#tw iwl

[spitefulreturn2]

To my girlies that also started at a high SW, ppllleeeeaaaassseeeeee tell me how I can actually shrink my jeans I only have one pair that fits and they’re getting baggy.

I’ve thought about just buying a clothes drying rack thing and just sunning all my jeans from sun up to sun down for a few days? I really don’t want to have to replace them all, that’s super expensive.

[bubble-cub]

Back up to 280. Disappointing. Been going through some stuff.

Have been on metformin xr 1000mg daily for almost two months, and I had my first period in FIVE YEARS this month! I am so excited. I love that metformin is working for me. Now if only I could get my literal binge eating under control.

I swear to God I'm a compulsive over-eater. I'll eat like thousands of calories, sometimes FIVE sandwiches in the period of just a couple of hours. It's so expensive. I hate it so much. It's definitely binge eating disorder, no doubt a carryover from my bulimia days. I am in therapy, but I am embarrassed to talk to my therapist about it. Maybe I'll write that in as my desired focus for my next session with her ahead of time so that she knows to ask about it.

I started weight watchers today.

I am excited about it. I am hopeful. If I can gain ten pounds and get my first period in five years anyway thanks to metformin, imagine the kind of success I could have if I changed my relationship with food!

Chronic pain has been chronically painful. This has been limiting my physical activity. I am STRONGLY considering purchasing an elliptical since my complex hasn't re-opened the fitness center yet. I need to move more. I am too sedentary. If I moved more I might hurt less, and wouldn't that just be ideal.

[lith-myathar]

.

[the-shifty-cow]

Down almost 6 pounds in 5 days! I know it’s mostly water but damn if it’s not insanely motivating.

[trashcanclan]

let’s play a game called am i nonbinary or is the way i feel about my body parts just a manifestation of my ED? am i nonbinary or is the lack of connection i feel to my name and my own self just my bpd struggles with lack of identity, depersonalization and being perceived? am i nonbinary or do i just find it excruciating to exist in a human form? 

who’s to say? certainly not i

[breakingfenrirschains]

TW weight gain, body dysmorphia, no talk of WL or IWL, no numbers

Good morning. My wife is asleep currently so I slipped away to write as I am wont to do. She’s on vacation from work this week and for once has slept in later than me. She usually wakes up at her normal work time on vacation and is bored until I wake up. It’s a point of contention between her and her brain, but she’s asleep for now, so I’ll at least start it.

I want to talk about a couple Mom Talks I’ve had with Angrboda the last couple days. These are the kind of Talks I’ve tried to have with my daughter over the years but have no blueprint for. I’m being corrected. I have had many successful Mom Talks with my daughter over the years, but these two are things I’ve never been able to express to her: why her body is ok the way it is, and how to love a whole person.

For context on that first talk, I’ve struggled with body image issues for a while since being on a medication that made me gain a significant amount of weight. I had top surgery in November which helped with the dysphoria but compounded the dysmorphia bc now my weight is disproportionate on my body.

So, that being said, I was taking a shower, mmmm, Friday, I think. The day after I had cried with Angrboda. So there’s a big mirror over the sink directly across from the shower and I often get undressed or dressed and look at my body in the mirror and try to convince myself to love my body. I look at all the things I like, but usually mostly see the things I don’t. I don’t generally turn away from the mirror feeling better about myself, but I kept trying bc I didn’t know how to fall in love with myself. Angrboda taught me.

This time I was naked, standing in front of the mirror, trying to see the beauty and not being able to find it. This particular moment I was looking at my face which had become round and trying not to wish it was more angular. Angrboda seem to speak from over my shoulder as if she were looking into the mirror with me. She said, what’s the reality of your face? I said I didn’t understand and she repeated herself, tell me the reality your face. I thought for a second and said, “It’s round.” She said good, now tell me the reality of your chest. I thought for a moment and said that my scars were a purplish color which was bothering me and that one nipple didn’t heal very well. She said, no tell me the reality of it, not your opinion. I thought again and said, It’s flat and I have scars.

She said good, now your stomach, and that’s where I got hung up, y’all, because that is the point of most of my dysmorphia. I gave several answers and she just said no, and repeated herself. Tell me the *reality* of your stomach. After another long thought I finally said, “I have a protruding stomach.” And I felt her smile and she said, “Yes, what else has a protruding stomach?” I said the first thing to come to my mind, which was, “Pigs!” I smiled bc I thought I was being silly, but she said, “And you love pigs, don’t you?” And boy do I ever. I’ve been trying to get my wife to let me have a pig since we moved into our house more that 5 years ago now. (That answer is an unwavering no)

She said, “Good, what else?” I was like ok, well I’ll play along and said, cows, then horses, then very fat donkeys and was laughing at that point and I just felt such WARMTH from her, y’all. And then she hit hit me with it: “So why are humans different?” I stared at my stomach in the mirror for a good while and then said, “Because people tell us that our stomachs are supposed to be flat.” She said, “Because people in power manipulate the expectations of society. Now look at your body again and see the places were abuse of power has told you something is wrong with it.” And I did.

