Monthly Archives

September 2019

Style

Add to Cart

September 30, 2019

I’m taking a serious look at my budget lately. I’m finally getting the hang of You Need a Budget and wow-oh-wow is it a wake-up call. The amount of money we spent in September eating out ($858.70) along with the black hole I call ‘spending money’ in our budget ($706.45) made me want to crawl under a weighted blanket and suck my thumb. I never in a million years thought we spent that much, but alas we now have the receipts. YNAB is the Kim Kardashian to my Taylor Swift-esque spending sprees.

Given that and our upcoming vacation to Cabo which still isn’t fully paid for, we are on a bit of a spending hiatus for the foreseeable future and it’s a good thing. It’s forcing us to be more creative cooking at home and doing things that are fun but don’t cost much money, but that means that my shopping habit also has to go and it’s going down kicking and screaming right now. My silly brain keeps a constant loop of the latest thing I want that I think will make me happy, which is totally annoying and is what keeps me on that limitless treadmill of consumerism. I’m thinking that maybe my brain will be placated if I post a blog post of all the things I want and intend to buy someday. Then, when my brain brings it up again I can shout at it and say ‘YES, GOT IT. Don’t you remember I wrote a blog post about it?’

Also, I’m thinking that maybe you have a better handle on your budget and might have some dollars sitting around just wondering how to spend them. Is that really true? If so, can you tell me what it feels like?

Here’s my list of wants, not needs:

nadia ftf boots

Nadia Fashion to Figure boots. I want those snakeskin boots, man! Gimme! I just feel like I could make a cute fashion moment with those boots and a black bodysuit and my jean jacket. So major. Where would I wear it? No idea! I don’t really have a thigh high occasion in my life, which I probably need to fix right away.

girlfriend collective

I really, really want a workout set from Girlfriend Collective. I just see myself moving and grooving in dance class with my perfectly coordinated, Sedona-colored set with my little crop top situation. I like their give-back focus and their size inclusivity a lot, too.

albion fit black swimsuit

File this Albion Fit Eden One Piece swimsuit to things I am actually going to add to cart before our Cabo trip. The best swimsuit I’ve ever owned in my entire life came from Albion Fit. They don’t sell it anymore, but it was so very well-made, flattering, long-lasting, gorgeous. I love that suit so much, but it’s on its last leg and so it’s time for me to get a new one. I considered going to two-piece route, but I’m still working on my body confidence and know that there will be a lot less pulling and finagling if I go with the one-piece. I am so excited about this suit. Can’t wait to put it on and swim up to the bar and order a Tecate.

I could go on and on, but I will stop here as I feel like I was able to get the biggest wants in my brain on the page for now. What about you, friends? Anything you’re obsessing over that you want to share? I would be happy to take a look and validate its cuteness for you…

Images via: 1, 2, 3.  

daily diary, just for fun, Uncategorized

Mediocre at best

September 22, 2019

coookies

I recently read through my last few posts and resisted the urge to delete them. They’re just so…dramatic. I am trying to convey the most painful moments of my life (which, spoiler alert, is a decidedly un-fun undertaking) and it comes out so silly and empty, so I’m taking a break on that project for a bit until I feel like continuing it which probably means that I’ll never come back to it, just like so many projects I’ve started with gusto and then lost interest in completing.

A few months ago, I listened to Cheryl Strayed on Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations and identified with Strayed’s urge to just embrace being mediocre and to write anyway. That’s my new writing motto. I basically suck at writing, but it is the thing I like to do the most of all and so here I am, showing up again with my mediocre at best effort and trying to get a few words on the page.

With an opening like that, let’s just keep the random train thriving and I’ll just share everything that’s on my mind on this sunny Sunday as I wait for my French Onion Soup at La Boulange in Oakland.

  • I went to Santa Fe this week for work and fell in love. It’s like where I grew up in Arizona, but not hot. The average age and temperature was around 72 and I felt right at home. I wanted to go to the Georgia O’Keefe museum, but instead had to go on an intense hike with my coworkers that left me literally gasping for air at 7k foot elevation while trying to keep it profesh, pretending like I didn’t feel completely panicked inside because I couldn’t catch my breath. If I had unlimited funds, I would rent an amazing house in Santa Fe for a few months and just, like, eat Mexican food and buy expensive blankets. Maybe take up horseback riding.
  • Sometimes I think I have what it takes to succeed in this age of personal branding, especially when I get sucked into the Instagram vortex and I convince myself that it’s not even hard. Other times, I just want to throw up at the absurdity of people cultivating a following by acting on the internet in specific ways that they know will generate clicks. I vacillate between wanting to delete my Instagram app and then reading up on how to be a ‘like to know it’ influencer. Tell me I’m not the only one who feels this way?
  • I’m continuing on my spiritual growth path, reading Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment. GUYS, holy shit. To say those books are mind-bending is an understatement. I basically realized that I am making my own self miserable in my brain because I have decided that the only way I can be happy is if the external circumstances in my world that I have almost no control over line up in a way that satisfies me. Absurdity! I also listened to the Untethered Soul at Work audiobook. Talk about a punch in the gut. Choosing to view work as an act of service, where your only job is to do your job to the best of your ability, will rock your entire world. Do you realize how much brain power and energy you waste at work complaining about decisions that are made way above your pay grade? What about the energy drain that comes with hating your work and wondering if you’re wasting your life? Deciding that you are where you are and that the best decision is to make the best of it will literally change your damn life. I can’t do these books justice. Read them for yourself and let’s have a book club.
  • I saw a fireworks show last night at the A’s game and it made me so happy. I was like a giddy little child. The theme was ‘pop music’ and when they synchronized the fireworks to MMMBop by Hanson, I almost lost my damn mind!
  • This morning, Jax hurt my leg when we were playing with his ball while I was trying to pretend-meditate and I lost my cool and grabbed his nose in an aggressive way and I feel so bad about it still that I could cry just. An interaction like that proves to me that I still have a long, long, long way to go to be the person I want to be.

