Tag Archives: Health

Season Four, Episode One: Learning to Love That Bass

Posted in Beauty, Culture, Health, Opinion, Society by

I am in love with the Meghan Trainor song, “All About That Bass”.  It’s so catchy.

Yeah, it’s pretty clear, I ain’t no size two
But I can shake it, shake it
Like I’m supposed to do
‘Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase
And all the right junk in all the right places

I’m 5’1″, 137-140 pounds, and I am definitely all about the bass.  I have an hourglass shape, with curves for days–I wish that being a 34DD with a big butt had been on trend when I was a teenager.  I don’t think I actually accepted myself for the awesome and sexy person I am until the past few months or so.  And I find that incredibly sad.  I’ve averaged a size 8 in pants since I was twelve, surrounded by girls who were stick thin and were proud of their size 0/00 status…I felt fat for years and unattractive and just disgusting.

It’s probably no surprise then, that I developed an eating disorder when I was in seventh grade.

I remember feeling like I went to bed a 14/16 in the girls’ section of the clothing department, flat chested and shapeless, and waking up this curvaceous woman with boobs and hips and thighs and a butt.  Ohmigod, a butt.  I am multiracial, a beautiful combination of Cherokee-American, Creole, German, Irish, and Italian–but it seemed that I was the curviest white girl I had ever seen.  I’m sure I was exaggerating in the dramatic way that teenagers often do, but I was ashamed of my body and all the unwanted attention that came with it.  I retreated in baggy boys’ jeans and way-too-big tee shirts and loose sweatpants.  I walked with my shoulders hunched over so that no one would focus on my chest.  I hated walking down the street and being honked at by men my mother’s age.  I felt like a piece of meat, and all I wanted was to make all that attention and ugly feelings I had inside go away.

So I stopped eating, here and there.  I’d skip breakfast, maybe lunch.  I ate dinner and would break down after a few days of self-imposed semi-starvation and endless, stupid bouts of exercise–I’d eat until my stomach hurt.  I would feel disgusted with myself immediately after, but I could never make myself vomit.  I tried many times, sticking my finger down my throat, trying a toothbrush because I’d heard the bristles would make you gag…I was vain, I suppose, and didn’t want the acid from my stomach to erode my teeth and I didn’t want broken blood vessels in my eyes from the pressure of throwing up.  I liked the power that came with telling myself I wasn’t hungry, even though my stomach was rumbling and my blood sugar was so low that I would shake until I downed sugary sodas or wolfed down a candy bar.  It was a vicious cycle.

I was careful, though.  My mom would get suspicious of my eating habits, so I remained around 128-130 for most of my teenage years.  When I got pregnant with my son when I was 18, I was terrified of getting fat.  I barely ate, I was constantly sick (to this day I wonder if my nine month bout with severe morning sickness was mostly in my head)…I only gained 16 pounds, and weighed five pounds less than what I weighed pre-pregnancy the day after I had my son.  I hovered at my size 8 status, but things were good, with the exception of a brief stint of not eating for two weeks when I broke up with his father.  I was eating, I was happy, and life was pretty good.  I abused diet pills here and there, but nothing that would really call for concerned attention.

At my last job, I gained a lot of weight.  I was a receptionist, and I sat for hours upon hours a day, six days a week.  I hated my job, and drowned my sorrows and frustrations in milkshakes and junk food.  I wound up gaining roughly forty pounds over four years.  I had ballooned to 165 pounds by February 2012.  I remember hearing that number and all of the old thoughts and feeling came rushing back like a runaway freight train.  I was living with my parents still at that time, and we had no scale at our house because my mom knew I had eating issues, and she said a scale would encourage unhealthy behavior.  My boyfriend at the time was overweight, and he suggested that we try losing weight together–I bought a scale, and kept it in my room.  Naturally the act of weighing myself became an obsessive act that I went through several times a day, and pretty soon it was a rush to see the numbers go down.  I was disgusted with myself, especially when my size 12/13 pants wouldn’t go up over my thighs.  I remember bursting into tears in my boyfriend’s hotel room.

