Friday, November 21, 2008

RANT

I thought of entitling this blog something like, "In which La'Fru goes to the dietitian, is told to try harder, and wants to throw up" or "In which La'Fru is mad as hell and isn't going to apologize for mentioning it here on her blog".....but Goddammit, I'm pissed. I'm pissed, I'm pissed, I'm pissed. sigh..that feels a bit better.....

So I go to meet with the dietician this morning at my endocrinologist's office at 8:30 AM. She's nice enough..has these funky retro-art glasses that I spend most of the session looking at and wondering if she's trying to look like one of the characters from Whoville...but I digress....

I know that it's a huge practice and that I'm a mere number to them. I know that she assumed that I had just started working on this "healthy eating thing" in September..but goddammit, I'm pissed. I meet with her and I want numbers, okay?! I want to know how many calories I need to eat a day, I want to know how many calories to eat on the days that I work out in the pool with water aerobics, I want to know how many times a day to eat, I want concrete knowledge. And then she tells me something that I'm quite familiar with in therapy-land but not so much expecting in the land of nutrition: there are no concretes. She is unwilling to tell me a specific number of calories to eat a day b/c it's more about the number of grams of carbohyrdate I consume during each meal. That's easy, I know it's 45g of carbs a meal. I did pick that up when I went through diabetes education back in January and met with a nutiritionist back at the beginning of the year.

So I break it down for her. I tell her the following.....I've been heavy all my life. I've struggled with diets off and on and even courted bulimia while I was in college. My biggest fear is that I've fried my endocrine system and my body turns all ghetto on me and sez, "oh hell no...we're not giving you an 'effin' inch, girl! We know this game?!!!" To which she replies, "that's true. you have to raise your basal metabolism rate and to do that, you need to work out seven times a week". She wasn't condesending or ugly.

Let me be clear here, I'm not pissed at her. She was kind and just the messenger. The message is what I'm raging at. I've worked pretty hard to heal myself of hurtful things that I've said to myself over and over through the years. I'm pissed that I didn't have the tools to know how to cope with emotions when I was a little girl. I'm pissed that the messages that I got about food from my mother included shrieking at me because my pants were too snug. I'm pissed that I anquished in high school about what to wear after Tuesdays b/c my two good outfits that I was comfortable in where worn already. I'm pissed that I dated a man who poked my hip bones and told me, "OMG, there is bone under there. You can be thin". I'm pissed that I let myself think that it was okay to go with his version of what I needed to be. I'm mad that I thought binging and then throwing it up was the way to go for about two-three years in my life. I'm pissed that no one stopped to say, "Sweet girl, you are just fine the way you are" and that before I met my husband and his family, no one else around me had the balls to say it sans a few lovers here and there.

I'm tired of fighting this Goddamned fight....I get hopeful, I try to work hard, I am told to work harder, I work harder...it's like what Annie Lamott says in her biography Grace (eventually)...scoot...scoot...stall....go back...scoot...scoot...stall....revert...get scared...try again...scoot..scoot...stall.

It's Grace....even in my anger...it's grace. (sigh)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

KNOW THIS... I LOVE YOU !

Betty Graham said...

Sweet Girl ..I LOVE YOU just the way you are..Be Happy and know I love you forever

Mama

S. Page said...

lil sis,
Repeat after me, "I am a beautiful, strong, talented woman.
My worth as a human being does NOT depend on my size.
My Heavenly Father loves me."
Accepting yourself does not mean giving up on being healthy.
I am MEGA sized, but as you know from my blog I had an excellent check up this week.
Eat reasonably,enjoy your water aerobics,enjoy life, be good to those who love you.
You are my lil sis and I love you bunches and bunches just the way you.
Love,
big sis