proportions

It's been about a month since I stopped dieting. Forced upon me by the past year and a half of bloat and slow but steady weight gain no matter how dedicated I was to working out and to my diet.  The last successful diet was intense intermittent fasting and daily hardcore exercise, I was the tightest I'd ever been. Thin, toned, defined abs, a lovely ass.  See the thing is, I like myself when I'm thin.  As dysmorphic as my opinion of myself can be, I do know when I look good.   

It occurred to me today that it's when the proportions are right that I like myself.  I've never aimed to be rail thin. Muscle tone, a little fat in the right places, but none in the wrong ones. I last looked like that during the pandemic as I coped with the insanity like I normally do. With my need to control my diet and appearance. 

Not chewing until at least 3pm everyday and burning an average of 400 calories, I'd typically take in about a thousand calories. I'd have my wine too, some days I counted those calories, but some I didn't depending on my number of fucks left to give. A solid amount of drinking back then, but in my defense there was little else to do during quarantine, and fewer means of escape.

All of a sudden, my body just rejected it all. We were watching the Superbowl, February of 2021. Superbowl food and beverages.  Like I normally do, I grazed a little bit of this, a little bit of that.  Naughty but reserved. And that night my guts tied themselves in knots and haven't let go since.  Now I'm bloated, crampy, feel full constantly (like I do in this moment but I just finished a 60 minute long high intensity work out, with only coffee in my system since dinner last night.) It's the worst.

My guts are a mess.  

Naturally, with the demise of my control and waistline back then, I started to crack. It was a slow unravelling into the shadows but no matter what I did to stop it, I kept sliding.

Retrospectively, a lot of things were happening at once aside from my stomach and diet; promotions at work, more responsibility everywhere, being a mother, working on the house, managing my relationship with my husband, and friends... more success leads to more expectations by more people. 

It's not just about having it all, and earning it all, but it's about keeping all of it together with the cool, calm collection of a stone. Un-phased, graceful, grateful, #blessed.

Stone cracks under pressure and I know logically that anyone would have eventually broken down under all of that stress, but I really tried not to. A year of trying to backpedal and gain my control back, Nico and I were going thru it as a couple, and all I wanted was my body back but it seemed the more I tried to fix things and control things, the more everything just hurt and the less my body responded to any of it. It was just clinging to everything, trying to protect itself from more famine. From more threat and stress. My system was on overload and after fighting it off for as long as I could, I acquiesced.  I let it come.

I let the demons come, I let the fear wash over me. I stopped restricting. I went from doctor to doctor to address my digestive issues, nothing but clean bills of health and strong warnings from each of them that I needed to watch my stress. The stress was killing me.

I never understood that. Like, what am I supposed to do to lower my stress? Not be a good mother? Not work hard? Not keep myself in shape? Not live up to the expectations? Care less? HOW.  I just didn't know how to help myself anymore.  So I stopped trying.

It's been a month, maybe a little more, and I'm intentionally not dieting. Under the logic of The Fuck It Diet, 25 years of dieting is bad for the body, the mind, the soul. All I've ever known is restriction and starving or exercising my feelings away. I'm not a binger- never have been. So what does not dieting look like? Pretty sure I at this point eat like a normal person eats. I still stick to protein bars, salads, a snack here and there, then dinner. I work out four times a week. But my body will not let go of anything I eat.  It's like its trying to feed all the years of hunger and I'm up 13 pounds. I shudder.

I have to let the proportions of my life level out and be ok if that throws off the proportions of my body. The mirror shows me letting go of control, what nourishing myself looks like. You can see it in my face, in my core. I'm still muscular but it's all just not tight anymore. No bones, no more defined muscles. Its hard for me to see but I am constantly reminding myself that this is ok and that it has to be.

I'm not letting myself go, what I'm doing is letting all the bullshit go and grabbing onto myself. I want to eat, to live, to move, to feel but to not feel that I do those things at the expense of my control.  Forever my value has been constrained to my thinness and impressiveness. And I can't do it anymore.

I can't have Vienna watching me run myself into the ground worried about the perfection of it all.  She's too close to the age I was when I fell victim to this and I need to break the chain. The most important thing I give her will be this and the ironic thing is the better I do, the less likely she'll know what I did for her. It'll be off her radar if I'm successful at finding a way to feel comfortable in my own skin. I want nothing more for my daughters than for them to feel comfortable in theirs.

The only way I'll be appreciative of all I've built for my life is truly if I appreciate myself for having done it. I have to stop punishing myself and hating myself because I've gained weight or I'm not good at something.  I can't care if people aren't impressed by my presentation. I can't expose my daughters to this toxicity. 

I say all this and mean it. I really do. I hope one day I actually get there, but even as I sit here and write this there is still part of me that longs for thinness and beauty.  Who still believes that the feeling of turning heads and gaining everyone's approval tastes better than food. Who worries the added weight will turn my husband off. 

Maybe I'm disproportionately worried but I have to let that fear go too.