FatGirl vs World

Many years ago, someone bought me a very nice candle as a thank you for some work that I did for him.  As I'm not the kind of person to spend $40 on a candle (I'm more likely to spend $5-6), I filed it in the "to be saved for a special occasion" category along with other things like fancy/delicate stemware, clothing that I don't want to get dry cleaned, and shoes that only feel comfortable for the first hour.

The other day, I was cleaning and dusting, and took out the candle and opened it up for the first time in years to smell it.  It just didn't smell as bright and as fresh as I remembered it.

Okay, my point with all of this is that sometimes things in life are amazing and special, but they're also fleeting.  Sometimes you have to light the candle and enjoy it then and there because the "special occasion" may never come, or you might not know it when you see it.  Create the occasion and it will be special.

The next step: realizing that you're the occasion :P

**waves** Hi everyone -- I'm not dead, I promise.  I started the new year very hopeful and then got the wonderful news that I have heel spurs in both of my feet.  They are very painful and it totally made me slam on the breaks with walking, going to the gym.  Steroid shots didn't work, going to physical therapy next.  But if that doesn't work, I may have 2 more surgeries ahead of me.  Fun!

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DISCLAIMERS
1.  Rebecca Scritchfield is my dietitian and my friend.
2.  She did give me a copy of the book to review and enjoy, but not before I had purchased a copy for myself.
3.  I may be a little biased because I'm quoted in the book (pg. 219)

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It's taken me reading the book twice to really process a lot of Body Kindness.  My first read had me thinking that the book was organized wrong, and the second read had me convinced that you could read each section out of order and see something you might have missed if you read the book from front to back.  I realized that Body Kindness wasn't organized wrong:  it was organized to undo a lot of the familiar harm (from easier to undo to harder to undo) we've seen in countless other diet/weight loss/fitness books and articles in order to open the reader up to a new way of thinking about not just their body but, more importantly, their life.  I should have known that Rebecca would be sneaky like that and make the book a gigantic head fake (a Randy Pausch term for indirect learning).

Body Kindness is divided into four main sections:

1. What you do ("Habits like eating, exercise, and sleep choices");
2. How you feel ("The thoughts and emotions that influence your day-to-day choices and overall life satisfaction");
3. Who you are ("Your beliefs and values that help you focus on what's really important to you and why"); and
4. Where you belong ("The relationships every single one of us needs that provide the opportunity to be part of something greater than ourselves").

For me, it's humbling to think of my own life in the context of such miraculous and historical beauty [the Grand Canyon].  How can I waste another moment of my short years on this planet down-playing the miracle of this body I have been given?  From tiny cells we become the most beautiful thinking, breathing, feeling creatures on earth.  What an amazing gift we have been given, and how dare we squander and abuse it?

At the end of 2016, I was cleared to start working out in the gym again (elliptical, light weights) and I had all these visions of going balls to the wall, of trying to reclaim what I couldn't do while I was injured or rehabbing.

Reading Rebecca Scritchfield's Body Kindness and seeing the documentary Embrace have kinda thrown a wrench into the works:  I started asking myself:


The second thought was that I wasn't giving myself much credit for how far I've healed.  I sometimes forget just how bad it was and what it's like to live in a body that's not in pain all the time.  Why would I want to do anything to jeopardize that simply because of a date on a calendar? This is still a marathon, not a sprint.  That has not changed.

I still need to be patience and aim for balance....

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With that in mind, I announce #GoTheDist 2017:

Just got back from a screening of Embrace and I think I need some more time to process. My thoughts are flying in a few different directions.

But I want to put to you all a question that I asked after the movie to the panel (but I am going to ramble a little more here).

So much of society and consumerism feeds off of insecurity -- keeping us from feeling comfortable and secure in who we are and what we look like. Essentially, we question our own worth and value.

The parallel in boxing is instability--when we get too narrow. When we "get narrow" it makes it easier for our opponent to knock us off balance at the same time it limits our range and power. Getting narrow with self-love often looks the same too--trying to take up less space and disappear.

The response is to "square up" (widen our stance to create a better foundation) -- sometimes only a single step in the right direction to restore our range, power, and stability.

What do you think is one way we all can "square up" in the direction of improving our self-confidence and body image efficacy? 

There really should be water in the glass. Sorry dairy lobby.

It's about time I got to talking about diet.  I've already written about my thoughts about the other parts of the puzzle:  1/5:  The Foundation and 1/5:  Exercise.  Just to refresh, I firmly believe that wrapping your head around being healthy can be split into a pie with 5 wedges and distributed as such: 

Andrew WK is a professional partier. He's a professional partier on a mission to spread the party lifestyle around the US and around the world.  