I stopped eating, slowly at first–eating disorders creep up on you like falling asleep, slowly at first and then all at once.  It’s crazy how much food and hunger occupied my thoughts.  Once the casino opened, it was easy to drop the weight.  I worked the graveyard shift, so I slept all day and barely ate when I was awake.  Fifteen pounds melted away in the span of mid-May to the end of June.  People began commenting on how great I looked, which was like crack.  I loved hearing how skinny I was getting, so I cut back on food even more.  I lived on a steady diet of Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and carefully rationed out junk food.  I got back into the habit of lying to everyone around me, and the scale showed that I was losing an average of a pound to three pounds a week.  For the first time in my life, I was an actual anorexic.  I had finally fallen over the thin line I’d walked since 1997.  The scariest thing wasn’t the actual act of starving myself, rather it was how incredibly easy it had been to starve myself.

I have always said that it takes a strong mind to have an eating disorder.  It takes a lot of self-control to deny yourself the basic need of food.  I remember being able to tell myself to shut the fuck up because I wasn’t hungry, and if I ate, I might lose my boyfriend–he had made a comment, probably innocuous, about how he had only dated like one or two other curvy girls in his life, and that he usually dated slender, athletic women.  I was secretly and quietly threatened by his ex-wife–he had shown me pictures of her from their wedding and honeymoon, and she was this thin, fit, pretty monster that terrified me.  I knew deep down that he wasn’t over her, and I didn’t want him to leave me for her (even though he did eventually).  I think that was a huge factor that kept me from breaking down and eating everything in sight–and the thought of him not being attracted to me because I was fat made it that much easier to starve myself.  The smell of food made me nauseous, the thought of eating made me panic.  It felt so good to be hungry, to be lightheaded.  It was sick, twisted, and disgusting, but God did it feel good.

I remember one night at work the air conditioning went out.  It was mid-July, and in Cleveland, summers are humid and unforgiving.  The casino was packed with bodies, and I hadn’t eaten in three days.  I’d felt weird, almost tingly, when I had clocked out my previous shift and I had ignored it, even when my legs felt like jelly when I woke up that night.  I had been on the roulette table when I got extremely light headed and my legs went to spaghetti and I almost collapsed twice on the live game.  I had to be tapped out and went down to the break room, where I drank Gatorade and blamed the entire thing on the heat.  I was really good at being in denial.

By the end of September, I was nearly down thirty pounds and lied my ass off to everyone around me.  2013 proved a bad year for me, and I fell even deeper into my vicious cycle.  I lived on my own and no longer had my mother’s watchful eye over me, making sure I didn’t get too skinny.  The combination of losing my boyfriend and the anxiety of work and living alone was a terrible one, causing me to drop to 120 pounds.  All I did was lie about my weight loss and brag about how thin I was.  I was in denial about my terrible migraines and the fact that I was constantly freezing cold and how my brain seemed to be wrapped in a thick fog.  My thoughts were slower and my heart pounded like a tribal drum instead of a normal heartbeat.  You could see my ribs and faintly my sternum.  My collarbone protruded, and I thought I looked great.  I was skinny, and I was miserable, but I was skinny, goddamn it.  If I couldn’t have control over anything else in my life, I sure as hell would have control over my weight.

I’m not really sure what made me take a step back and look at how fucked up I was.  I would like to say my son, but I would be lying.  I’m not really sure what was the deciding factor was–I remember looking at a picture of myself from my 28th birthday and thinking I looked like a bobblehead doll.  My best friend ran her first marathon.  My dad was diagnosed with stage IV cancer.  I think perhaps it was all of those things.  I wanted to be happy, I wanted to stop being so miserable, to stop thinking about food and about all the pain I carried around inside of me.

I started eating again.  I started going to the gym, and I started running and doing strength training.  I remember looking in the mirror one day and thinking Oh my god, I have muscles.  I’ve never had muscles before, and I look great.  I embraced my butt, my hips, my thighs.  Without them, I wouldn’t be able to run, or fill out a pair of jeans or leggings.  I like what I see in the mirror.  I still panic at the 137-140 that I see on the scale at the gym.  I probably always will.  I still have the tendency to skip meals and lie about if I’ve eaten or not, but I’m improving.  I’ll never be a size 2, and I think I’m okay with that.  For the first time in my life, I’m okay with how I look for the most part.

