30/30, Self-doubt, Gaslighting

Never say never, but I think this will be my last Whole30 for quite some time.  The first time around I got so much out of it.  I really became aware of how certain foods affect me, and that makes it so much easier to make good food choices.  I think it’s hard to refuse the burger and fries just because they are unhealthy.  Not so hard to refuse when it is going to wreck you digestively for 24 hours.  Y’all know I’ve hemmed and hawed over this 2nd round.  I’m proud that I’ve finished, but I’m glad to be finished.

Suspect I’ve lost some more weight, and I wrote about the bit of anxiety it was causing.  Yesterday in therapy I made an amazing discovery that really this just comes down to not trusting my own body.  As long as I am responding to my hunger and fullness, making the best choices for my body and keeping a conscious eye on my emotional eating, my body is going to find it’s right place.  Maybe it’s less weight, maybe it’s more.  Today I’m open to whatever comes.

Many of us are so used to relying on external cues to tell us we are okay.  Corporations trying to sell us shit have told us what our bodies are supposed to look like.  We become fixated on numbers on the scale, dress sizes, body fat percentages, etc. as an indicator of whether we are good and normal.  I’m suddenly aware that it is impossible to love your own body if you’re looking at someone else’s as the ideal.  A wise friend of mine offers the reminder, “Eyes on your own paper.”

One thing I’ve learned over the past year is that just like my alcoholism is a symptom of a spiritual disease, trying to change my body from the outside in is a symptom of not trusting myself.

I came across this article the other day.  I can’t tell you how much I love it.  From an early age I was told that I was dramatic, sensitive and prone to overreacting.  Looking back, I was just expressing normal emotions and the people around me were so emotionally repressed that they didn’t know how to deal with it.  When I suffered a trauma in my teens, I was told to, “Pull it together,” because my behavior was embarrassing.  I don’t fault my mom for that; she didn’t have the whole story.

When everyone around you is telling you that your emotions aren’t right, eventually you start to believe it.  Eventually you stop trusting yourself.  Eventually you become so out of touch with your feelings, that you’re hard-pressed to label them when asked.  I used to get upset and have no idea why.  Many times I’d find myself in an argument with my husband and just be making a best logical guess at why I was agitated.  I felt totally separate from my feelings.

I want to make some kind of poignant wrap-up, but must to return to the land of diapers and dishes.  You get the gist, right?  If I can’t trust my emotional feelings and myself, how on earth can I expect to trust my physical feelings and my body.  Have you ever been gaslighted?

Whole30 Day22 and why losing weight is scary.

Feels like I’m in the final stretch of this Whole30 nonsense.  A week ago today I decided I was going to quit.  I announced to my food group that I was going to announce to my Whole30 group that I was turning in the towel halfway through.  It makes me laugh now.  A few posts back I talked about feeling a sense of responsibility to the people who were doing it for the first time.  Well that delusion persisted and suffocated me until I got to that place of “fuck it.”  I’m grateful to have a very wise, sober friend who gently suggested, “You know, you don’t have to tell anyone what you are doing.”  And just like that the situation deflated.  Listen folks, I’m just not that important.  I’m not saying this in the spirit of putting myself down, but to acknowledge that I had ventured beyond right-sized and into grandiose.  The only person I’m responsible for is myself.  Ahhhhhh, what a relief!

Over the past week I’ve noticed my pants fitting loser once again.  I touched on this in my last post, but a strange something is going on in that I am not necessarily thrilled by the weight loss.  I don’t weigh, so I only go by how I feel.  When I look in the mirror I feel mostly happy with my body and sometimes I love it.  I feel really feminine and strong.  So when I put on a relatively new pair of jeans and found that the butt was sagging, I noticed that I felt a bit of panic rising in me.  Part of it was that I don’t want to fork out money for new clothes, but behind that was the thought, “But I like where I am.”  And delving deep down to the bottom was the belief that skinny = dangerous.

I didn’t totally acknowledge that thought at the time, but I could feel this little niggling discomfort at the idea of losing more weight.  I couldn’t put my finger on it until I read this post from In My Skinny Jeans.  When I met ED I was 15 and bottomed out after a real mind-fuck of a relationship.  Self-worth was nil and I stopped eating much of anything.  The thinner I got, the more attention I got and I found myself in some situations that feel very dark and sad.  Then we moved out of state.  I got a fresh start, came back to a normal weight and began blaming that normal weight as the reason why boys at this new school didn’t like me.  Never mind that my aura screamed “DO NOT DISTURB!”  When I finally was able to cobble together a relationship in college, I started eating with enthusiasm and couldn’t seem to stop.  When that relationship began to display some serious foundational cracks, I decided to learn how to purge.  It goes on and on like that.

It seems almost insane that I would never put it together until now.  Yes, Miss Skinny Jeans!!!  Sexuality.  Yes.  **deep sigh**  So I’m even more grateful to be on the path of discovering my erotic creature through feminine movement.  It sounds kind of silly when I type it out, but WHATEVER!  That is totally what I am doing and I think it’s fantastic and interesting!  From here on out I plan to post a link to the song I choose for my dance each week.  I’m two weeks behind so…

She absolutely loved this one:

She absolutely hated this one which was a surprise because I love this song!

