Total Fatty

Ok Pema Chodron, work your magic. I need to feel my feelings, and yesterday I didn’t do a great job of it.

I snapped at my husband. I posted stuff on this blog. I gorged on Season 3 of Game of Thrones. I couldn’t bring myself to go out and buy some veggies at the grocery, so I just fried up the steak my husband bought and ate it sliced up and wrapped in tortillas, felt “unclean”, watched GoT, and went to bed confused, sad and mad. And I was “feeling fat.”

Why, you might ask?

Because I saw a bunch of pictures of me from the magical wonderful beautiful SheRecovers yoga retreat on Salt Spring Island, and I look fat. Fatter than I’ve looked before, and I know – I study these things. I also don’t weigh myself anymore, and I won’t weigh myself. So I have to go by how I look and how clothes feel.

I just returned from the retreat late Sunday night, so it’s reasonable that re-entry would be bumpy. I was tired. I had to get on a conference call early Monday morning. I was just old-fashioned grouchy.

So, what exactly IS “feeling fat”? Am I suddenly fatter than I was yesterday when I felt great? No. So what is the feeling I was feeling?

I guess it was embarrassment, on some level. I was talking so much at the retreat about how free I feel from food restriction and self-hate, that I believe in Health At Every Size (HAES), and that my body’s set-point is what it is. That I’m strong and healthy and I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. I move around. I sleep well. I’m GOOD.

But now here I am feeling like I’m 15 again, feeling ugly and unworthy, and thinking that my husband is an idiot for loving me. Frankly, I feel like a fraud.

I guess it’s to be expected that after a lifetime of believing my worth (not even getting into my attractiveness) was based in my looks and my weight, that I wouldn’t just wake up loving myself and never waver. So here I am, wavering.

I spent all day today, in between work tasks, searching feverishly for local Seattle HAES movement/fitness trainer so I could start exercising more.

I do want to exercise more, and I’m bored with walking, and I’m nervous about thin-normative “make it burn” classes where I’m told how much weight I will lose if I religiously keep going to the class. I want a softer re-entry into movement.

But I also need to reflect on the fact that I felt panicked today and was desperately seeking someone else – an outside source – to spoon feed me into a physical routine (theoretically not just to feel good and healthy – but also to reverse this weight gain of the past year since I quit everything). So, the first part is good, but the panic isn’t.

So I’ll keep thinking about this and hopefully I’ll figure out what my real feelings were, because fat is not a feeling – so sayeth Isabel Foxen Duke (and she’s right). I’ll get back to y’all.