Feminine 101

In January 2024, I began a “health journey.” This is to share where I came from, what I’ve achieved, and how I got from point A to point B. Please note, I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, or any other sort of health professional. I’m just a woman who took her health in hand and made some changes. If you wish to start at the beginning of my story, you can click here. Full disclosure: the image is AI generated.

Losing weight is tough. It is. When you have been fat for any length of time, losing weight permanently involves a total rewrite of your habits, your responses, and, to some extent, your identity. 

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I discovered I’m an emotional eater. When I get stressed, I go to the fridge. I go to the cupboard. When I’m upset, I want ice cream. When I’m exhausted, I just throw up my hands and think, “Screw it!” 

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I discovered that my willpower is trash. If there is a box of Golden Oreos in the cupboard (the regular ones require milk so they aren’t as tempting), I absolutely can and will eat the whole thing in one sitting. Did I just spend 18 months losing 50 pounds? Yes. Did I learn nothing? Apparently not.

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I discovered that I barely tasted food. I pride myself on my cooking. I’m good at it. I love knowing how to coax incredible flavors, textures, and aromas out of food in a way that my husband tells me most people can’t. Imagine my surprise to learn that I eat too fast to really savor the food. No wonder I ate too much of it. 

Confronting these realities about myself was hard. And, really, I didn’t have to until the last 20.

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See, I lost 48 pounds in roughly 9 months. The first 30 came off in 3 months. The remaining 18 took another 6 months. But then it was the holidays, followed by our busy season at work which, this year, happened to be the most physically and emotionally draining ever. And I slowly slipped backwards. I came out weighing 11 pounds more. Vacation a month later saw me back up another 3. I never actually met my original goal. But I was not going back.

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People do this, I thought. So I went looking for advice. I searched for women who lost the last 20 pounds to find out how they did it. And the ones who are truly slim? They are different from those who are simply not overweight.

And that is where I really learned things about myself. I learned that the real changes are not just in what I eat or even how much. 

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The real changes are in how I think. 

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When I was stressed or upset or tired, I had to rewire my immediate response. Food cannot be the solution to these problems. Food is not a solution. It’s a tool. When I’m stressed, I need to unwind. When I’m upset, I need quiet. When I’m tired I need rest. I started making a pot of tea to sip slowly and enjoy. I started walking, not just for exercise, but for relaxation. I started cleaning as though cleaning up a physical thing was a type of surrogate for the upset feelings. I started keeping myself busy by reading and studying. I started making time to nap if possible. When I’m stressed, my hands need something to do. I need to handle the things that get under my skin rather than using food as a coping mechanism.

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Since my willpower is trash, I need to set some guardrails in place. Translation? Don’t buy the Oreos. Don’t eat apart from meal times. This one has been huge. It’s not a “no.” Rather, it’s a, “if you really want that, put it on your plate at dinner.” Not everyone has to do this, but I found that I never put a couple of pretzels on my plate. Now, thanks to my guardrail, I don’t just grab a couple when I walk by. You don’t have to do this, but it’s an excellent way to stall unhealthy impulses. I do the same thing when shopping online: put it in the cart and walk away for a day or two.

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I now eat slowly. I put the fork or sandwich down between bites. I take smaller bites. I savor and think about the thing I’m tasting. I enjoy it! Just because my serving is a third the size of my husband’s doesn’t mean that I’m not loving it every bit as much. I take the time to taste. When I buy a donut, I don’t eat it in the car. In fact I almost never eat in the car. I wait until I get home so I can put that luscious cream-filled long john with maple glaze and crunchy nuts on a plate. And I pour myself a cup of steaming hot coffee. Then, I sit down at the table and take a decadent, indulgent bite. Then I put it down. I chew as slowly as I can manage. I swallow it entirely and rid my mouth of every crumb. Then, I take a sip of coffee. The bitterness rinses the sweet out of my mouth so that, when I take another bite, my palate is prepped for maximum deliciousness. The same can now be said of fast food. I love a cheap, sloppy fast food burger and fries as much as the next person. Instead of coffee, I drink water. And I never follow one bite of food with another. As a result, my body has time to think. My mind has time to listen to my stomach. And I find that often (especially with fast food) I only eat about half of it. I still have a hard time wasting donuts so I plan accordingly.

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It is in the last twenty, that I have really had to change. I wasn’t just changing habits or actions, but the mentality behind them. I was changing me. I now think of myself as a skinny person. I always thought that was a strange thing to say. But basically all the skinny women I sought advice from said some variation of that. I get it now. It’s not a vanity thing however some folks might hear it as such. It’s more that I don’t think like I did. I don’t think of food as more than it is. It’s not a magical formula for losing weight if you could somehow just get it right. Neither is food a mystical remedy to make me feel better or sooth away the stress. It just is. There is good–no excellent–food out there. And there is bad food out there. In some ways, because it’s not this huge, looming thing that might squash me at any minute, I even enjoy it more. But it doesn’t own me like it did before.

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No wonder not everyone is skinny.