Whole30 Day14 and My Body

“Why the hell am I doing this?”  Has been my prevailing thought regarding the Whole30 the last few days.  Yesterday I almost threw in the towel.  I was super busy, a wrench got thrown in the day and I ended up without any food for an extended period of time.  I was starving, and all I had were the kids’s beef jerky and Pirate’s Booty.  I hemmed and hawed about whether it would be better to just eat the jerky (which had sugar and soy) or stay hungry.  Ultimately I decided to just deal with the hunger, but I was doing a lot of mental cussing about how stupid this was.  Hungry = eat and I’m not interested in altering that equation.

Total honesty, I have snacked the past two nights after dinner.  Apple with almond butter.  Compliant, but snacking.  The first night I was not hungry, but I was home alone.  My husband is out of town, but my mom was here.  She came into town for a friend’s 60th birthday party that night.  A party I was invited to but declined because I didn’t want to deal with the seeing a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in a billion years without drinking.  I also didn’t want to deal with other people’s drinking.  But as she got dressed up and ready to go, I felt a little pang of missing out.  I kind of wanted to go, even if I wouldn’t be drinking.  Also got in a loop of thinking people will judge me for not coming.  Whatever.  So I was home alone and there was nothing on TV and I was too tired to read.  So I ate a little.

Last night I was actually kind of hungry.  Probably because of the food fuck up from earlier in the day and also dance.  I guess I could have just had an extra meal, but went for the sweet thing.  I don’t feel so bad.

Had my first class yesterday afternoon.  I think it can be difficult to notice changes in your own body because they happen over time.  I bend down to pick up something every day, every day it gets a little easier until one day it’s effortless without you even noticing.  Last night I was doing movements I hadn’t done in a year, so to come back to them in a different body was… strange.  I’ve lost some weight.  Enough to make some things feel foreign.  And the thing that was most shocking to me about that was that my reaction wasn’t, “Hooray, fabulous!”  I had a little dissociation.  Who’s body is this!?  Very weird.

I Don’t Just Say No

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life failing at diets.  I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think I ever lasted more than 2 weeks on a diet.  The counting and measuring was too laborious and the restriction was suffocating.  Plus, I couldn’t stop drinking.  When I entered therapy for my eating last year I already knew that diets didn’t work, so I was relieved to swear them off forever.

Today I confuse myself because I follow a paleo diet probably 95% of the time.  When I first decided to go paleo, I was really conflicted because of my pledge.  Later I did a Whole30 and further baffled and questioned myself.  Was I dieting?  Was I restricting?  Was it going to lead to a backlash binge?  So far (it’s been about 6 months) I haven’t had any retaliation eating.  Sometimes an urge might come up, but I’m usually able to identify an emotional cause and work through it.  I want to roll my own eyes at myself when I justify my nutrition plan with, “It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle,” but I think that is the truth.

Although I choose to not eat grains, legumes, soy, refined sugars and I limit dairy, the reality is that I give myself permission to have whatever I want at any given time.  The caveat is that I have to be aware of the consequences of what I put in my body.   “This will make you fat,” is not a consequence.   It’s shaming, mean and puts me into an immediate state of longing.  Today I was driving home from the gym, knew I needed some protein but didn’t want to cook.  I passed by Zankou Chicken, thought about stopping in and thought, “That will give you garlic breath.”  Now there is a concrete consequence.  I have shit to do tomorrow, I can’t be blowing dragon breath on people.  Because of Whole30 I know that gluten gives me tiny, itchy bumps on my cheeks, peanuts give me heartburn, soy cause huge zits, vegetable oil upsets my stomach, etc.  Suddenly these foods have very real consequences.  So when I crave something, I have to weigh whether the taste pleasure is worth the suffering that will come later.  When I pause, I’m usually able to make the kind choice for myself.

Then there is sugar.  I think that beast deserves its own post.

If you’re not from LA and, therefore, haven’t ever gotten down with some Zankou Chicken, it even gets a mention in one of my favorite songs of all time.

It’s Heeeeere!

The Halloween candy has arrived.  We live on a steep hill and don’t get trick-or-treaters because kids are lazy little buggers these days.  I don’t have a good reason to have the candy in the house, and am glad to not have to waste money on it.  Although yesterday I saw mini bags of Pirate’s Booty and made a mental note.  Happy gluten-free Halloween, kids.

Last night we went to a Halloween festival at my son’s school.  It was adorable, but I let the stress of getting dressed and out the door get to me.  Then I spent the whole time chasing them in opposite directions.  The Power Ranger insisted on going in the haunted house which is hilarious because he often gets scared watching Dora.  The butterfly just wanted to play in leaf piles.  I got into self-pity because my husband has been working so much these last two weeks.  I expertly turned the Halloween festival into, “OH MY GOD I ALWAYS HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING ALL BY MYSELF!”  I’m awesome.

Anyway, we came home with the first Halloween candy of the season.  It’s only noteworthy because I really don’t give a crap.  I don’t want to eat it.  I look at it and see chemicals and diarrhea.  Sorry.  Since reading It Starts With Food, this type of highly-processed stuff doesn’t appeal to me.  And since my Whole30, well I’m pretty sure that even a little of that stuff would end in zits and an upset stomach.  If I wanted to fall head-first into a sweet binge, I’d probably take the time to bake something so I know what’s in it.  I now am so aware of the consequences of my choices.  And since I’m not drinking, those consequences are a lot more uncomfortable than they used to be.

How are you feeling about the Halloween candy?