And that’s why I love that song.  It’s the song that I should have heard as a teenage girl.  Maybe if I had known that I was beautiful no matter what dress size I was, maybe I wouldn’t have fallen so far down the rabbit hole.  I’m thankful that with the rise of multiracial children in our country, the notion of beauty has changed.  Curves are celebrated and even envied.  A big butt is coveted.  It’s perfectly fine to be bigger than a size 4.  It’s fine to be all about the bass, even the treble.  You can be thin or curvy, just as long as you are happy and healthy.  Girls, you are beautiful.  Stop fat shaming each other.  Stop skinny shaming.  Embrace the fact that we are all different, and that we shouldn’t want to look like Barbie or a stick thin skeleton.  Healthiness is all that should matter–fuck what society says is acceptable.

I know you think you’re fat
But I’m here to tell ya
Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top

Yeah my mama she told me don’t worry about your size
She says, “Boys like a little more booty to hold at night.”
You know I won’t be no stick figure silicone Barbie doll
So if that’s what you’re into then go ahead and move along

Because you know I’m
All about that bass
‘Bout that bass, no treble
I’m all about that bass
‘Bout that bass, no treble
I’m all about that bass
‘Bout that bass, no treble
I’m all about that bass
‘Bout that bass

Season Three, Episode Six: Curveball Thrown

Posted in Family, Random, Uncategorized, Writing by

Man, it’s been a while.  Like two months.  I feel like we went out on a really bad date and then I decided that things were too awkward for me to like your statuses on Facebook, favorite your Tweets, or call/text you back.

My bad.

Fret not, kiddos.  I’m back.

That's right.

That’s right.

Shit got a little real after that last post I wrote about the Single Chick Bucket List (which I have been trying to get done and will start to blog about in the near future).  Six days after that post was published, my dad was rushed to the hospital for severe swelling and leakage in his neck.  He received emergency surgery the next day, and on Valentine’s Day (because nothing good ever happens on that fucking day) he was diagnosed with advanced stage throat cancer.  So needless to say things have been quite the rollercoaster since then–with the exception of a week and a half at the end of February, he has been an inpatient at the Cleveland Clinic and its sister hospitals.  Three weeks ago he had to have his larynx, lymph nodes, both thyroid glands, and a major vein removed from his neck–he has a trach and hopefully in a few weeks he can begin to try to learn to talk again with speech therapy.  Once things settle down and he gains the weight he lost (he was admitted to the hospital at 115 pounds;  he is 6’4″), he will start radiation.  He is supposed to have a lung and bone biopsy in the upcoming days, and hopefully things slow down a little and the results come back good.

My dad has taught me a lot about strength in the past two months.  The things I worried about in January seem so damn trivial compared to what we are dealing with now.  My dad being sick really made me get over my ex–seeing him still sucks ass in ways that I can’t eloquently describe, but I changed shifts in the shift rebid we had at work and I won’t have to worry about seeing him except for an hour or two depending on my schedule.  For some reason I thought that maybe my ex would come up to me and ask me how I was doing or how my dad was doing–his younger sister has stage IV cancer and I love her like the sister I never had, so I thought maybe he would show a shred of compassion.  Yeah…I was wrong.  He acts like I am invisible.  So I had to suck that up and tell myself right then and there that his lack of being a nice person just shows that there was no point in being brokenhearted over him.  I have learned to appreciate my friends and I love them all so incredibly much.  The texts, hugs, kind words, and phone calls have all meant more than you would think.