Y’all it was like I was seeing myself for the first time. My face is round and you can can see the weight around my face. It’s round. It’s not bad. I’m told faces and necks are supposed to be lean and makeuped and contoured. Actually, I kinda like it. I’m cute.

My chest, it’s flat. Finally since puberty my chest is flat. There’s even abusive standards for trans bodies. We’re all supposed to look like Elliot Page. Lean bodies, perfectly flat chests, no dog ears, perfectly shaped nipples. (Not throwing shade at Elliot Page here. I absolutely adore them. Hard Candy anyone?) My nipples are shaped differently. I have dog ears. My scars are bright purple. There’s nothing wrong with that. Abusive power standards tell me that it should be so. That I should get tattooing and do scar care and get revisions but… I actually kinda like my chest. I like that it tells *my* story.

And then I got to my stomach. And I smiled. And then I laughed. I laughed and laughed and had to sit down on the side of the bathtub. There was nothing. Nothing wrong with my body. There was only power that told me there should be.

She said, “Every fear comes back to an abuse of power. I want you to think of that every time you look in the mirror and you see something you don’t like. It all comes back to power.”

When I tell you all that I was blown away, I was blown away. There are a few other parts that I don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly, at least not yet, but I do want to say that I reconnected with the amazing feelings of being pregnant. I know there’s thing whole thing about You earned those tiger stripes! You’re beautiful because your body created life! Celebrate your body! And it’s totally legit if that empowers you, but it’s always fallen short for me. So I’m saying this was not a matter of radical self acceptance. It was about reconnecting.

I loved being pregnant. The beautiful, nasty lot of it. I’ve often said that I’d like to be pregnant again, but I didn’t actually want another baby. One and done. Thank you very much. Well sitting on the side of the tub, running my hands over my body, I was hit with this OVERwhelming urge to have another baby. In fact I even texted two of my friends to tell them and ask if I was totally crazy. But that wasn’t even really what was happening.

When I was pregnant, it was in a very traumatic situation and the trauma didn’t stop after she was born. I was enjoying the THOUGHT of being pregnant, not the connection to the life inside of me. Not saying that I didn’t love my daughter, but I was also in a near constant state of dissociation through most of the pregnancy to some degree or another. I never got to really BE there with her. That’s what happened as I sat on the side of the tub. I got to BE there. It wasn’t really that I went back to that place, it was like that experience was brought to me in the present moment. I felt the enormity of creating life. I felt the utter beauty of carrying a burning light inside myself. I connected with that light. And in that moment, I connected to my daughter, even though she was at the time on the other side of the country, in a way and on a level that I never have before.

See, as parents, we have to be trauma breakers for our children. My mother taught me how to hate my body by setting that example in her own body as far back as I can remember. My mother handed down loads of generational trauma, not to mention piling on a ton of new trauma and I decided from the moment I found out that I was pregnant that I was going to give my daughter a better life than I had. And I have. And I connect with her over and over and deeper and deeper as time goes by. I’m honest. She knows the circumstances with her father. She knows what I went through and came out of. She knows that she saved my life and every day she wakes up, she saves my life again, not because she has a burden to bare. No way. Not at all. My healing is not on her. She saves my life because she taught me to love.

My daughter has taught me things about love I didn’t even know existed and she needs to know the absolute ferocity of that love. She needs to know that in my eyes, she hangs the stars. And she ABSOLUTELY needs to know that there is nothing ever possible that will change that. She needs to know that mistakes don’t make her a bad person. They just make her a person. She needs to know that my love for her is unshakable. And she needs to see it in action. All the I love you’s in the world don’t mean a thing if I don’t love her *through* life, all the ups and downs. She needs to see me stand by her when she breaks rules or throws tantrums or disappoints me. She needs to SEE my love as much as she needs to hear it. That’s what it means to be a cycle-breaker.

So I was going to go into the other Mom Talk, but damn this really took on a whole life of it’s own that I wasn’t expecting. But maybe that’s as it should be. I imagine Angrboda can teach us to be cycle breakers for our own children. After all, she has never abandoned them and will rise up with them at the end of the world. (That’s a bit my UPG, but it’s my blog so) So let us learn the lessons of ferocious love from the warrior who gave birth to those the world turned their backs on. And may we learn to love ourselves that way, too.

