Sep 29

Sep 29 Permission granted.

I ate grilled cheese.

And potato chips.

I know, I know. This shouldn’t seem like that big of a deal.

But it is.

Because I gave myself full permission to do it.

See, I’ve been in a restricted eating state for at least a year.

(Carbs have been bad. Dairy has been questionable. 30 grams of protein per meal has been non-negotiable.)

But - if I am honest - I’ve actually been restricting my eating since I was twelve years old, because I started comfort-eating when I was nine to deal with emptiness, isolation, and abandonment.

So I had the dubious honor of being the chubbiest girl in my third grade class.

In short, this trauma runs deep. And it’s clear from a variety of signs that it is wanting to be fully seen.

I began questioning restrictive eating only very recently, when I started following @demtra.nyx on Instagram.

She has gone from 133 pounds to over 200 pounds.

On purpose.

She’s been documenting the whole thing.

I’ve been watching on in horror as she has allowed herself to recover from a well-disguised restrictive eating disorder by intentionally eating whatever she wants, as much as she wants.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her process. I consumed her entire blog in two evenings.

I was full of my own judgements:

She can’t trust this because she is eating foods that are ‘addictive’ to the brain - she is binging!
She is going to regret this later
We aren’t meant to feel fat! This is an excuse for indulging her compulsions
I don’t like feeling like my clothes are tight, so my Truth is to honor thinness, because I like feeling ‘light’ and ‘free’ in my body

In short, I decided her process was not for me, but that I could be in support of it because it was what was true for her.

And then. And then.

My script suddenly flipped.

I read about Orthorexia.

Orthorexia is an unhealthy focus on healthy eating, characterized by:

Obsessive checking of ingredient list and nutritional labels
Avoidance of certain types of foods consumed
Excessive time per day spent managing food intake (measuring, counting calories, meal planning, etc)
High level of stress when ‘healthy’ foods are not available
Critical thoughts of self and others when not eating ‘good’ food; anxiety surrounding bad foods
Resentment when ‘not allowed’ to exercise
Obsession with sticking to an exercise routine

Ok so, full stop, this is me.

It took me a minute to come to terms with this, because I thought I was sealing up the energy leak by avoiding foods that made me feel guilty.

But, in Truth, the energy it takes to avoid those foods is the energy leak.

(And I literally just wrote a post two weeks ago about how I don’t believe in ‘intuitive eating’ because it’s allowing us to consume foods that are like drugs in the brain, which distorts our survival drive causing us to binge on these foods, unable able to trust our own cravings. I also just posted before / after photos of all my ‘amazing’ progress from being obsessed with food and exercise. This is why I also say that being in sovereignty is also about reserving the right update your beliefs as needed to reflect what is True for you as it evolves.)

Needless to say, I had some work to do.

So the first thing I did was the karmic integration process:

I felt my fear of fatness in my body.

First, it felt uncomfortably HUGE. Like being too BIG for others’ comfort level. Taking up too much space. Almost, like, not ‘pretty’ and ‘feminine’.
Then, deeper, it felt like anger - “not fair!” it yelled. “Why are all the other third grade girls so much cuter and tinier than me!”
Then it felt like embarassment. The ‘fatest girl in the class’ type of embarrassment. The way I would bend over on my walk to the pool pretending I was scratching my leg so that no one would have a full view of my body (I was nine, people). This shameful thought: What did my fatness convey to others about me?

And then. And then.

It felt like pure terror.

Terror of how the rug was getting pulled out from underneath me at 9 years old by the adults in my life. Confusion. Bewilderment. Getting emotionally gut-punched over and over at the mercy of outside, much older influences.

I got that on a subconscious level I equate being fat with my world falling apart.

This was eye opening for my conscious awake adult self.

See, I am in service to the divine feminine path, which means being comfortable with loss (because the more comfortable we are with loss, the more power we have).

The more I felt into this, I realized inside of this program was fear of the greatest loss of all:

The loss of control.

Unrelated (but totally related), I went out to dinner with Christian a couple days later.

I ate way too much chili con queso.

When I got home the energy of fatness was so big it knocked me to my literal knees.

I sobbed, wracked with All That terror. And I physically processed 33 years of stored pain.

And then I allowed it to breathe:

This fat feeling.

What would it feel like to allow it? Give it space? To breathe into it even more space? To expand it out with my inhale?

Instead of trying to resist it by escaping into my mind with all the ways I was going to punish it and control it and make it pay.