The original purpose of writing this post was to remind you that homemade cookies are ALWAYS a good idea on Sunday. I like to save part of the dough and make a fresh dozen mid-week when I really need a pick-me-up. I don’t bake as often as I’d like, but when I do, I tend to make these cookies. They are the Ghirardelli Grand Chip cookie recipe printed on the back of the bag. A bit of a pain to make, but they turn out so good when you follow the directions precisely.

Okay, friends. Signing off for now. I really enjoyed writing this post because it felt like I was just being me. Probably not something that anyone wants to read, but who cares? Almost no one reads this blog anyway!

How’s your weekend going? Any other random bits or bobs you want to share?

 

deep thoughts, intuitive eating, weight

My Body and Food Healing Journey, Part III: Disordered Eating Takes Root

September 8, 2019

nutty bars image

Hello there! This post is part of a series of essays where I am attempting to retrace the pivotal moments that have defined the relationship I have with food and with my body as I continue on my journey of healing, self-love and acceptance. Learn more about the project here. 

I told you all in my last essay about my first diet, the fruit cocktail and tortilla that kicked off 17 years of yo-yo dieting and restriction for me. I’d be willing to bet that my initial diet lasted less than a day. I’m sure I held strong for as long as I could and then caved in to my cravings and ate something that wasn’t prescribed. But, the seed was planted. The gauntlet was thrown down. Within a few years, I was deep in my self-hatred and some really disordered food behaviors.

I believed I was fat and that being fat was a character flaw, so I set out to ‘fix’ myself. I didn’t know that diets don’t work. The media all around me already encouraged me to restrict my food intake to improve my appearance, so it wasn’t a tough decision. I already had a strong streak of perfectionism and a knack for people pleasing, so I believed that I could work hard enough at my perceived flaw in order to make myself more acceptable.

It was just ‘calories in/calories out’, right?

I focused my energies on the ‘calories in’ side of the equation. In middle school, I went from trying to diet my way thin to straight up not eating as a means of control, my own intermittent fasting before it was a ‘wellness trend’. I would do my best to only eat dinner. Dinner was sacred at our home, the time my mom insisted that we come together as a family. Even though my family supported my weight loss attempts, I was still expected to eat dinner. I would restrict all day as best I could.

I remember that time as the ‘Nutty Bars’ chapter. Remember that Little Debbie dessert? It was peanut butter and wafer cookies enveloped in chocolate. I think my middle school sold them for fifty cents. I liked them so much that I would maybe buy one of those for ‘lunch’ and then not eat again all day until dinner. Can you imagine? I was a teenager, still growing. A Nutty Bar wasn’t going to cut it on the nutrition front for an entire day’s energy output.

I became obsessed with food. It was pretty much all I could think about. It was biological. I was restricting, but my mind was trying to feed me, so I was miserable. I would start every day promising myself that I would be ‘good’. I would be so hungry while at school that I’d have trouble focusing. Sometimes I would be able to resist eating anything. Sometimes I would get my Nutty Bar. Sometimes I would get a Nutty Bar, chips, cookies, the whole shebang. Sometimes I would come home after school and eat everything in sight because my body was screaming for adequate nutrition. My family would see it and I would assume that they were thinking I had no control.

I would agree with them.

Around that time, I used to spend the night at my best friend’s house a lot. Her mom was and still is the kindest soul. She was a labor and delivery nurse. So nurturing, so kind, so caring. She paid a lot of attention to us and she was really concerned about my posture. She never said anything to me directly about it, but my best friend would tell me about how much it bothered her mom that I walked around with my back hunched over. She didn’t want me to have health issues because I couldn’t stand up straight. I now understand that I walked around like that because I wanted to disappear. I was ashamed of myself. I hated the size of my stomach, the width of my shoulders, my thick legs. I felt subconscious all the time and I was deeply disappointed in my perceived inability to overcome the flaw of my own genetics. So, I shrunk myself down. I was trying to make myself small by any means. I folded myself in, arranged my bones to be as small as humanly possible because I hated the space I took up.

It’s so painful to write these essays and retrace the steps on my journey. Before I can get to the place where I can tell you all about the fundamental, life-changing shift that happened to me in my relationship with food, I need to try to explain to you how low down I went into my body shame. I need to remember how painful it was to walk around with my shoulders hunched. How hard it was to loathe myself for the times I fed myself well, to retrace how painful my inner emotions felt and how deeply the restriction I attempted with food affected me. I’m trying to explain the pain, but then I remember that chances are if you’re reading this, you already know.

You probably relate to my attempts to starve myself. You probably already know what it’s like to binge. You can relate to agonizing over every crumb that passes through your lips. Most importantly, you probably already understand that it’s no way to live.

So, this is the story of when the disordered eating took root. This was when it all went beyond a diet to behaviors that harmed me for years, even though I seemed happy and smiling on the outside. This was when the food obsession really ramped up and the self-hatred, too. Thankfully, it’s not the end of the journey by any means, it’s just the part where it started to hurt the most.