Rebel Eaters, Episode 1 Journaling Prompt

Virgie Tovar has a new podcast, Rebel Eaters Club. She has a journaling prompt at the end of each episode, and I thought the first one was interesting.

This week, she asked to think about a food that we associate with our family of origin, with growing up, and our relationship with that food over time.

Almost immediately, I thought of freshly-baked bread.

My dad likes to bake bread. I do, too. But I REALLY like to eat bread! I always have.

We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, and bread was a cheap staple we always had on hand. Sandwiches, cinnamon toast, filler for other meals. I've always enjoyed eating bread.

That's what struck me: With all of my disordered eating and exercising to "earn" food, I never stopped eating bread. This might be because, back in the '90s, carbs weren't the "enemy." Fat and calories were. So while I'd NEVER eat a fat- or calorie-dense bread like a bagel (the subject of the first podcast, and a favorite chewy way to start the day for me now) or a croissant (ditto the "fave" part), I could always do toast (with fat-free butter substitute and sugar-free fruit spread, naturally) or a warm roll.

In fact, when I was in my least healthy phase of dieting, I had Little Caesar's Crazy Bread at least two or three days a week for lunch. That meant I had to skip breakfast, but it was worth it. Man, I love that stuff; no other pizza place has anything comparable and I don't know why. 

Further, I cannot remember ever feeling guilty for eating bread. I've always been able to enjoy it without any negativity. I do remember being shocked when I learned that Texas Roadhouse's yeast rolls have more than 200 calories each, but... I don't think about that anymore and they're amazing.

An interesting note about this that I made, and that may or may not be related, was this:

First, I am fortunate in that neither of my parents was the food or body police. Neither of them ever told me that I needed to eat or to look different. My food intake was controlled only inasmuch as my mom thought we could "wait until dinner" rather than snack 45 minutes early, and if we had a rare bag of Oreos in the house, we could only have a couple at a time. I feel like this was more a resource thing than a restriction thing.

However, my mom was often, if not on a diet, "being careful." One year, I purchased from the Christmas bazaar at our school, a light-sensitive pig that you'd put in the fridge or cabinet, and it would oink when the door was open. I didn't see this as being rude, and it was in no way mean-spirited. I saw it as a funny way to help my mom remember her priorities.

But my dad... I think my dad gave me permission to LOVE food. He cooked, baked, and grilled a lot (my mom cooked almost every night, and the unfortunate reality is that all of those common meals of spaghetti, meatloaf, and hot dogs just blend into one generic memory). He loved trying new things. He really REALLY experienced food. He ate slowly. He paid attention to flavors. Food wasn't the enemy. It was a comfort. An indulgence. An adventure.

I have a vivid memory of being upper-elementary aged and kind of recognizing somewhat our financial situation. We were on a road trip and had stopped at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo. Someone was attempting their challenge to eat a 72-ounce steak and all of the fixings in under an hour in order to get it for free. I was crying, because I'd seen that the cheapest menu item (this was in the early 1980s) was an $8 hamburger. It was *so* expensive!

My dad came over and hugged me and said, "It's okay. We're on vacation! We can't eat like this at home, but we have a budget for vacation, and that is fine! Order whatever you want."

Many years later, my mom told me that the cycle was that they'd have a thousand dollars or so in credit card debt that they'd pay off right as we went on another vacation, and it would start over again. 

But for my dad, those experiences (which were, still, fairly modest things like visiting Laura Ingalls Wilder's or Mark Twain's homes, or the St. Louis arch, or the Huntsville Space Center) were worth the price. They were a necessary getaway, and food was a welcomed part of it.

That might also be why, no matter what stage of eating disorder I was in, I have never "watched it" on vacation. Vacations have always been guilt- and stress-free times to enjoy whatever food I could find. 

And to this day, I'm one of those people who will happily fill up on fresh bread at a restaurant and bring my entree home. I try to find good bakeries wherever we go. I love bread, and it's a lifelong relationship.

