Wicked Wednesday: The Devil In Reverse

 

I decided to do something a little different today. I drew a Tarot card to ruminate on and got the Devil in reverse. The card is from the International Icon Tarot.

The card represents the critical factor for the issue at hand. The Devil, when reversed: Resistance of temptation. Freedom from bondage. The pursuit of higher goals despite the influence of luxury and pleasure. Release from obsession with money and power. Liberation from fear, weakness, and indecision through communion with higher powers or the inner voice.

So even though I don't think I've been doing a great job with it, the Universe seems to think that I am breaking away from my clamoring for adulation and belief that I am a loser if I am not insanely wealthy. 

I am aware that there are people who think that divination tools including the Tarot are "evil" and there are others who think they are silly. I don't think either of those things. You're welcome to think whatever the fuck you think on this subject. I don't intend to argue either way about it with you, so keep that shit to yourself and go write about it on your own blog if you are so inclined. I'm not religious but I'm not an atheist either. I don't have a problem with either atheists or religious people as long as they can be respectful of my agnostic views. 

I was going to do a little more with this, but I've realized that I'm really fucking hungry. I'm trying to (slowly) learn not to ignore my body's needs. I spent so much of my life doing that, starting as a young child when it was done out of necessity. We were really poor when I was little and my father was working towards his doctorate. We often ate horrible shit like boiled soybeans. 

If I never see another boiled soybean in my life, I'll be happy. I like other soy products like tofu. I like roasted soybeans. I cannot abide boiled soybeans. They have the same appeal as cardboard. I could choke down boiled soybeans well before I would ever eat liver and ditto raw squash, however. I love cooked squash but I really can't stand it raw. It tastes like cotton dipped in a little chlorophyll. Liver tastes like a mixture of mud and bile. It's entirely gross. When my mother cooked it, the house smelled of it for days afterward. I always fed my portion to the cat under the table.

After my father got his doctorate, we no longer had to rely on awful boiled soybeans for nutrition. We stepped up from the lower class to the middle class and we were pretty well-fed. Food restriction was still a thing though as my father didn't want to allow any sweets into the house. My father never had the proverbial "sweet tooth." The rest of us liked sweets, though, and when my mother noticed that my brother and I were sneaking candy into our rooms, she put the kibosh on my father's sweets ban.

My father was always very fatphobic, and he engaged in orthorexia, running approximately six miles a day in his prime. He ran in old-school Converse shoes. He was a big man, six foot four and around 200 pounds. Running this much without proper footwear took a toll on his spine over the years. He eventually had to have a laminectomy on several vertebrae in his lower back. By then he was severely physically handicapped because of a stroke. He was relentlessly critical of himself, often referring to himself as a "useless cripple."

I fight not to allow body shaming into my treatment of myself. I need to learn to be okay with eating when I'm hungry without policing my food choices (other than to calculate the amount of insulin I need to eat a portion of food) and without shaming, scolding, or punishing myself for having a large body.

Fuck size shaming and fuck diet culture. These are the only diet books I use.

The Fuck It Diet

https://bit.ly/FIDCIE

Health at Every Size

https://bit.ly/HAESCIE

Here is the book that helps me work on my addiction to approval.

https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

Spirit of the Universe, please help me to keep working toward self-acceptance. I don't feel like anyone will ever understand or like me and that hurts, but I realize it doesn't mean I'm less worthy of being treated decently, if only by myself. I deserve respect at whatever size I am and whether or not I am famous or wealthy. Please help me to respect myself, Spirit. Amen.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Ornery Owl

Round and All Out of Fucks to Give

Free-Use Image by Open Clipart Vectors

Hangry is ready to chow down!

Free use image from Pixabay

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

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Fat Friday #17: Do Not Ignore the Hangry

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Thanks to my decades-long abusive marriage to ED, my hunger cues are jacked, and my responses to them can be screwy too. 

