Losing Sixty-Five Pounds Gradually

You can find information on Candlemas at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/ and Valentine’s Day at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-day/

I wrote this back in 2007. That’s ten years and a lot of healing ago.

A couple of months ago, my doctor told me that my blood sugars were inching up and recommended I eat lower on the glycemic index. This means eating foods that release their nutrients slowly, rather than flooding the body and causing a quick rise in blood sugar.

Choosing appropriate foods is not rocket science. Lots of fresh veggies and fruit, beans, meat, and fish. Cook only with olive oil. Reduced fat dairy products and mayonnaise. Avoid white rice and flour – brown rice and whole wheat flour is fine. Avoid fried foods and stuff made by huge conglomerates that care about their profits but not their customers’ health.

Intellectually, it’s real easy and I know exactly what to do. On an emotional level, though, it’s a different story. I just don’t understand eating. I don’t get that what I do this minute will have consequences in an hour or a day or a week. Perhaps that’s because my sense of time is so distorted that things don’t seem connected. If I plant a package of morning glory seeds, it doesn’t feel like I will have twenty magnificent morning glory seedlings in a few weeks. It feels like I’ve just wasted $2.19 by burying those little brown thingies.

My favorite comfort foods are all bad for me. Pasta, white bread with butter, donuts, potato chips, Coke. My little parts want all of those at the same meal, and lots of them.

If I get anxious, I tend to eat quickly, thoughtlessly, and therefore over-eat. If I get really upset, I just stop eating entirely. It isn’t a decision: I have no appetite and just can’t wrap my mind around the idea of putting stuff in my mouth and swallowing it. I get all freaked out by the idea that I am hollow inside. Weird, eh?

I know that many people without abuse histories have some of these same attitudes. I also know that many, many abuse survivors have far more severe eating problems than I do, often to the point of being life-threatening. But these things still bug me on a daily basis. My attitudes, beliefs and behaviors around food all feel choppy and fragmented, rather than integrated into a smoothly working process.

I’m also reminded on a daily (minutely?) basis of another result of my abuse, a life-long depression. Back in the days of tricyclics I put on eighty pounds that I have not yet been able to take off. I try to think of my extra weight as a battle scar and to remind myself I won the battle against suicide, for I am still here. Maybe I can win the battle with food, too. Of course I would rather not have battle scars – I would happily settle for a nice medal that I could wear on special occasions.

I’m proud of myself, though, because I don’t throw up my hands and say, “It’s useless. I’ll never change.” I keep on trying, meal after meal, supermarket run after supermarket run. I’m not a fanatic about eating healthily, for life without chocolate is not a happy thought, but I keep moving in that direction. It is paying off, too, because my blood sugars are normal now. I’m happy, for I sure wouldn’t deal well with diabetes.

It may be this way with most parts of healing. You just have to put one foot in front of the other, baby step by baby step. You don’t have to understand completely, you don’t have to completely believe in what you are doing. You just have to decide it’s worth a try and then keep plugging away at it. It’s not dramatic – but it’s doable.

So what was the process like? If I remember right, I didn’t lose very much the first few years. I know for sure I didn’t make a lot of big changes all at once. I just sort of chipped away at it.

The first thing I tackled was potato chips. I told myself I would eat fewer, not that I would never have another potato chip in my life. The less I ate, the less I craved them. Today I have them once or twice a year at somebody else’s house. They are just as delicious as ever, but the next day I have forgotten all about them.

The next project, sugar, was much more ambitious. It’s one thing to eat fewer potato chips but more crispy, salty, yummy tortilla chips. It’s another thing all together to eat less ice cream, fewer donuts, fewer M&M’s, and even, believe it or not, less tomato ketchup. I had to start reading labels seriously, for who knew high fructose corn syrup was added to so many products?

I just found out that loving sugar is not my fault, it is because of some bugs in my digestive system that live on sugar and ask for it. The more I eat, the more they reproduce, and so there are lots more of the little buggers telling my brain to eat sugar. When there are very few of them, their pleas are much fainter and therefore easier to ignore. How smart of my unconscious to decide to work on all products containing sugar, not just one or two!