But strength.  My father has faced every step of this bullshit with a positive attitude.  He smiles and cracks jokes and just holds it together for our family.  I think maybe he always knew that this was a possible consequence of being a smoker for nearly 60 years.  I did, but I never really thought it would happen.  It has made us stronger as a family, it has made me stronger in the fact that I have realized that life isn’t a given.  Things change.  Moments occur that can shake our every belief and thought to the core.  I laugh a lot more and I have decided to become more self-assured and more self-aware then I was before.  If I don’t like something, I make it known.  If I don’t want to do something, I don’t do it.  I decided that you don’t get anywhere in life by shrinking back in the background and not making waves–I’ve always been an extrovert, but I hate confrontation and I hate hurting other people’s feelings.  I have also decided that if I know what I want, I should try to figure out how to get it.  There are no do-overs, no rewind button (old school VHS reference), no backspace.  Everything is constantly moving forward and you have to move forward with it.

It’s like the Modest Mouse lyric, “And we’ll all float on okay”.  We need to stop taking everything so goddamn serious and just let it go.  Time hurtles on through the great void, with or without us…just stop worrying about the little things and let go.

It’s good to be back.  I missed writing, but I figured that I would find my words when I was ready.

Lamp tripping

Quick Blurb:

I started a new shift last week and I’m adjusting to working during the day like a normal person.  No more 8 pm to 4 am…I don’t know what it’s like to be awake during the day and asleep at night.  It’s like the world flip-flopped itself on me.  I feel more rested and maybe I’ll get more accomplished.  And accomplished means more blogging, which is always excellent.

I just have to get used to it.  Sunlight?  What’s that?

when did they put a lamp here

Season One, Episode Thirty-Two: Of Boobs, Cheetahs, and Justin Bieber

Posted in Comedy, Health, Humor by

So I joined a gym last month.

I am so guilty of this. I am in an imagined one-sided race with people at the gym and they don’t even know how intense the competition is 😛

I’m not really an athletic person–I got a D- in gym my freshman year of high school, and that was after the A’s and B’s I got on the written tests.  (Deduce your own conclusions from that.)  I’m rather clumsy and uncoordinated.  I’m that girl who trips over her feet and gets visibly flustered, yet does it again roughly fifteen minutes later–I love flip-flops, but I tend to catch the tops of them along the sidewalk for some unforeseeable reason and I always wind up stumbling.  I can’t catch, and my throwing skills are pretty sub par.  If I go to hell when I die, I will spend copious amounts of time being forced to play volleyball and badminton amid the fire and brimstone–my older brother is the athlete of the family, and I am okay with that.

But anyway, I joined a gym.  I figure that a little physical exertion never hurt anyone, and as long as the activities I participated in didn’t involve a single ounce of athleticism I’d be okay.  So I have gone quite a few times, and I like it.  I prefer the elliptical because it feels like fancy skiing (if I knew what skiing felt like, haha) and because it’s a guaranteed sweatfest.  Well…it was.  After the first few times my body got used to it, and I exercised the other day for a half hour without breaking a sweat.  No bueno.  So I hopped off the machine in search of a cardiovascular workout that would make me look like a sweaty mess.

I tried the stationary bike.  I got a little sweaty, but I had to keep messing with the seat because I’m short and I couldn’t find a good height to sit at…plus I kept sliding off the seat because it was at an angle (and it made my ass hurt later.  Now I see why the fitness magazines tell you to bring your own cushioned seat cover.).  I casually made my way over to the treadmill and stared it down for a good thirty seconds–I’m sure the other gym-goers probably thought I was insane, but there was a method to my madness.

I am not a runner.  Not necessarily by choice, more or less by my lack of athletic prowess, my questionable coordination, and the fact that I can trip over nothing.  Oh…and did I mention that I’m a 34DD?  Yeah, that too.  So I turn on the treadmill and put it at 3.5 mph, a good speed for getting my walk on.  The chick next to me is running at a speed of 9.3 mph, and not to be outdone, I crank that shit up to 5.9 mph, bust out that Justin Bieber song that I’m embarrassed to admit I really like (“As Long As You Love Me”), and start running like a cheetah.


