Last night I finally crossed 160.
I had just finished two donuts and a slushie (yep, no more only whole foods – I’ll get to that later) and I just had a feeling.
I’ve been stepping on the scale for the past week being like, did I do it yet?!
But every day it was like 156, 158, even 159.6, 157, 158…. just hovering.
This morning it was 158 again, so of course it was partially because it was the end of the day.
But still.
I was 133 when I started this and last night I weighed 161.2 lbs.
That is almost 30 lbs put on my body in less than 3 months.
I’ve been excited to cross it because it feels like proof that no matter how much my ego hates this whole process or wants to sabotage it or wants to still restrict me from eating, I am still feeding my body and am committed to it.
And. My mind is really reaching this point where it is like “but ok, what if it never stops. What if you just keep going and you are the only person who’s ever tried this who it doesn’t work for and you aren’t doing it the perfectly correct way enough so it will fail and you’ll just get really fat and ruin your body and your health.”
It is similar to my donut story from last night.
I have been reading the book “The Fuck It Diet” (which I highly highly recommend) and in it she talks about the way we restrict foods. And how the answer to healing restriction is total and complete non-restriction.
Essentially, letting yourself go “out of control” around food.
This is a mind fuck for me because I don’t think I’ve ever been out of control in my whole life. Even when I appeared to be out of control, I was never out of control.
In high school I would get super drunk all the time but I never blacked out, no matter how much I drank, and I never did anything that I didn’t want to do sober. Because I was terrified of losing control. (Not that that was a bad thing in that instance – I just think it speaks to how incredibly calculated and in control of myself I was).
In the book she talks about people who restrict and then binge. For a while I was like, well I don’t binge. And I felt a bit superior about the fact that I didn’t binge.
I have never been one of “those people” who would eat one cookie and then eat the whole box and be like “don’t give me those things I have to just eat them all!”
I judged that hard.
But then in the book she talks about how binging is a normal body response to restricting and then she is like you know what it is if you restrict and succeed in not binging? Anorexia.
So.
Not that I would claim that I have been anorexic. But that was a wake-up moment for me too, because I am very very good at controlling and restricting my body. And shoving its needs and cues away from my conscious mind.
And then she went on to talk about “shitty foods” and how if we are afraid of eating shitty foods that is still restriction. And we can’t heal all restriction unless we heal that too.
Now I know this. I went through this in my early twenties, when I realized I was orthorexic and paranoid of eating pretty much every food.
I was cutting out fruits and grains and animal foods and was terrified of eating out and was deeply afraid of the entire snack industry and basically couldn’t be a normal person out in public because I thought I’d ruin everything forever if I ate foods with bad things in them.
And at the time I thought I “healed it” because I went through a few months of eating everything again and then it wasn’t really a problem.
Until it creeped right back in. Sneakily and slowly.
So today I want to be like “of course I am afraid of Doritos and donuts and nachos and regular candy” because “who eats that shit” and maybe I will give myself permission ever to eat one or two chips but omg, I am definitely not the person who would eat an entire bag of Doritos.
And you know what? It’s not because I don’t want to. It’s still a place of restriction. Where I am terrified of what will happen if I do.
I want to be in a place where no food instills fear in me. Where I trust my body to tell me exactly what it wants.
And to get to the place where I can hear my body tell me exactly what it wants – as opposed to all these confusing signals that are happening as a response to restriction – I have to heal the restriction.
And that has to happen first. Before the nourishing phase.
I thought I could heal the restriction by just going “all in” on potatoes and eggs and cheese and milk and ice cream.
And then I was extremely called out in this book when she talks about how she began by doing exactly that. And that’s not enough.
I was like fuck me, I am still restricting. Even though I am trying so hard not to restrict.
This feels like the biggest edge for me because even though I have had stuff about weight wrapped up in all of this. For me the deepest piece has never been about weight.
It has been about controlling my health more than it has been about controlling my weight.
And I can see the unhealthy piece of the narrative.
Last night I was like “I think I want a donut.”
I would never have ordered the donut for myself yet. I would have waited until I was “ready.”
And Jordan was like “Let’s order donuts.”
And he said I should order more than one. So I ordered two donuts. And a strawberry lemonade slushie.
I cannot even tell you what happened to me when the donuts arrived.
Because donuts are a “bad food.”
I do not eat donuts. I say I don’t like donuts. Because who is out of control around their health enough to eat donuts. Not me.