Without wanting to cut my body parts off and crawl out of my skin.

It was so uncomfortable.

And then. And then.

It was euphoric.

It was true ‘light’ and ‘free’.

I got that my definition of fat is based on a completely arbitrary scale. Certainly not mine. Who says what’s fat and what’s thin? And who says that one is better than another?

If I don’t like feeling fat in my clothes it’s because society celebrates teeny, tiny clothes that are uncomfortable when I eat ‘too much’ (another subjective definition - who says what’s too much?).

The clothes our fashion industry promotes are like an energy vice; they are trying to compress us.

My fight to be at 120 pounds is actually based on nothing valid. It’s lunacy.

Who’s authority am I seeking the approval of here? Trying to be the good girl for? And based on what objective scale that actually means anything?

My quest for 120 is actually meaningless.

And it’s certainly not based on my own inner authority. I’ve given my power away to some weird, random, nebulous power outside of myself.

But as long as I am chasing this number (and pretending I’m not), I’m not meeting the part of me that’s actually in pain. That’s terrified of life and losing control of it.

The Work gets sugar-coated by my avoidance of sugar.

When I eat the sugar, I have the opportunity to go there.

What’s inside of that guilt, that shame, that resistance? Who’s there puppeting the strings? What does that little girl have to say? Can I give her a seat at the table (and tell her it’s ok to eat)? Can I hold her? Soothe her?

If I am in diet restriction and exercise indulgence, none of This actually gets dealt with.

I feel like I am finally waking up from a bad dream where everyone is obsessed with making themselves disappear, trying to shrink themselves smaller, and prove to the world how ‘good’ they are by needing less food and taking up less space.

At best, it’s a do-loop distraction that gets us nowhere on our spiritual awakening journey (until the misery of it gets to be enough that we are willing to really take a look at it).

At worst, it’s insanity.

I am starting to get that our culture obsession with thinness is control programming. Like drinking.

Big diet and big alcohol are as toxic as big pharma and big tobacco.

But they are more insidious, subtle, sneaky, and manipulative, because society still condones them as ‘good’.

(Random trivia to highlight the craziness: did you know that before the 1900’s, cellulite was just known as female skin? There was no charge about it at all. Which means cellulite is deeply, richly, softly, innately feminine. Denying it is akin to us trying to reject and get rid of our boobs!)

At Demetra’s reco, I started reading a book called The Fuck It Diet (which, of course, is not a diet at all).

The biggest Truth Bomb for me is how insane it is that I’ve been using my mind to dictate what my body needs.

Um, last I checked, that’s supposed to be my body’s domain.

Taking this a step further…

Energetically, the mind is masculine and the body is feminine.

The masculine is meant to be in service to the feminine, not her master.

But when I research food plans to determine how I should eat, I am using my ego masculine (my own inner patriarchy) to oppress my divine feminine.

My feminine knows exactly what the fuck she needs.

She does’t need a ‘man’ to tell her. Or to - god forbid - violate her by forcing her into compliance without her permission.

Just, NO.

So I am giving my body her power back.

I will not say I am comfortable with gaining 75 pounds (but the fact that I am not holds information for me, and I will continue to meet myself there in the discomfort to sit with her and hold her).

I will not even say I am comfortable with gaining five pounds. In truth, I am afraid of my hunger. I am afraid she is insatiable.

And what if she is?

But pandora’s box has been opened. I cannot unsee what I have awoken to. And this is up big for me right now.

It’s my main work.

It’s so old, it’s so deep. In my case, it’s absolutely ancestral. It’s a core freaking wound.

And it’s time to let the puss out.

So I will share my process, my progress, and my insights as I go.

And, for now, I am ready to lay down my food restriction in terms of foods I have to avoid or foods that I have to eat when I don’t want to (fuck you, protein shake!):

I surrender my macros. My measuring. My counting.

In the past I have done this hoping that ‘intuitive eating’ would actually be another diet plan and somehow I would magically arrive at my dream weight.

But this time I know it’s because it will confront me and trigger parts of myself that have been told to stay in the closet, so that I can see them and invite them out into the sunlight of my compassion and awareness.

So that I can be a grand space-holder for them on behalf of myself, my lineage, my past lives, and all women (and men) who’ve ever felt this much conflict with their bodies.

I am ready to sit with the parts of myself that are expanding.

No matter how uncomfortable it is.

And to say that if my body wants a grilled cheese, I will feed it to her:

Permission fully granted.