Pondering...

Lately the meat of this blog has kind of drifted. With new found oomf I am getting art made (great) writing more (lovely) working on a song or two (thrilling) and still working out and pushing myself. Blogging has fallen to the side. So I hooked you guys up with Instagram so that at least you know where I am. Most of the time. However, I am still actively making vlogs over on the YouTube machine under the name LittleFatMeBlog and if anyone is interested I will return to posting the videos here. All that I said so that I could say, "I know that pictures and silence is not why you guys come and I am going to make WAY more of an effort. Starting now."

I am a food addict. I am in recovery and I am sober - BUT - I am a food addict. That means that I have had (for at least 15 years) an unhealthy and imbalanced relationship to food. I had an extreme relationship to food. That is why every time I said, "I'll just eat normal, but less of it." I failed miserably. This time I took that extreme relationship with food and I switched it up. I became extreme in the other direction. I count and calculate EVERYTHING, I moved my scale into the kitchen, I developed a "healthy" fear of butter, hidden calories, trash food... I talked about food nonstop. My life was (is, to a degree) about food. When you are fat those things are seen as dedication, as triumph, as enviable... Did you know that those are the behaviors of anorexics. I didn't, I had no idea. Fear of hidden calories, guilt over and indulgence, having the scale in my kitchen?! If I was never 255 pounds all of those things would have been red flags that an unhealthy, extreme and imbalanced (sounds familiar) relationship to food was developing.
I thought to myself, for the past few months - I think I even talked about being mindful - that I couldn't be anorexic (I'm not, but I do think that I have disorder eating) I would say, "Uh, you are too big to be ana." Only then I came across a blog by a girl who was 135 pounds and her body was shutting down because of the damage she was doing with her eating disorder. All she kept writing was that the doctors were wrong because if she was sick she'd be thin. Hmmm.
Okay, so where does that leave me? The extraordinary fear that I feel when I see a pound, the fear that doesn't make it to the videos because by then rational has set in, the fear that screams, "UP A POUND!!!! YOU ARE GROWING BACK INTO YOUR SKIN!!!" The guilt I have a piece of cake, "Really? All that work and you still have to have cake?" The self hatred I feel when my jeans, that are snug because I bought them that way, become tight due to normal bloat. All of these things are real, and scary, and yet another reminder that this is never over. I don’t get to shut the door and forget.