🍽 Lil Treasures #55: Your Body Wants A Brownie
Another week down in the strangest year of our lives! I have some delightful treasures for you this newsletter. But before we do that, I have one Q+A that I want to answer. I intended to answer more, but…alas. Time is a flat circle.
Q: “Weight gain during this craptastic time. Feels hard, but I don’t want to just ignore it.” — anonymous
A: (takes your head in my hands, looks deeply into your eyes, with great love) I’m not a doctor, nor am I a nutritionist, so please take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt. You are undergoing massive amounts of stress right now. I know that because everyone on the planet is undergoing massive amounts of stress right now just living through a global pandemic. Add on whatever personal qualifiers you have in your own personal life and you’ve got a real s-word sandwich. Can I just tell you that you don’t have to add this to your plate? That your body is under enormous pressure and it’s okay if you’ve gained weight. You’re not failing, you’re not wrong, you’re not broken. If you put your energy into depriving yourself right now or worrying about the weight that you’ve gained, you’re going to end up even more stressed out and frustrated than you already are. You’re putting impossible expectations on yourself.
Something that has really opened up my eyes around the food/weight/body conversation lately is intuitive eating. I’ve been reading Evelyn Trioble’s book (Intuitive Eating) and it’s blowing my mind (thank you Lazy Genius!). All that to say: give yourself some grace. Take care of your body. If it wants to curl up on the couch and drink a glass of wine, let it. If it wants to go for a Stupid Walk™️, listen to that. You are getting through one of the most fraught eras of recent history and your resilient body is carrying you. It is strong and capable and sometimes it wants a brownie. That’s okay.
On that note, I’m going to eat a brownie right now.
Okay, I’m back. Let’s do some treasures.
🤝 I loved this article about a town in Arkansas rallying around a family who got a hateful letter after displaying a Black Santa in their yard.
🦩 If you are anything like me, your work and general life rhythm has been thrown off for - I don’t know, all of 2020? This video of God creating flamingoes really resonated with me.
🎄 I honestly cannot tell you how this has made me laugh. Several of you alerted me to this account, and all I can say is: BLESS YOU. It’s got a real Garth and Kat vibe and I’m just grateful. Also very partial to “Martha Has Not Been Socially Distant.”
This is extremely all of us:
Also me:
Let’s do Twitter Hall of Fame now, yes?
And of course, if you can, please visit the We Got You Club spreadsheet to see if you might be able to spread some yuletide cheer to someone.
Hey. Guys. Listen. You’re making it. You’re doing great. Seriously. I mean it. Take a rest when you need to. Eat the brownie. Proud of you.
Erin, thank you thank you thank you for your mention of Intuitive Eating! This is the direction my own eating disorder recovery has taken, and it's changed my life. I agree with Elise (elsewhere on this comment section) who suggested Christy Harrison's podcast Food Psych, and I also recommend Harrison's book Anti-Diet, if anyone is looking to understand how diet culture's pervasive messaging affects more areas of our daily lives than most of us realize. As a gal who's never really liked being told what to do, pushing against diet culture feels like the best kind of rebellion. :) Other good sources of information on Instagram include @no.food.rules, @jennifer_rollin, @drcolleenreichmann, @feelgooddietitian, @thenutritiontea, @dietitiananna, @drjoshuawolrich, and @foodsciencebabe. And I'm decidedly NOT a dietitian, but if anyone has any questions about my own personal journey with food, body image, and intuitive eating, I'd be happy to help.
Onward and upward.
I only have one treasure this week because it is the treasuriest of treasures.
About a year ago, I left for work in a rush (remember that?) and when I arrived, I looked down and realized that my necklace--one that belonged to my beloved Grandma--hadn't clasped properly and the chain was hanging down. To my horror, I discovered that the necklace's pendant had fallen off and was nowhere to be found in my car. I immediately called my now-husband and asked him to look around the house, inside and outside, but he didn't find anything. I consoled myself with the fact that maybe he looked for it like a typical man...and I'd find it later that day. When I got home that night I searched outside with a flashlight and did a fairly thorough search inside our tiny house, but no luck. The pendant was gone, and I was devastated. Over the last year, I've held out hope that I'd find it---I would idly look for it when I was outside gardening, and when I redid our bedroom, I searched all the nooks and crannies of the old wood floor to see if it had slipped through. I came to a tenuous acceptance that it was gone, but I always hoped it would turn up.
Fast forward to last Sunday when Steve bought me a new stick vacuum and I was excitedly trying it out (oh, the things that delight us in adulthood). He had pulled out our entertainment center to do some man thing with his TV or cables or wires or something, and I was gleefully using the vacuum to suck up the giant dust bunnies wrapped up in the cords, pushing the cords around to get maximum suckage of said dust bunnies. After zooming around the rest of the house, I was going to put the vacuum away and was passing in front of the entertainment center (which had now been pushed back against the wall) and saw some rubber washers and what I believed to be a screw on the floor. I picked them up (with my hands) and set them on the table for my husband to deal with later, and as I turned around, I did a double take...and started screaming. The "screw" I had found was my pendant. I have no clue how I didn't vacuum it up or how I missed it when I looked under the entertainment center a year ago, but there it was.
After screaming and crying really hard and holding that pendant in my hand like Carrie Bradshaw when she finds her Carrie necklace in the lining of her Dior bag, I looked up the Parable of the Lost Coin (probably not something Carrie Bradshaw would have thought to do), and I felt a newfound understanding of how desperately and unrelentingly God pursues His lost coins and how wildly His angels rejoice when we are found. It was an analogy come-to-life that I'll never forget. And I'm just so, so happy to have that necklace back around my neck.
I hope you all have a restful weekend, and I look forward, as always, to hearing what you've got to share. ❤
I am someone in a generally larger size body who is recovering from an eating disorder where I lost lots of weight and everyone told me how "proud" they were of me and how I had never looked better which caused the disorder to go on even longer. I realized I had a problem when my dad was laying in a bed in a hospice facility and I was trying to figure out if I had running clothes in my car so I could get in a few miles before dark. I was thin, but y'all, I was NOT HEALTHY.
I joined the intuitive eating train a year or so ago, and it has been a game changer in helping heal my relationship with food and (over)exercising. I have gained weight, and am coming to terms with the fact that my body is more comfortable in a double digit size, and I do not want to spend my one time on this earth fighting that or counting calories.
Anyway, Erin, your opening Q&A was beautiful. After reading so, so much about diets and how they wreck us physically and emotionally, this Enneagram 1 wants everyone else to know this. But it's like talking about Jesus-if you aren't ready to hear it, you're not going to listen.
So cheers to wine and brownies. Cheers to Stupid Walks TM. Cheers to learning to listen to what your body needs like we did when we were kids. And cheers to ignoring the new year's resolution/quaratine 15 bulls#!+ and all of us loving our bodies for what they've done for us and how far they've brought us.