Active Girl, Fat Girl and the Crazy Cravings Game

This week is crazy. Crazy, CRAZY, CRAZY with all of the impulsive eating I’m wanting to do and all of the impulsive eating that I’m saying no to, it’s insane! Oh my goodness. Everything I see or hear or smell prompts some kind of internal meter that immediately shoves this newest desire to the front of the line, usurping all of my previous cravings, making this interloper the newly crowned King of the Cravings whose needs must be met. Right now. One would think I was pregnant, considering all that I want to eat RIGHT NOW. (Nope, not pregnant – and never will be again. That was all negotiated into my c-section when we had baby number two. Phew!)
Today we drove past the Dairy Queen. As an adult, Dairy Queen is not a place I frequent very often at all, but when I was a kid it was the celebration place that we would go to whenever we had performed in a play or had made some awesome presentation to grown-ups outside of the school day. My go-to treat was always the Peanut Buster Parfait- hot fudge, Spanish peanuts and vanilla ice cream all topped with whipped cream! Today my inner fat girl wanted that more than anything…. On the way back from Costco, where we had seen the Dairy Queen before getting on the freeway, it was all I could talk about. Bradley mentioned that it’s ok for me to cut loose every once in a while and let myself have a peanut buster parfait, but I started going on and on about my inner fat girl and the deals I make with her.
I was reminded of Monica, from the show Friends, in season four where she finally has an opportunity to go on a date with the most popular boy from high school: Chip Matthews! Unfortunately, he is also Rachel, Monica’s best friend’s, ex-boyfriend, who treated Rachel horribly at a dance. In defending her desire to go on this date with Chip despite how awful he he had treated Rachel, Monica says:

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I totally do this! I talk my fat girl down from the ledge all the time! And I rarely let her eat! Right now I keep telling her that soon enough ‘we’ will be able to enjoy a treat of the Peanut Buster Parfait, but first ‘we’ need to get further down below 200 because I don’t want that treat to turn into poundsover 200 that I will need to re-lose. I want a cushion of 3-5 pounds below 200 before ‘we’ start celebrating with delicious ice cream treats.
We.
Did you notice that ‘we’ in there?
As I was explaining all of this to Bradley I realized the terminology of ‘we’ to describe these two, very different sides to myself. My fat girl had control for close to forty years, my active girl was the one who was hidden and buried before. We bought her hiking boots, subscribed to backpacking magazines for her, we read hiking memoirs and looked longingly at couples running around the neighborhoods together and even ventured, breathlessly, up a mountain or two, but I rarely let her speak or act out because she likes to do hard things. Things that were linked to failure and humiliation back then, and there’s nothing my fat girl hates more than failure and humiliation, so she suppressed my active girl. She won for years, decades… A lifetime.
So, now, I do tell her to shut up, sit down and chill out. She had her turn and look where it got me. Her cravings can’t be louder than my health and she will get shut down, because my active girl is in control now. I like it much better that way, but it’s been insanely hard the past few days. My inner fat girl just loves it when PMS happens. She shouts at me, all day long, for every stinking moment, all the things I could be eating and the exercise I don’t need to do. Even if I’m full, she still harasses me to eat a jelly bean or a cracker or… Anything! Like, seriously, almost anything in my mouth will please her.
But not letting her have it makes my active girl powerful and happy; just the way I like it.
(It should be noted that I have all the ingredients in my house to make the peanut buster parfait right now. I have the policy of not denying myself because I obsess, so I negotiated the ingredients so I can make mini parfaits… Good compromise, I think, and I can parfait it up for weeks! Oh goodie! LOL! Because I need that temptation around…)

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Today we headed to the beach for day three of Spring Break. Yesterday we headed down to the Tacoma Art Museum for the Georgia O’Keefe show. It’s been a really fun Spring Break! Exercise has been a bit off, but I’m hitting the veggies really hard. Tonight we had pizza, Brussels sprouts, green salad and tomato salad for dinner and by the time I was halfway finished with my veggies I was too full to eat my pizza! 🙂

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I saw this today and it fits me to a T! SO TRUE!
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The word fat is offensive and hard to swallow for some people, I realize, but I totally did that thing of owning a word that has negative connotations in the pejorative sense and shifted it to describe me in a simply descriptive way. (Like how our ethnic and LGTBQ brothers and sisters have owned the terrible names they have been taunted with.) There’s nothing wrong with fat- being fat, having fat, loving fat… I rejected myself because of my fat, rejected my husband’s love and adoration because I couldn’t trust that he loved my fat, I rejected life because of my fatness, so to use that word so casually, so normally, just as a simple adjective is quite meaningful and significant for me, so please accept my intent and lack of offense at it’s use. 🙂