Weight Prejudice

I admit I wonder what other people eat and how they relate to food.  At Dunkin Donuts this morning, the woman ahead of me ordered hot chocolate and a bagel with butter. Were they both for her, does she exercise, what will she eat for lunch, does she eat lunch?

All these years removed from compulsive eating, anorexia and bulimia, I’m still curious how “normal” people eat and  wonder who is a normal eater and who isn’t and how that is defined, anyway.

In my last post, I talked about supermodel Tess Holliday, a plus-sized woman with seemingly fantastic self-confidence. I love her attitude and her message – love yourself at very size.

Holliday has gotten backlash for her weight and her message – some feel she’s a bad role model for women, particularly young women. They say she’s saying it’s fine to be fat, and that’s bad.

Most naysayers point to health-related issues that may occur with excess weight. I suppose that could be part of it, but woman’s intuition tells me that many people just don’t like fatness.

When I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now, I was in fine health. I wasn’t physically comfortable, but all my vitals were good and there was nothing wrong with me. But I can’t tell you how many people insisted I needed to lose weight. Near strangers raised eyebrows when I ordered dessert, asking if I “really need that”?  

When I weighed my current weight, but suffered from severe bulimia, puking frequently through the day and over-dosing on laxatives, the compliments flew because I was thin.  No one made any comments about how or what I ate. In fact, many sought my advice on how to lose and maintain a slim weight. But I was so sick and did permanent damage to my health.

So, you can’t really gauge someone’s health by her weight.

I am curious about someone like Ms. Holliday’s approach to eating. I don’t judge her – it’s her body (!), but just wonder if it is possible to have a healthy diet and healthy relationship with food and still weigh 280 pounds at 5’5? It seems it would take a lot of food and a lot of eating to maintain that weight.

My curiosity stems from my own lifetime of food and body issues. I always wonder…

Keeping the Weight

I have a friend, Morgan, who is all by charts considered morbidly obese. She’s written about it successfully and continues to write and blog.

I met Morgan years ago after she had lost 190 pounds (half her weight) and had written a book about the weight loss. She was speaking at a workshop I attended, and we’ve been pen pals ever since. Morgan received some acclaim for her significant weight loss and book – she made television appearances and was interviewed by Oprah Magazine, etc.

Fast forward 10 years and Morgan has gained back all the weight. And she’s decided to live with it – this is who she is, and she’s not going to put off living just because she’s fat. For years, her life has been about trying to lose weight. She hasn’t lost weight, and she’s done fighting.

I respect that decision - She feels, though, that she has to mourn some things she may never know again – breathing easily up and down the stairs, male attention, easy, attractive, comfortable clothes, comfortable seating on busses and airplanes………..and so many other aspects of life which are simply more difficult to navigate with extra weight.

I also respect plus-size super model, Tess Holliday, who is 5’5 and weighs 280 pounds.  In fact, she probably weighs more now, as she’s pregnant. Holliday is everywhere, even gracing the cover of People magazine,  and is extraordinarily popular. If you follow her social media postings, she seems truly happy and comfortable and confident.

This is what she posted on social media today, “I would have only been so lucky being a teenage girl seeing women embrace their bodies of all shapes, of all sizes, and realizing I didn’t have to be ashamed of mine. It’s this message of saying, ‘This is our body and we’re not ashamed and it’s okay for you to love your body.’”

I agree a million percent and I love her message, yet I still wonder if she can truly be that comfortable and thrilled at her current weight.  I hope it doesn’t sound judgmental. I just know that when I, at 5’6, weighed 180 pounds, I was physically miserable. My stomach rolls hurt when I sat. My thighs chafed together and left deep red marks on my legs. Perhaps the worst were bras – I have big and very pendulous breasts even when thin. At 180, my huge saggy boobs dragged down every bra, which left deep deep deep and painful marks on my shoulders. Every time I start to gain weight these days my first thought, “nooooo, I can go back to excruciating bras”.

My period cramps, bad to begin with, were worse.  I couldn’t find comfortable clothes and basically wore mummus. I got purple stretch marks all over.

Being overweight just hurt physically. If I had weighed 100 pounds more than I did, as Tess Holiday does, I think it would be truly uncomfortable. God bless her for loving her body where it is.

I know this post wanders through different idea, but they were both on my mind and have been for a while.