For several months I would stop concentrating on eating less of things and just add healthy stuff to my meals. After a while I developed a taste for spinach and broccoli. Now I have a salad every single night. My physical therapist says, “Do less of what feels bad and more of what feels good.” I don’t think of pasta and sourdough bread as feeling bad, but I get the idea.

Another thing has helped a great deal. I had my knee replaced and, with less pain, I can move more easily. Comfort foods aren’t as enticing. I started going to the gym and now, after a few years, I really enjoy it. Exercise apparently doesn’t make you lose weight by itself, but it makes you healthier and helps keep the weight off. And since muscle weighs more than fat, I can stay at the same weight but be thinner.

It also makes me more conscious of my body. I am beginning to see how moving one muscle affects another one and this makes me feel less fragmented physically. Somehow, I have gained some idea of how eating works. I now understand that there are, indeed, causes and effects. If I consistently pig out, I will gain weight. If I eat healthy most of the time and only pig out occasionally, I will be fine. What is really neat is that getting in touch with the way eating affects my body has taken no conscious effort. It just happened.

I love looking back and seeing where those baby steps have taken me!

Valentine’s Day

I’m putting together a mailing list, partially to announce my booklets, if I ever get them published, and partially to share things that are too short to be made into a whole blog entry. If you would like to join, let me know in the comments section or write me at rahome@ra-inf.org.

I’m writing about Valentine’s Day, even though it isn’t a major Satanic holiday, because it goes way back into antiquity and some of the old customs may be absorbed into the cult rituals.

The first trace of this day was the Roman Lupercalia, a purification/fertility festival celebrated on February 15. (The word Februarius comes from a word meaning purification or purgation.) Dogs (a symbol of purification) and goats (a symbol of sexuality and fertility) were sacrificed and two young priests came up to the altar. The other priests smeared goat blood on their foreheads with the knife used for the sacrifices and the blood was then wiped off with wool dipped in milk. They were supposed  to laugh at this point. Nobody seems to know why. After a feast, the two young priests ran naked around Rome hitting women with lashes made from the skin of the sacrificed goats. This was supposed to make women fertile and to banish evil.

It is believed that the festival was called Lupercalia from lupus, wolf, and that the priests traced their lineage to Romulus and Remus, who were orphaned and nursed by a wolf. However, the festival was older than that, as Romulus and Remus’ mother  had been impregnated by the god Mars at Lupercalia. (As an aside, a prostitute was called lupa, a female wolf.)

In 494, Pope Gelasius the First co-opted Lupercalia and made February 14 both the Feast of Purification and St. Valentine’s Day. The meaning of the sacrificed dogs and goats show through the Christian feast day.

There were three saints named Valentine, and it’s unclear which was chosen for the honor. The most likely one was a priest who lived in the third century AD who was killed for refusing to renounce his religion.

A more interesting story is that the Roman emperor Claudius had forbidden marriage because he thought unmarried men made better soldiers. Valentine was caught secretly marrying Christians and was imprisoned. He restored sight to the blind daughter of his jailer, who converted to Christianity. Before he was executed, he sent her a farewell letter signed “from your Valentine.”

In any event, St. Valentine is the Patron Saint of bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travelers, and young people.. Quite a mixed bag, I’d say.

It was Chaucer who made the connection between Valentine’s Day and true love.  (Birds were believed to mate for life.)

“For this was on St. Valentine’s Day,
When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate.”

By the 18th century, people were exchanging gifts and hand-made cards. The tradition took off in America around 1850 with the advent of mass-produced cards.  Now, a billion cards, a quarter of all greeting cards sold, are Valentines.

The cult I was raised in was a stuffy New England one that tried to adhere faithfully to the old British rites and it celebrated February 14th, concentrating on hearts. That tells me the day was a Satanic holiday in this particular cult at least as long ago as the 1880’s because some of the older members were children then. They never would have allowed an established holiday to be ignored.

I am sure many other cults observe the day but have different customs. And I am equally sure there are others that don’t do anything for Valentine’s day. And I may be cynical, but I doubt many of us are going to get our fair share of those billion cheesy cards.