Even my ice cream has all organic natural ingredients.
I don’t know what the fuck is in this donut but I am sure it represents all bad food that will ruin my health.
I couldn’t even eat it right away. I wanted to get mad at Jordan for anything – for not seeing what a big deal it was for me, for not reacting in the exact correct way, for being annoying in some way – instead of eating the donut.
I took myself into the other room and I journaled.
And my narrative around the donut was like “If I eat these donuts then I am just jumping off the cliff and I will be eating Doritos and candy and all of these things and I will get so fat and diseased and make everything worse and nobody will love me anymore and I’ll lose my business and everything I have and I will end up at the bottom being all alone and everybody will be like you did this to yourself and everything will be ruined forever.”
I eat a lot of very healthy foods. I swallowed raw liver yesterday. (Which weirdly, now, my body also craves – but that’s another story).
I do not want to be the woman who cannot eat anything with bad ingredients because she is afraid of ending up fat and diseased at the bottom of the cliff.
I would much rather be the woman who feels super good in her body at any size and eats a ton of whole foods because her body loves and craves them and who can eat a “bad” food and trust that her body can filter out what it doesn’t want and most importantly WHO HAS ZERO STRESS ABOUT FOOD.
And the way to get there is through this process.
And it seems that the beginning part of this process is going to have to be eating donuts and Doritos because that is the thing that truly fills my body with the most terror.
I know some of you might be like “well those are clearly bad foods.”
And I will just tell you two things. One is that when you start restricting food the line around what is a “bad” food becomes very unclear because if you do enough research on the internet every food can be a very very bad food.
And the other thing is that I know from my own emotional work that terror is a very interesting feeling. Because terror is a highly charged sensation. And when we have a lot of charge around something it is a pretty good indicator that there is something for us in it.
Because I am not neutral around donuts.
I absolutely thought I was. I thought I didn’t want them and didn’t like them.
Kind of like how I thought I didn’t like to cook until I realized that was just a cover for feeling like I wasn’t good at it.
And then a few months ago I started eating so much food and then last night I craved a donut.
My body really wanted those donuts. It was very clear. “I want a donut.”
And I had two donuts in front of me and had to go into the other room because of how afraid I was that this was the end of everything good in my life.
Neutrality would be “I want a donut and will eat it” or “I don’t want the donut but I could eat it if that’s the only option I had to eat.”
I cannot tell you how many times in my life I have chosen not eating over the options of food I had around me because I was afraid they would ruin my health.
Jordan and I were traveling and the only option was a packaged sandwich from a coffee shop? Nope, not eating.
Know what ruins your health more than bad ingredients? The stress on your body of not eating.
I think I’d be pretty happy around 150-155 lbs.
But the truth is that I have no control over where my body is going to decide to eventually settle.
And it will have to gain the amount of weight it needs to in order to feel safe in order to settle anywhere.
I’m a size large in everything and it feels so freeing to not have any judgements around the size I am.
Before if I was a medium instead of a small there would still be this lingering feeling of “I should try to fit in the small so I feel better.”
If I could fit in the extra small? Then I could feel extra special.
Not now. Now I am like let me order the XL too in case that fits better.
It feels deeply true and deeply good to let my body expand in this way. To be a woman instead of a little girl trying to not take up any space.
The thing that I don’t think most people really get is that I trust my body so much.
I trust that my body would never ever ever lead me to a place that was bad for it.
I think everything that is “wrong” in my body comes from all the places I haven’t listened to my body (or haven’t been allowed/able to, as a child).
This feels like I am finally fully handing the keys to me over to my body.
I am like, I trust you.
I will follow you wherever you want to take me.
I trust that you do not actually want to subsist on Doritos and donuts forever and I will eat all of them while you learn to trust me again, too.
I trust whatever weight you gain and however much you choose to lose
I trust that you only want what is best for us.
And actually, how arrogant does it feel to imagine that my mind knows better than my body, who performs about a million tasks a day without my input keeping me alive?
In order to heal the restriction I have to go “out of control.”
And I am willing to do that.
I ate both donuts and the entire slushie and you know what?
I felt great and slept deeply.
If you liked this piece, you might also enjoy:
– Food & ice cream & weight gain & nourishment (the beginning)
– Gaining weight: the first two months, going shopping
– Healing my inner teenager & being hungry before bed
– Feeling like I ruined my body & having more than enough
– What Jordan thinks about my weight gain (video)