to and for my body has consequences.  If I eat junk and don’t move, I feel run down.  If I don’t eat enough and move too much, I feel broken down.  I have learned there’s balance to be had, that there’s an equation where eating enough and moving enough and resting enough add up to a body that feels comfortable.  Strong.  Happy even.

So, are self-love and self-acceptance more meaningful if you go through self-hate and self-harm to find them?  I can’t say that’s true for everyone.  But for me, my dieting and disordered behavior led me here, to a place where I neither ignore nor harm my body, but live with it and through it.

And that’s a pretty great place to be. 

I’m not much for the bad language.  That said, I’m not offended by most curse words as long as they’re not demeaning to any group of people other than assholes.  But I just don’t use those kinds of words in my everyday speech; it’s not a habit I’ve picked up.

But you know?  The single most useful phrase I’ve discovered while giving up dieting and body hatred and self-hatred is this:

Fuck that.

You’re not pretty because you’re fat?  Fuck that.

You’re not “a good girl” because you eat meals that are not portioned and calorie-counted and Pointed?  Fuck that.

You don’t deserve to love yourself because you have cellulite or wrinkles or gray  hair or a size 26 ass?  Fuck that.

You’re a quitter because you refuse to starve yourself any more?  Fuck that.

You’re too short?  Too tall?  Too wide-hipped?  Too big-chested?  Too loud?  Too quiet?  Too demanding?  Too hungry?  Too confident?  Too proud of yourself? 

Fuck that all.

That phrase has saved me in dressing rooms.  At grocery store checkouts.  While watching television.  When flipping through magazines.  On the doctor’s office scale.  When faced with packing up a closet filled with clothes that have become too small.

I like it because it very simply affirms what I’ve come to believe is true:

Anything that says you are not a worthy person just as you are right now is noise.

And fuck that.

The farther I get from dieting, the better I can see what it gave me.

Oh, restrictive eating and the accompanying illusion of control, how you soothed me.  Oh, punishing and endless exercise, how you numbed and distracted me.  Oh, single-minded purpose of becoming smaller and smaller, how you turned my attention away from my broken places.

I am dissatisfied so much these day, so full of vinegar and fury; it spills everywhere across my life. 

It terrifies me.  It’s asking for sweeping changes, loud declarations, cleaned slates.  It would be so much easier to starve it into silence, to tire it out on the treadmill until it is limp and weary.

But I’ve learned self-punishment can’t be my sedative.  So I don’t self-punish to contain my rage; I let it seep into corners and across pages and I hope that by letting it out, it will let me go.

I have a spent a lifetime not being good enough.  I have spent a lifetime apologizing for being me.  For being not-pretty, not-clever, not-graceful, not-lovable.  Apologizing.  Diminishing.  Hoping that if I make myself small enough through word and deed, then I’ll be allowed to pass by unharmed. 

I made myself small for my father.  For my classmates.  For too many men.

And eventually for myself when I believed they were all right about me.

I don’t want to be small anymore.  I don’t want to be small in my own esteem, small in my body, small in my life.  I want vastness, fullness, depth and breadth.

More than just wanting though?  I believe I deserve it.

I am not apologizing anymore.

Fillyjonk has a great post up at Shapely Prose about why it’s important to treat your body with love and attention even if it’s not your ideal.  It’s good reading and really resonates with me.

I don’t put a lot of effort in dressing myself well.  I have lots of excuses: a wee clothing budget, a lack of shopping choices given where I live, a low tolerance for fluorescent lighting and dressing room mirrors. 

But my very, very biggest reason?  I’m not completely convinced that this is my real and permanent body.  I sometimes think that as I become better at intuitive eating, my weight will stabilize a bit lower.  Or that when spring comes and I can run outside more, I’ll drop back into a size 10.  Or that magic elves will come during the night and spirit away my thighs, and I’ll suddenly look really good in skinny jeans.

Honestly, though?  I stopped dieting in April, my body arrived at this weight in June, and I’ve not moved more than 4 or 5 pounds in either direction since.  That includes the times when I relapsed into calorie-counting, the periods of poor eating and no exercise, and lots of weeks of sensible food choices and rigorous workouts.  I’ve run the gamut of behaviors and my weight hasn’t left the 143 - 148 range (PMS-related bloating doesn’t count!).  That sounds at least semi-permanent, no?

Even if this changes six months from now, even if I shift into a size 14 or a size 10 or something else altogether, I need to treat my body like it’s my home, not a brief stop on the way to somewhere better.

If that means minor shopping trauma or scheduling a real haircut instead of just hacking at my hair in my bathroom or actually using the gift certificate for a manicure* that my husband got me instead of waiting for “a reason,” then that’s what I need to do.

This is home.  And there’s no place like it, right?

*I’ve never had a manicure.  Is that weird for a 31-year-old woman?  I’ve been working really hard at keeping my hands injury-free for the last 2 months and have been leaving my cuticles alone in preparation, but I’m still nervous.  There’s a good chance that no amount of primping will make my charwoman hands pretty and that would be rather sad-making.