…Make that a cheetah with huge boobs and lungs not used to running.  I lasted about a minute and a half before I had to slow my shit down and walk without looking like a winded old lady.  Fighting the urge to hunch over and gasp for breath, I walked it out and attempted to find my inner Usain Bolt.  I made it for about two minutes this time before my chest started screaming at me to stop–it wasn’t that I was out of breath, to my partially winded surprise I actually had found a decent rhythm and was doing okay.  It was my boobs who were threatening to cause a chesty revolution and attack me.  Now I’m used to having to double up on sports bras and the such when I exercise, it comes with the territory, but that day’s choice of a strapless bra underneath a Target sports bra wasn’t getting the job done.  Nay.  I’m sure the boys in the gym enjoyed the show, but I was in pain and I had to jump off the treadmill and call it a day.

Sweaty and broken, I immediately Googled “how to run with big boobs” and found all kinds of sites where girls complained about running with large chests and how it really sucked.  It also seemed like they were running in search of making their ladies smaller–I like being chestacular, I would just like to be able to run without being in pain.  So I have decided to go on the search for the Holy Grail of Sports Bras.  I hear compression bras are the way to go, but I need a really spectacular one to lock these babies down, or my half-assed dreams of running will never be fully acheived.  I have received suggestions of trying the VSX line by Victoria’s Secret, or even Under Armour, which I think I will test out in the upcoming weeks.

Speaking of running, I’ve decided to participate in the Cleveland edition of the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.  It’s Saturday, September 15.  I won’t be running in the 5k, but I will be doing the 5k walk.  I’m collecting donations and my goal is $200.  If you feel like donating, please click here.  You don’t have to feel like giving a lot, even $5 will help.

I have mixed feelings on the Susan G. Komen Foundation after all the crap happened with Planned Parenthood funding earlier this year, but I have friends who lost their mothers to breast cancer when we were in high school, one of my former co-workers’ mother had a double mastectomy due to breast cancer, my boyfriend’s mother and sister have both suffered from it, and no woman (or man, for that matter) is immune from it.  I feel like we need to make strides to find a cure for breast cancer, hopefully in my lifetime.  If you choose to donate, thank you and I appreciate it.  If not, please just take the time to do monthly self-exams and stay vigiliant.

Season One, Episode Thirty: Mid-Season Recap

Posted in Parenting, Random, Relationships, Travel, Uncategorized, Writing by

Time flies when you’re living life.

In Niagara Falls, Canada back in May.

I hadn’t realized that April was the last time I blogged!  I suppose that in the rush of everything positive that has gone on over the past three months, I just didn’t have time to write.  The casino opened May 14, and the shift I had been on up until last night made it damn near impossible to do anything but work and sleep–I worked what we call “sunrise” (a more pleasant-sounding spin on the more depressing-sounding graveyard shift), and when you work from 1 am to 9 am, you find that blogging ranks pretty low on your list of priorities 😛  But anyway, life at the casino is great.  I love being a dealer, it’s pretty fun to just essentially play games and interact with people for eight hours and get paid.  I’m surprised at how comfortable I have gotten dealing roulette;  if you had thrown me on a roulette table back in April I probably would have burst into tears (as a matter of fact, back in April I did burst into tears on the table in class) and froze up.  Now I can easily tell you how much five straight-ups (175) and 7 splits (119) are (294), all in my head.  I actually enjoy dealing roulette more than blackjack, and the people that I’ve known since the original Table Games Service Academy (Dec. 2011 to Feb. 2012) can tell you how much of a 180 that is!  It’s great to work with people I enjoy and actually feel appreciated, something that I never once felt at the dealership.  I have no stress and I’m relaxed…I love it.

Other that, one would say that my life is wonderfully mundane.  Nicky is getting so big!  He’ll be in second grade in three weeks, and he’s only 11 inches shorter than me–that doesn’t say a lot for me, but 50 inches is a pretty huge achievement for him 🙂 He’s had a summer filled with climbing the tree in our front yard, swimming in his friend’s pool, playing baseball, and just being a little boy with his entire summer vacation ahead of him.

Nicky during Marine Week back in June. He has had an awesome summer so far!

My boyfriend and I are still together and are pretty happy.  He went home in the middle of June, and I went out to Chicago for a few days this past month to see him, which was great because I love the city (and him, but that’s beside the point :P).  We’re pretty confident that we can make this long distance thing work.

