Baking Bread

I have the week off in between my old job and my new job, and I’m doing so much. I’m taking driving lessons, I’m walking a sick friend’s dog, I’m kissing my cats on their adorable little heads…

And I’m baking bread!

Last year on my birthday my fiance bought me a book on baking bread. I was excited, but almost every recipe called for sourdough starter, and I didn’t feel like I had time to embark on that project until this week off.

When I started committing to Intuitive Eating and The Fuck It Diet, the first food I found myself craving and allowing was bread. Good bread from a French bakery, every day, without guilt or shame. Something about a hearty piece of bread seems so nourishing and satisfying for me. Being “allowed” to eat bread without guilt was the first amazing step on this process for me.

Baking bread feels similarly nourishing. I love to cook, but there’s something special about baking bread. You take such basic ingredients (mostly flour and water) and you knead it with your hands and then you have this basic building block of food that people have been eating ever since they could make flour.

Diet culture spent so long telling me I was “bad” for eating carbs, especially refined carbs like bread, but bread seems like such a basic human right.

I’m happy to be baking bread today.

About to go into the oven

DRESS DAY!!!!

My wedding dress is arriving today. The original deadline they gave me was May 28, so it’s in earlier than expected.

This will also be the very first time I’ve seen my dress! I designed it with Anomalie, and so far I have only seen a sketch. I am so excited and also so scared!

I have no idea if it will fit! Ever since I truly committed to Intuitive Eating and The Fuck It Diet I haven’t weighed myself so I really don’t know the status of my weight. Most of my clothes still fit so I feel like maybe the dress will fit? But, I’m really committing myself to the idea that even if the dress doesn’t fit that is totally okay. Alterations are a thing and everyone gets them.

Wish me luck! According to UPS tracking it should be here sooooooon!!!!!!

Here’s what I’m wearing until then:

VBO 2day

I’m extremely psyched on my outfit today and partially because it REALLY shows my body.

How exhausting was it in the past to try on a million things and getting DISGUSTED every time the folds of the fat of my human form weren’t completely obscured? It was REALLY exhausting!

This body acceptance and food acceptance (and weight gain) journey has made me kind of psyched on showing off the things that previously I thought of as imperfections.

My wedding dress will be here SOON and we’ll see how it goes, but I’m promising not to freak out if my body is visible, as is.

The Story Of This Dress

Hi! This is me in my body today:

The crazy thing about this dress today is that it is the actual same dress that I wore at my actual Bat Mitzvah over 20 years ago. It was the dress I was wearing when I stood on the bimah with the same rabbi who is going to be marrying me in less than 5 months.

When I was 13 I was teeny tiny. I was an extremely skinny and waifish child and ate huge amounts of food while still being almost distressingly skinny. That’s the body I had when I wore this dress for the first time… I barely had hips or a butt and had the nickname “Breadstick” among my “summer friends” in Vermont.

Today, 20ish years later, this dress still fits and I feel like it still looks great on me, just in a much different way. My butt really pops and the curves of my tum definitely are visible but it feels nice to wear.

Stretchy clothes are amazing because they fit at many different sizes and I like that. I have liked wearing this dress at many different weights and I like it today.

My Wedding Dress Is Coming Soon!

…and I’m trying really hard not to be stressed about it!

This whole thing started because I found myself obsessively dieting **in secret** out of fear the most expensive dress I’ve ever bought wouldn’t fit me when it got here. I felt the closest I’d felt to my eating disorder in years.

I really had no idea that wedding planning would help me embrace a completely new way of life through Intuitive Eating and accepting my damn self exactly how I am, even if that means weight gain. It was a huge shock and it’s a beautiful surprise.

But D(ress)-Day is getting closer and I’m going to potentially be up against one of the harder moments of this whole dang thing.

But I am looking cute today and that is coooool.

I Am Mad!

I have learned over the past few months that a big part of healing from trauma is getting angry. I’ve spent so much time feeling like everything was my fault. A lot of the liberation from this is getting mad at what is really going on.

So lately I’m super mad at diet culture! And internalized fatphobia! And explicit fatphobia! And “health” obsession! And bogus “science facts” about “obesity” and BMI and everything else! I’m mad that so much of my life was spent believing this stuff because it was more comfortable to continue hating myself than to question it.

It kind of sucks! I feel like now that I’m aware I see diet culture and fatphobia every single place I look and I hate it. But I guess the only thing I can do is battle the Food Police and Fat Police in my own brain and stop myself when I start to say mean things about my body and remember that this shit runs deeeep.

Anyway, here I am in a flower sweater today! It’s almost May!

A Place Both Wonderful & Strange

Me in one of my best Twin Peaks sweaters

This article was a good read today.

A few months ago I was desperately trying my last ditch efforts at fixing my “problems” with Weight Watchers, so it’s pretty wild that I spend a ton of my time right now dismantling my inner fatphobia and reading up on fat positivity and fat activism. This was not what I expected.

In this process you encounter a lot of concern trolls — people who are so married to their idea that “thin” means “healthy” and “good” and “pure.” This is one of the same reasons it’s so hard to embrace Intuitive Eating… because these concern troll messages are so embedded in us from diet culture… “I can’t stop dieting because then I won’t be healthy.” It’s a freaking trap!

Even though I feel soooo convinced that I am on the right path now and that dieting will kill us all, when someone comes back at me with “butttttt that’s unhealthy, didn’t you know [insert any debunked fatphobic “scientific stat” that people think is 100% true even though no research says it is],” I tend to get a little flustered.

I’m trying to collect some links to stuff like the article I linked above for a quick copy-pasta retort.

Anyone got any favs?

xoxo