Yesterday, I didn't eat all afternoon. I was busy working on things, and when I felt that little rumbly in my tumbly, I didn't do like Winnie the Pooh and grab a smackerel of Hunny. I ignored it and kept working. I learned long ago that I'm not allowed to eat unless I become absolutely ravenous, and that's a bad pattern that I tend to fall back into. I wasn't in a particularly bad place emotionally. I was on a pretty even keel with myself, in a neutral place as far as my body is concerned, which is the best that can be expected for me. I was just busy, and eating was inconvenient.

Nine o' clock at night rolled around, and I was ravenous. I had a big bag of beer-battered shrimp in the fridge. I was so hungry that all I could think of was eating everything in sight, so I cooked and ate that whole bag of shrimp.

During my entrenchment into Diet Culture, the next thing that would have happened would be for me to berate myself, call myself all sorts of horrible names, possibly spend a few hours working out to punish myself for my dieting "failure". 

In this case, I ended up saying "blah, I don't feel so good. Next time, I'll cook a regular serving and see if I want more after I eat that."

Bingeing is a natural response to food restriction, whether that restriction is deliberate or due to difficult circumstances. As Caroline Dooner points out in her marvelous book, The Fuck It Diet, your body doesn't know whether you're in the middle of a famine or simply trying to starve yourself thin enough to wear a ridiculously small bikini. It will respond the same way in either case.

By the way, you know that "hangry" feeling that happens when you're really hungry but don't have any food on hand or you're on your millionth diet that's going to Work Perfectly This Time And Make You Skinny and Hot Forever?

That feeling is telling you that YOU NEED TO EAT!

By the way, Hangry is that worm in the picture at the top of the post. He does not like to be ignored.

Do not ignore the Hangry.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Fat Friday #6: Shockingly, Concern Trolling and Size Shaming Fail To Make People Thin

Image by Dina Dee from Pixabay

This is my response to a post by This Fat Old Lady regarding the fact that children who are bullied for their size tend to gain rather than lose weight.

I surmise that part of the reason for this is because being bullied is stressful. Excess stress causes overproduction of cortisol. Excess cortisol contributes to weight gain. Cushing's syndrome is a condition which causes overproduction of cortisol. However, one need not have Cushing's syndrome to present with overproduction of cortisol.

Yes, I certainly appreciate everyone who was "concerned" over my weight and who praised me whenever I starved myself because the worst thing anyone can possibly be is fat. They did me a world of good, and I became svelte and beautiful with petite, delicate features and married a billionaire who treats me like a queen.

Oh, wait. None of that happened.

Here's what did happen.

I developed an eating disorder at twelve. I yo-yo dieted until I was 45 years old. I tried to hate myself thin for some 33 years. Shockingly, it didn't work.

At this point, I'm fat and food insecure. Even though I often eat nothing for most of the day, I'm still fat. This is probably partly due to my endocrine problems, but it's also due to the fact that eventually, the diets stop working altogether.
My hunger cues are pretty well gone. I don't feel hungry when I wake up. I start planning ways I can restrict my food intake instead.

You see, instead of the billionaire who treats me like a queen, I ended up marrying ED.

You may have guessed that ED stands for Eating Disorder.

ED praises me when I starve myself.

All ED's praise for my food restriction, whether intentional or unintentional, doesn't do doodly-squat towards making me the thin, conventionally attractive hottie that I'm supposed to be. My body refuses to lose weight at this point. I may be malnourished AF, but thin I am not. And unless what happened to my fat great-grandmother happens to me, I probably never will be.

My great grandmother was five feet tall and weighed 300 pounds. In her late 70's, she developed acute myelogenous leukemia. She dropped from 300 pounds to 95 pounds within the space of a year, and then she died. But hey, at least she cut a svelte figure in her casket, amirite? Because fat is the very worst thing a person can possibly be. Even worse than being dead.

~Cie~

Don't like my fat body?

Here's my fat finger instead.