Love and Fried Eggs

TW: eating disorders


Food is the conscious center of my life. I spend more time thinking about food than anything or anyone else.  Food in relation to hunger, to comfort, to my body.  Maybe it's the same for everyone?  Or I am a ravenous lunatic?  But really.  I grew up with a Paris-trained chef for a mother who had the education and the privilege to put time and work and love into everything she makes.  And salt.  Lots of salt.  From an early age I trained as a runner, which allowed me (as a teenager) to consume whole boxes of pasta in one sitting and not look like an amorphous blob.  I took food for granted until college, where I promptly became very sad and very lonely and very anxious and discovered that food is a powerful drug. By the time I noticed that I'd ballooned out of control, it was too late. I panicked. Started counting calories, restricting and bingeing, restricting and bingeing.  I had a constant running total in my head, lists of foods consumed on every scrap piece of paper, numbers, calculations, allowances.  I didn't hang out with people.  I hung out with food.  I was too anxious to eat around other people--food was my shame, too personal, too intimate--so I lived off of vending machines and self-loathing until I went to Italy, where neither of those were options.  Italy and new friendships nursed me back to a healthier attitude toward food, toward life.  I felt powerful.  Last year I ran two half-marathons, and during that training, I was happy to discover the simple pleasure of fueling my body to help it recover and become stronger.  But still, I know exactly how many calories are in literally everything.  I know the powerful false-comfort food imparts, and the dull aching guilt it leaves behind.

I'm a food addict.  It's like alcoholism, except unlike alcohol, food is necessary for life. Staying sober is an excruciating exercise in strength of mind 24/7, for one's entire life.  When I am sad, or stressed, or anxious, or tired, my first impulse has always been to reach for food.  Not hugs, or books, or a nice warm bed.  Not love.  Food.

But then again food IS love.  I want to share food with the people I love.  I wanna bake them cookies, like, all the time.  On the other hand, when I'm feeling alone in the world, the instinct is to gorge myself, food as penance.

So it is.  It isn't.

Forgiveness is the way out--learning to slip and pick myself up without losing all hope that I can stand at all.  My perfectionism doesn't play well with food.  It wants to punish with hunger.  And so I've fetishized hunger almost as much as I've fetishized food.  When you've gone months, years, without ever feeling truly hungry, it becomes one of the best and most desired sensations.  But yeah.  We're working on it.

Lately I've been flirting with veganism, because meat doesn't make much sense to my body, and nor does dairy, with the exception of eggs (how could one ever leave behind the love that is a soft, creamy egg-yolk?), and because I have little self-control, cheese (I shouldn't, but the salt, oh, the salt).  I'm basically an ovo-vegetarian at the moment.  Shunning processed foods and most animal products for whole, plant-based foods.  I'm not totalitarian about it.  If someone makes something divine that involves meat or cheese, I'll try a bite.  Probably couldn't ever give up my occasional spicy tuna roll, either.  When I eat out, I stray often.  It's all good.  It's about my personal mental and physical health, and less about animal rights, though I'm glad I'm not supporting corporations and factory farms as much as I once did.  It's about how clean and good and strong I feel when I eat real food.  Last night I made delicious chipotle sweet potato spinach burritos--the crisp vibrant colors alone made me happy.

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I'd say that I'm learning when to reach for a body, when to go for a run, and when to have a snack. I'd say that I'm better than I've ever been.  Sometime soon, I'll have a bad day, eat a whole family-sized bag of tortilla chips, loathe myself, give up, binge for a week.  The cycle will continue as long as I'm learning what's love and what's not, what I've earned and what I haven't, and how to be grateful for the body I have instead of the ideal I want.

I hope to write more about food.

This is the context.

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