I also lost nearly 20 pounds since February, I’ve gone from 160 to roughly 145-147 pounds.  I’ve joined a gym and am trying to be a lot healthier in my eating and lifestyle habits.  I feel great, and I love how I feel.  I was thinking about losing 20 more, but I don’t want to lose my curves, so I might drop about 10 to 15 more and build muscle.

I actually didn’t notice how much weight I’d lost until I took the picture on the right at my boyfriend’s house in Indiana.

I have every intent of being more consistent with this blog now that I am on swing shift and have more time during the day to get things done.  I’m actually going to sign off now to go eat dinner and get ready to go to work…Til next time, XO!

Season One, Episode Four: Extreme Makeover, the Follicular Edition

Posted in Beauty, Random by

I’m bored with my hair.

I’ve been growing my hair out since late 2009, and it is right below my bra strap.  Pretty long.  I have been thinking about donating it to Locks of Love, so I’ve been on the fence about cutting it.  It’s not long enough for me to actually have hair to have after cutting off the required minimum of 10 inches, so I have to wait, and I’d be really pissed at myself if I chop it off right before it’s long enough to donate.  In my opinion, that would be like quitting the race right before you crossed the finish line.  It’s taken nearly two years to grow it out and nearly three years to get rid of all the bleached highlights that I had since September of 2008 (Locks of Love won’t take hair that has been bleached).  That is the follicular equivalent of training for a triathlon.  Except in the follicular world, instead of lifting weights and cross training, you refrain from excessive hair dye and you deep condition.

I have had long hair and short, but I feel like I should inform y’all that my hair is thick, what my stylist calls “dense”, pretty coarse, and curly.  To sum it up, I have a LOT of hair.  And it is heavy.  I occasionally (like at the moment) get headaches from the weight of it piled up on my head–I hate wearing my hair down a lot because it takes a lot of time to wrangle into submission and I hate having hair in my face, so I usually wear it in a ponytail or in a messy bun.  And I have a bad habit of pulling it up while it’s soaking wet, so I have this huge wad of heavy, wet hair just chilling on the back of my head all day at work.

Fabulous.  Add that to the stress that my job already gives me, and no wonder I get migraines at work.

So anyway, cutting it is out.  So is dyeing it blonde, something that I’ve been itching to do since early early 2008, the last time that I had dyed it that color.  I am currently my natural color, which I guess could be described as a medium brown with lots of natural blonde highlights and a slight tint of auburn.  It’s pretty, but I am bored.  In high school I dyed my hair religiously, anywhere from blonde to dark brown to reddish brown, and I cut it whenever the mood struck me.  This being good thing is hard.  I haven’t dyed it since June of 2009, and my hair is healthy, yes, probably the healthiest it’s been since I was like 11, but I want to do something new to it.  I like the reaction you get when you do something to change up your look.  And for me, dramatic is always the way to go.

I am kind of thinking about dyeing it darker.  I saw Kristen Stewart (I don’t like Kristen Stewart, and I haven’t seen any of the Twilight movies) with this long, black hair for some Snow White movie she’s doing, and the wheels in my head started turning.  What if I dye it black?  And not with permanent dye, which would ravage the hair that I’ve worked so hard to keep healthy, but with a temporary dye that washes out in 24 shampoos and is supposed to be good for my hair?  I might do it.  I’ve never had black hair, so I figure this is a good way to test drive it.  If I like it, I’ll just keep using temporary dye until I chop this all off!

XOXO

Obsession of the Moment

Posted in Beauty, Random by

I want to try this so bad!!!!

I am infatuated with this stuff! I have to try it, I've heard nothing but great reviews.

I am a self-admitted LUSH-aholic, so I am kinda biased, but I’ve read that R&B is supposed to be amazing for angry, distressed, curly hair.  My hair oftentimes can get angry.  It is sometimes distressed.  And it most certainly is curly.  I need something that can keep my hair from drying out in the harsh winters we have here in Cleveland, and I like that LUSH doesn’t use any animal products in their stuff, so even though I’m not a member of PETA or anything, I still feel like I’m doing my little bit to help the rainforests and all that.  I think I’m going to buy some with my next check, and if I do, I’ll be sure to share what I think of it!