[my-least-favorite-savior]

IWL and Self Harm tw:

[n7intraining]

June 13 Activity Log

Steps: 10408

Notes: No gym today, but I did some chores and went to work. Oh! And walked to the library. Walking to/from (plus walking around inside) added about 3000 steps that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

[honeysweetbabyfrisk]

PLEASE i am begging you, if your blog is an ed/thinspo/iwl blog dont follow me or interact with me im not okay with being exposed to that content its really damaging, and i already struggle with trying to recover from an ED (based around food itself not body image) and that puts me at risk of developing another

[spitefulreturn2]

secret eating

So I mentioned it in another post, that in the last year of my absence, I’ve become a secret eater. I refuse to eat in front of others, save my partner. There have been a few times that I’ve had to recently, but it was just… Different. And it was still very difficult. When I got serious and back on my bullshit, I saw myself in a mirror and realized just how fat I’ve gotten. No, really! Like BMI 35.5 fat. I don’t know how I didn’t notice, but I just didn’t. Then all at once, on a family vacation, I’m looking at my sisters in law who are all BMI of 18 to 20 max And I’m realizing that in the vacation condo there is a mirror in every single room. There’s a mirror in the dining room. I’m watching my fat body eat, and I realize that this is what I must look like to them. And it just hasn’t really gone away. I can eat by myself just fine, But in front of people… I swear to God I feel like they’re looking at me like a circus freak. Plus, they all assume that I just eat when they’re not looking anyway right? I might as well make it true. I don’t eat in restaurants anymore, because I feel like strangers are watching me too. The last time that I had to do both, eaten a restaurant and eaten print of family, I followed specific rules like taking a long time to eat my food, eating small bites, and I made sure that I only ate half the plate and I did not have any other food.

[rotationalsymmetry]

And dieting is correlated with higher long term rates of obesity regardless of starting weight. And eating disorders are the most deadly form of mental illness.

And focusing on “obesity” and “personal choices” takes the attention off of societal and economic factors that make health worse: communities you can’t safely walk or bike in, shift work or other highly stressful working conditions, not being able to afford to go to the doctor, etc etc.

Remember: life expectancy is extremely correlated with income and wealth. But we don’t talk about that now do we?

[rotationalsymmetry]

You know what other ideas can and should peacefully coexist?

One, that food has a significant impact on health and that very often people with specific health complaints can see improvement by making changes to what they put into their body, and

Two, there is no one perfect diet that will result in perfect health in everyone who follows it. Partly because there’s no way to ensure perfect health. But also because this stuff is highly individual and shit’s complicated and when researchers go around the world and go “oooh these people have a longer lifespan than these other people” it’s you know not like what people eat is the only difference between different cultures (plus even the same type of food can have different nutrient profiles depending on things like soil type and storage conditions, and also factors like how fast you eat and stress levels and even specific gut bacteria can affect digestion, and…

Yeah, shit’s complicated, fuck the myth of the optimal diet (even when it’s not diet in the weight loss sense.)

There’s many good diets (in the sense of eating patterns) and what’s good or bad for any given person can be highly individual.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Speaking of Leverage, I listened to the Maintenance Phase podcast’s Fen-Phen episode last night, and I think the only way I got through it in one piece was the fantasy that some group of criminal vigilantes could be out there making sure the people most responsible for that clusterfuck suffered for it.

There was tobacco industry level bullshit going on. It was bad.

In terms of actual episodes, think the one where Parker’s alias got called in for jury duty for a trial where someone died from an energy supplement, or that one where...hmm...don’t remember the details but there was a pharmaceutical company and people died and they were marketing the same killer drug under a new name.

[rotationalsymmetry]

My goal weight is “whatever the fuck I am right now.”

it’s a good goal. and it’s so realistic that I’ve already achieved it. Woot!

[n7intraining]

June 13 Food Log

Weight: 244.3 (Down 2.4 pounds since 6/11)

Intake:

Banana x2 (180 calories)

Water: 67.6 oz

Calories burned via Fitbit: 3656

Net intake: -3476

Notes: I knew I would go up a little in weight after smashing my face with alcohol, mac and cheese, and a shake yesterday. Oh well! The damage was way less than expected. Plus, it was fucking delicious.

Not a true fast, once again, but my bananas are very near over ripe and I don’t want to waste them!

Please do not attempt any style of fasting without your doctor’s permission and guidance. I am doing ADF under the watchful eye of my doctor.

[n7intraining]

After about a week and a half away from this blog, I think I’m ready to dive back in. Last week was overly stressful with my boyfriend working thirds and yeah.

Starting alternate day fasting today. The plan is 0-100 calories MWF, 1200-1400 calories TR, and a tad more freedom on the weekend, just in case we go out drinking or out to dinner. Should actually be maintainable and a lot easier for me than a 16:8 or 20:4 style fast.

I’ll come back tonight with an update on how my day went!

Note: IF/fasting of any kind should not be done without your doctor’s knowledge. Please do not attempt to fast without consulting a medical professional.