It's not about headbanging (and getting a bangover), or doing the things that help people escape from their daily life (drugs, alcohol, vices and distractions).  Andrew WK wants everyone to reconnect with what it truly means to be alive and human. He wants everyone to step out from the darkness and choose to be in the light of hope, joy, possibilities.

Last night was more than just attending a speaking engagement by a rock star (with him taking audience questions and staying until after midnight to talk to everyone, take photos, and sign stuff).  I think Andrew WK wanted to connect with everyone in the room and remind us of the joy in life.  

I felt like a terrible audience member, but I took notes (via twitter) so I'd remember what he had said after the adrenaline had worn off.  Here's some of his gems: 

7th grade? Wearing my dad's polo and a sad bra.

Every woman's best friend and style guru, Tim Gunn, wrote a scathing article of the fashion industry's size-ism and my inner fat girl (from age 8 onward) is cheering loudly.  Mr. Gunn says:

Have you shopped retail for size 14-plus clothing? Based on my experience shopping with plus-size women, it’s a horribly insulting and demoralizing experience. Half the items make the body look larger, with features like ruching, box pleats and shoulder pads. Pastels and large-scale prints and crazy pattern-mixing abound, all guaranteed to make you look infantile or like a float in a parade. Adding to this travesty is a major department-store chain that makes you walk under a marquee that reads “WOMAN.” What does that even imply? That a “woman” is anyone larger than a 12, and everyone else is a girl? It’s mind-boggling.

It was mortifying when I was a pre-teen to have to exit the Juniors's section and venture into the Woman's section to find clothing that would fit me (anywhere from a 14-18, and a solid 36C), but would be unable to find anything because it was too mature for me.  Same thing went with shoes.  I was a size 9.5/10 in the 4th grade.  I would quite often end shopping trips with more tears than clothing and a frustrated mother.

8th grade, Goth Janet Reno

The summer before 8th grade, my mother took me a plus-sized store at the local mall.  There we bought leggings and tunics in every size and color (mustard and burgandy were big that year).  Though they made me look like a 60-year-old lady, they at least fit and covered my body.  Eighth grade hadn't even started before my mom got sick and within a month she had died.  Then came the task of finding a dress to wear to her funeral.  My father might have been more stressed out by shopping than he was at planning the funeral.  We finally found a black jumper-like size 20 dress at some store in the next town over with this green shirt to wear under it.

Coupled with the deranged haircut that I got (nb: never get a drastic hair cut while you are in mourning --Aunt Christina should have stopped me from doing that), I think anyone looking at me would assume that I hated my body, didn't want to be fashionable, and didn't care about the clothing I threw on my body.  On the contrary, I was desperate to fit in and have clothing that fit.

 I didn't shop much after my mom died.  I think partly it was just awkward to ask dad to go shopping with me (he always suggested the prep school look of plaid skirts and oxfords). I also wasn't the kind of kid to just ask for money and to be dropped off so I could do it myself. Nor was I the kind of kid to ask the women in my family for help (it comes loaded with their opinions as well). I do remember going shopping one time for my brother and asking to purchase a pair of boy's skater jeans -- you know the kind where you could fit a village in the legs.  I wore them all through 10th grade. But outside of that I just wore my mom's old clothing (her rainbow collection of turtlenecks) and hand-me-downs from dad (his plaid shirts).

With Steve S.  Ah, what a crush I had on him.

Shopping for myself was always an ordeal.  My Sweet 16 dress was a disaster of epic proportions -- a long white dress (it was only one that fit my body that was in my price range) with a crush velvet top and a chiffon bottom, at an event where we were serving Italian food buffet style. It just begged to get sauce on it.  I had tried desperately to find an age-appropriate knee-length party dress.  But when you're a 16/18 in 1997, that's a tall order. Also note the terrible hairdo (Thanks, Aunt Kathie, for taking me to your hairdresser who ignored my "don't give me bangs" mandate).

I had to have my Sweet 16 early (the problem of having an August birthday is that no one is around to come), and without any semblance of a tan, I look like a bloated ghost looking to haunt all my friends and family.

My brother's friend's younger brother, Dan. Pity date? Cause no one asked me.

Shopping was no better in 1999 and in order to circumvent the heartache of having to shop for a dress, my dad offered to have one made for me.  Why I thought a 15th-century Italian Renaissance dress was my best option, I'll never know.  But I will say that no one else had the same dress. Go me?