Body Image

I never would have thought we’d see a plus-size model on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Much has been made of body size and body image lately.

Wish it were going on when I was a kid. For me, being fat brought shame and misery.  I was the only one in my family with a weight problem.

My pretty sister was a popular cheerleader with great friends and devoted boyfriends. My mother was newly single, pretty, smart and dating happily. I was fat with braces, acne and frizzy hair.  Suffice it to say, I did not date. Not for many, many years.

School meant teasing and loneliness. To comfort myself, I just ate more and continued to gain weight, outgrowing clothes on a regular basis.

Mom was a single mother who supported the family as a piano teacher. Often, she begged me to stop eating so much – she couldn’t afford to keep re-stocking the refrigerator or all the new clothes I’d need with each new size.

Being fat felt like the worst, most horrible thing to be. I hated myself and my body.

In my 20s, I starved myself down to skinny and that brought more misery. The severe deprivation brought weakness, anger and desperation. At 30, I found alcohol, which I’d never drunk before because I had food to fill my emptiness. I decided to drink instead of eat. Soon, I was doing both – binge drinking and binge eating.  Bulimia set in.

After several horrible years of getting drunk, binging and purging all night, I was introduced to crack cocaine, which seemed the answers to all my problems. I wasn’t interested in anything else – so I felt crack cured my alcoholism. I lost all interest in eating, so weight wasn’t interesting, nor was binging, purging nor starving. I was thrilled.

But, of course, crack, as it does, took me down very very badly, almost irreparably.

I was one of the lucky ones and 12 miraculous Steps resolved all for me and now at nearly 52, I walk free of all my addictions.

But, imagine what my life would have looked like if my weight and my looks hadn’t meant so damn much. Bring on the plus size models.

How Intuitive Eating Helped

Intuitive eating was helpful in many ways and not in others.

The first idea that worked and stays with me today is eating small portions –if  I’m still hungry, I can eat more later.  I remember going to a workshop and someone saying that it’s startling to see how little they needed to feel satisfied. The woman said it was actually sad – she mourned large portions, but she didn’t need them.

I do this now. I eat small portions of anything I want and am still, to this day, surprised that a little bit is quite enough.

This leads me to idea of eating anything I want – no food is often limits, and I love that. For most of my life, I would deprive myself of most things tasty until I couldn’t take it, and I’d binge voraciously until I couldn’t breathe. There was no such thing as one cookie or one scoop of ice cream or one piece of bread.

Some people believe that some foods should be off-limits, that some of us have allergies to certain foods like sugar and wheat. I’m not sure what I believe, but I do know that I am able to eat everything in moderation these days, and don’t even want a lot of sugar or wheat. I’m surprised by how very little sugar interests me.

I do believe, though, that we each need to know our own bodies and honor them. If someone finds she can’t eat just one cookie or piece of bread, then she can refrain from eating them, if that seems to work best.

What didn’t work for me were a couple of tenets of intuitive eating. When I first began the process, I was deeply in the throes of binging and in six months, had gained 65 pounds. The idea of stockpiling my house with all my favorite foods (mint chocolate chip ice cream and brownies) proved too difficult to try for long. I loaded up on “binge” foods and ate and ate and ate. And ate. Freaked out, I stopped stocking ice cream and went back to my nearly empty refrigerator (diet coke & wine) – too scared was I to be around food. (I’m happy to say that my fridge currently brims with food – everything I need to eat. None of it calls to me when I’m not hungry.)

What also didn’t work was eating frequently throughout the day – every time I felt hunger, supposedly. For one thing, I wasn’t particularly attuned to hunger yet. Personally, I like to think less often about food, not more often. And I didn’t want to be eating all the time at work – it  seemed smelly and odd.

Also with intuitive eating, there’s the idea of eating only when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. So, if you’re not hungry, no matter where you are, don’t eat. This just didn’t work for me all the time. If I went to my boyfriend’s house and his mother made dinner, no matter my level of hunger, I was going to eat what she made. And I wasn’t going to nibble.

I can do this because I’m no longer afraid. I can face food fearlessly and comfortably and not think about it before or after I’m eating.

I learned this ability through Overeater’s Anonymous and the Twelve Steps. My next post will cover how this works.

Trying Intuitive Eating

All my life, the only way I knew how to “control” my weight was through dieting and starving and that always failed. Restricting lead, inevitably, to bingeing, each and every time.

