Healthy or Thin?

I was really conflicted about posting my eats for the day on the day after my last gluten attack. The meals were small, and yes, that’s as much as I can get down when I accidentally eat gluten. But I usually eat WAY more, and I didn’t really mean for the only post on my blog that chronicles everything I eat in a day to be an abnormal day and such tiny meals. I thought about posting a picture of my lunch today (bowl of soup, turkey and goat cheese sandwich, pickles, and a bowl of popcorn) to “prove” that I eat normal sized meals, but I decided it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. There’s a little voice in my head that tells me that I should eat tiny meals like that everyday and that I’m getting fat. Most of the time I’m really good at ignoring that voice, and listening to the more reasonable one that tells me to take good care of myself and eat as much good, nourishing food as I want. I think I got a little confused on those days that I wasn’t feeling well, when those voices overlapped.

It was not that long ago that I paid more attention to the mean, name calling voice that tells me to eat less. Months went by that I ate nothing but oatmeal and salads, and yeah, after I started eating less restrictively, I gained about 5 pounds, but I’ve maintained the same weight for over a year now without restrictive dieting.

That’s important to me. Nothing makes me angrier than that stupid quip about “there’s no food that tastes as good as skinny feels.” It is not true! To me, food is something to be enjoyed and savored – even if it means an extra five pounds. It feels way better to me to be able to go to restaurants and order whatever I want than to obsess about every calorie that passes my lips in order to feel skinny. Oh, and that’s another thing – even when I was 5 pounds lighter, I still didn’t “feel skinny.” I felt crazy and diet-obsessed.

And it’s really sad to me that we live in a world where that’s the norm. Where we’re “being good” when we eat nothing but oatmeal and salad, or “being bad” and eating whatever we want to. I try to eat whatever I want to. All the time.

Like that bowl of popcorn I mentioned earlier – inspired by Katie, it was drizzled with tahini and maple syrup. I loved the sweet-salty combo!

And another thing – the way we women diet and make ourselves crazy about thinness is not healthy. A lot of the things we do to ourselves in order to achieve thinness are not healthy. As an example, one of my coworkers did the HCG diet a few months ago – the diet is a 500 calorie/day regimen, and the dieter takes a pregnancy hormone to “suppress appetite.” But the first couple of days on the diet, the dieter is instructed to binge to “trick” their bodies into burning calories faster. Sounds pretty fishy to me.

ANYways, my coworker who was on it got incredibly sick, like lost control of her bowels for a while sick, and even though she lost 7 pounds, she’s put it back on since ending the diet. But here’s the really sick part – she encouraged another of my coworkers to do the diet, too, because she lost weight, therefore, it works!

I’ve done stupid stuff to my body in effort to lose weight. But I’ve also lost weight in a healthy way. I got a little crazy somewhere down the line, but where I am now, I value being healthy over being thin. Since I allow myself to eat whatever I want (well, most of the time — I’m still a work in progress) and not worry about whether I’m “being good” and “eating healthy,” I don’t call my current weight my healthy weight. I call it my happy weight.

I’m by no means claiming to have this all figured out. Or claiming to be 100% healthy either. What I am saying is that there’s a balance between binging and dieting, and somewhere in that balance, real health. That’s what I’m trying to find.