Wrapping Up Babecamp

This week, Virgie Tovar's book "You Have the Right to Remain Fat" came out, just as we were finishing up the online Babecamp. It has all been great fun, lots to think about, and tons of reinforcement.

One thing I realized is that I'm probably about 2.5-3 years past the target demo for Babecamp... Not age-wise, but body-ownership-wise. Which is a cool, comfortable place to be.

I listened to a lot of podcasts as Tovar did media for the book release. It really made me wonder what I might have thought about what she had to say when I was involved in previous relationships.

At one point in a podcast, the host said something like, "What does it say about your relationship when your partner is okay with your being hungry, dedicating hours to something you don't love doing, and denying yourself things you really like simply because of the social currency it conveys to them?"

:::blink:::

I had an active and overt eating disorder during my first marriage. Also, exercise bulimia. It was all set off by my husband telling me that I was overweight, and my trying to "fix" it. He was a witness to all of this. My appearance pleased him, and he obviously did not care what I did to acquire or maintain that appearance.

I had a more "healthy"-looking eating disorder and commitment to working out in a way that I clearly hated during my second marriage. I had gotten past most of the stuff from my 20s until my second husband also told me I was 50-60 pounds overweight and needed to lose it. He treated me with disgust and disapproval until I lost the weight, all while still expecting me to perform in the bedroom, knowing I was not physically appealing to my partner.

And I lost a LOT of weight due to what Tovar calls "internalized inferiority." I believed that my husband had the right to hate me for being fat "and disgusting," which was a moral failing on my part that showed all over my body. He was able to wield this, using my desire for his affection and approval, into a tool of control.

Over and over, as I've read about women who believe, due to their life experiences, that in order to live a full and free life, they will likely have to abandon their dreams of being in a lifelong relationship with a man, I recognize that I am married to the perfect man for me. He's the perfect match for where I am in my life right now, and the perfect partner to cheer me on as I learn and grow and come to find the woman I'm meant to be, who I didn't have the chance to find as I was spending so much time and energy on artificially maintaining a body type to remain pleasing to a critical male eye.

Furthermore, I'm grateful to be middle aged. It's so much easier to be confident in who I am and not really give a single stinking rodent's hindquarters what anyone else thinks about me.

Finally, Tovar said something I loved during an interview where the host "concern-trolled" her (which is when someone says, when speaking of fat acceptance, something to the extent of  "but what about health..."). Paraphrasing: There is no minimum weight someone has to be to deserve respect and freedom from bigotry.

This applies in so many realms, I want to keep it, most of all, at the forefront of my mind. There is no minimum of ability, health, intelligence, accomplishment, drive, etc. that someone needs to possess. Everybody deserves to expect to be treated as fully human because they are. And that's my favorite takeaway.

Happy Birthday to Me!

All right, fine. If you're keeping track, it's still more than two months until my birthday.

But James already got my present for me, even though I still have to wait a few weeks for it.

Something hit me the other day: I cannot remember the last time I went to bed feeling cruddy and thinking, "Well, I ate like a garbage person today. I'll do better tomorrow."

If you've never done this, then I don't know how to explain the feelings of shame, failure fatigue, and physical illness that accompany that little bit of self-demoralizing.

There have been many times in my life when I've tried, with varying levels of success, to appreciate my body in its natural form (i.e. when not being manipulated by food restriction and exercise for the sole purpose of body-taming), with varying success.

I remember when I was training for the LVMPD entry test, I was able to run 5 miles and felt like a total bad ass. When I was weighed as part of the physical, I was surprised to see 195. That was up significantly from my lowest weight, due to a years-long eating disorder, when I spent some time at about 148 pounds.

Incidentally, the GNC scale still told me I was 7 pounds overweight here, so while I felt pretty okay about how I looked, the numbers taunted me.

However, a few years later, I was nearly 50 pounds heavier and significantly more healthy. And I didn't feel much self-consciousness about how I looked.

Still, what I didn't realize was that Diet Culture was pervasive in my thought processes and self-esteem.