But somewhere in my delusion about style, I did find some peace in knowing that I wouldn't have to go to the store and find some hideous mother of the bride dress that was the only thing in my size, but still cut on the bias, with too many sequins in the wrong place, and no idea of how to make the wearer feel beautiful.

I'm actually wearing this dress today, the main difference is my pink hair.

It took a long time to know how to dress my body, and in what fabrics/cuts/styles, etc.  But it took even longer to give up feeling like the fat girl in a sack.  Sometimes that's really just looking at myself long enough until the self-criticism is replaced with a bit of self-adoration, and sometimes it's a bit of brass ovaries that don't give a fuck and knowing that I look and feel good.

But I will say this to Tim Gunn -- you're 100% right.  It's not just the clothing that's the issue for plus-sized women -- it's the whole shopping experience. I can go into a store and be ignored or directly insulted, but the worst of it all is when I go into a store and I'm not even represented.  And this is what I would want to say to designers and companies -- if your excuse is that your fashion wouldn't look good on my body, that's the fault of your design, not my body.  Cause I can make a Snuggie look sexy as hell.  If you can't step up to the plate, you lose my respect, my money, and my support.

Yes, that's a Snuggie.

(Oh and Tim -- if and when I ever get married, I'm totally going to ask you to help me find a dress.)

In my last post, I talked about the less obvious parts of weight loss as they relate to foundation work -- namely, getting your head/heart in the right place as a precursor to getting your body on board.  The next steps relate to the other parts of the pie (mmmmhmm pie) -- 1/5 exercise and 3/5 diet.  And it's really up to you (you know yourself best) to determine which to tackle next.  For purposes of my blog, I'm just going to talk about exercise next.

Exercise is a deeply personal thing.  Some people need to push their bodies hard and for other people, that doesn't quite work.  Some people (like me) are coming back from injuries and need to learn to trust their bodies.  Some people are working against a lifetime of equating exercise with punishment.  And some people are thrill-seeking endorphin-philes that want to push their mind and their body to some unnamed limit.  That's okay.  You don't need to judge yourself by what everyone else is doing.  Keep reading that last sentence until you hear the truth ringing in it:

I'm quite fond of saying that weight loss/health gain has 3 main components (I used to say 4, but I now include it the other categories) that are not weighted equally:


I wanted to talk a little bit about the foundation work.  That little slice of the pie can look very different for different people.

For me, the first part of the foundation was coming to grips with why I put on the weight to begin with (suffering the loss of my nana and my mother).  I needed to understand that trauma before I could effect any meaningful change in my life.  Otherwise, I'd be doomed to repeat the coping mechanism of eating over and over again.  I spent a good year in therapy to deal with my anxiety and did more work with my dietician to help understand the relationship between food and my sadness/need for connection.

The second part of my foundation had to do with coming to grips with my health and my body metrics.  I'm still going through this; starting over as someone with Celiac Disease and what that means for my diet and how I need to compensate.  But when I was first starting out, I think I needed to exhaust myself of all the excuses that absolved me of responsibility (such as a thyroid condition).  I needed to accept that my body was the result of my choices.  I needed to know my baselines -- my body chemistry, my body measurements (weight and tape measure) and my physical ability.

The third part was about changing my environment, my patterns, and my relationships.  It's not fun to take a look at your life and realize all the places that are pitfalls.  I had to own all the places in my life where I was able to make better choices but didn't -- because it was easy, it was what I always did, or what everyone was doing.  I had to be selfish and say "If I want my life to change, I need to change these things in my life."  And there was a lot of pain here as well as catharsis.  Doing this created space in my life to add things that would not only benefit me but benefit the people I cared about.

And the fourth part (that used to be its own category) is what I like to call "recovery."  I said that I integrated it into each category -- and it looks different in each category.  Foundation recovery is giving yourself the permission to take care of yourself and to let go of the rest.  Let go of the pain that disables you, let go of the grudge that eats away at you, let go of the people that bring you more sorrow than joy.  And then let go of the guilt of letting go.  Know that you can do these things and still survive.

I've been talking to my dad about his foundation, his path.  I said this to him privately, but I'll say this to you all (and to him) right here -- "I want your heart and mind to embrace this process.  Nothing to fear or avoid."  If you lay the foundation right, everything else becomes a product of self-discovery, of joy, of pride.  And none of it is because you're punishing yourself.  And that's what makes this time different than all the other times.