When I began the journey of changing this cycle, I was bingeing and purging many times a day. Life was so miserable, I didn’t want to get out of bed most days.

Realizing that what I’d done up to that point didn’t work, I looked for a different approach to eating and discovered the idea of intuitive eating.

This approach involves legalizing food — carrot sticks are not any better or worse than carrot cake. No food is forbidden. In fact, we should stock up on all our favorite foods in quantities so large we couldn’t possibly eat them in one sitting.

If you love dark chocolate, don’t buy one chocolate bar, buy ten. If you love carrot cake, don’t buy one cake, buy three so you can keep two in the freezer.  If you like crusty bread, buy a few loaves.  If you want heavy cream in your coffee instead of skim milk, go for it! Cashews and almonds—buy the family sized packages.

The idea is this. We chronic dieters have spent our lives eating controlled, pre-determined portions of pre-planned food at specific times of the day. How much, what, and when we ate had nothing to do with how much or what we wanted or whether we were hungry. And then there were those times we ate from “mouth hunger” instead of “stomach hunger.”

We need to eat food on demand. Demand feeding requires learning to feel and respond to stomach hunger. This re-calibration of eating habits requires vigilance. In particular, it requires that we attend to emotional reasons for eating, since a lot of times we seek food for comfort (mouth hunger) even though what comfort it brings is fleeting.

How do we change our eating? Let yourself get hungry as much as possible during the day and eat just enough to satisfy that hunger each time.  Carry a food bag, filled with your favorite foods, so that you are never hungry and without something to satisfy that hunger.  Stop thinking in terms of meals or of food that is appropriate to specific times of day. If you wake up hungry and feel like eating a bowl of chili, eat it. If it’s “lunch time” and all you want is a piece of chocolate cake, have the cake.

Stop eating when you are satisfied — not stuffed.  Stick with this, learning to forgive yourself, keeping at it long enough to convince yourself that you can stop now because, in an hour when you are hungry again, it will be okay to eat.  The idea is that if you know you will have permission to eat later (unlike when you’re dieting), it’ll be easier to stop at a comfortable place.

I tried a lot of this approach. In my next blog, I will discuss what worked and what didn’t and how I incorporated some aspects into my current approach to food – and life!

How I lost 100 pounds and Keep it Off Peacefully

It's been a long road. I grew up a compulsive eater, weighing well into the 200s until around thirty when I got tired of being the "fat one". In my thirties, I stopped eating and starved myself down to a sickly and miserable 85 pounds. Then followed bulimia, years and years of binging and purging, day and night.

Then I turned 42, 10 years ago this June, and I couldn't live that way anymore. My entire life had run around food and weight. I had one friend, a miserable job, no boyfriend, as well as a burgeoning drinking problem. Something had to change.

Throughout my life of bingeing, bingeing and purging and starving, I'd read all the literature I could on the topic of eating disorders and found two approaches which made sense - Intuitive Eating and Overeaters Anonymous.

Many would say these two are divergent options, but I've been able to combine some of both to have a relatively easy and pretty darn free approach to food and my weight, which is exactly smack dab in the middle of those height and weight charts, without my even trying.

My next blogs will be about how I did it and how I still do it, every day.

Height and Weight

I went to the doctor today and had a few questions/concerns. My eyes have been giving me trouble – sometimes they ache, and my vision gets blurry. Also, my perimenopausal PMS is out of control – just yesterday, I broke down at work, sobbing and wailing in front of my co-workers AND my boss. I can’t live like this every month.

While there, I learned that for the first time in my life, I have high blood pressure. Me?!!!! My doctor looked a little concerned and ordered a full set of blood work.

Did any of this bother me? Sure, a little. But I got a referral to a good eye doctor, a prescription for Lexapro and we’ll monitor my blood pressure -  nothing alarming.

You want to know what sticks out most from this visit? My height and weight. I jumped on the scale and weighed what I’ve weighed every year, for as long as I can remember. The exact number, in fact. And a number I am quite happy about.

BUT – I’VE SHRUNK AN INCH, SO THE HEIGHT/WEIGHT RATIO IS DIFFERENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am, therefore, heavier than I used to be by about five pounds. THIS is what alarmed me.

Weird thinking dies hard. Happily, I am not planning on losing weight. I am just fine.