I had so many "rules" about how I ate, even while giving myself permission, kind of, to eat as I pleased. I still saw foods as "naughty" indulgences or "healthy" choices. If I did too much of the former, I felt really bad.

Even after James and I got married and I was looking in the rear-view mirror of those miserable forced workouts (even while loving riding my bike challenging places, walking all over, dancing, etc.), I would still often look back on my day with a sense of backward-facing dread, and feel ill at the thought of the "bad" food I'd put in my body.

Or I'd remember that I'd forgotten I'd had a snack and then still eaten as much as dinner as I would have if I'd not eaten a snack. And I'd be frustrated with myself.

So, that's a long way of saying: I don't do that anymore. At some point in this work I'm doing to listen to my body, to move as I please, and to eat as I will without any of this becoming an energy-draining focus from my very full life, I've managed to throw off the go-to guilt that has gone hand-in-hand with food choices for as long as I can remember.

I no longer linger over glances at myself in mirrors or storefront windows as I walk past. I don't feel self-conscious about what other people looking at me might think. I buy and wear clothes that I enjoy, that allow me to move, and that I don't have to think about, regardless of the "rules" of what might or might not be "flattering."

There is, however, one area in which I still struggle: Pictures.

I LOVE pictures. I often hand my camera to James (and cringe, because, frankly, for as brilliant as that man is, he cannot take a dang photograph... and now that I think about it, it might have to do with how overstimulated he gets in loud/busy situations in that he cannot filter out superfluous information, and that's exactly what his pictures look like) or someone else and ask them to get a picture of me doing whatever we're doing, because I tend to be the recorder of memories.

However, my tendency still is to be hyper-critical of snaps of me, because... I guess I'm seeing myself from someone else's angle, and I'm not used to it, so it reveals things about me I don't see in the mirror, even though my son has fully mirrored closet doors, and we're in his floor about 10 hours a day, so I've likely glanced at myself at almost every possible angle in the past year and a half.

I'll give you an example from a couple of years ago. My friend Jana, of Jana Gross Photography, had brought her girls to our apartment to swim. She snapped this candid shot of Mal and me.

This picture is pure joy. But at first blush, my reaction to it was, "Holy crap, that arm! Those bulges! Ugh!" I had to look away from myself because I couldn't take it (it was a couple of months after this that I did my last-ditch effort to drop a few pounds, and after calorie-restricting for two months, decided I'd rather try to be happy than thinner). In the past, I'd delete pictures of myself that I did not like but knew, absolutely, that some day I would adore this picture and the moment in time that it captures with such buoyant energy.

(Incidentally, this kind of "documentary photography" is Jana's milieu, so if you need pictures that are absolutely YOU and not the same poses that are trending with every other photographer on earth, you should absolutely book her.)

And now we get to James's birthday present for me! He purchased admission to Virgie Tovar's Babecamp, It's a four-week online course to learn how to have a peaceful relationship with your body, first by examining how we got to where we are now, and then by working on tools for self-love.

If this sounds horribly self-indulgent to you, especially given that there is so much real trouble on earth, then let me assure you that dissatisfaction with my body has been an incredibly time-. energy-, money-, and talent-consuming function of my life for as long as I can remember. Ridding myself of its last vestiges frees me up to be fully present for the people and causes that mean most to me.

As an ancient example: When D was smaller, we had an absolute bedtime of 7:00 PM (which is funny; Mal just finally conked out at 11 tonight). D could read or play in bed, but had to stay there. There were countless times D would call down the hall with a random question, clearly just wanting to chat, desiring company. And I'd yell back to "go to sleep!" Because I "needed" to work out. Not because I enjoyed it. Not because the exercise brought me peace and life. Because I did not want to be as fat as I'd been in the past.

Time and time again, I chose attempting to alter the natural size of my body over building a relationship with my older child.

I'm not ever going to do that again.

Babecamp will end about a month before we go on our family vacation. I look forward to taking, and being in, a ton of pictures. Without obsessing over myself in any of them.

And many more.