Food, glorious food?
This is a post that I’ve thought about writing for a long time, even started and deleted it a few times, but could never figure out how to put it all together. Previous attempts were usually brought on by something angering or annoying and that never turns out right. But I’ve been thinking a lot about my issues with food lately so I thought I’d give it another go…
Food. It’s an essential thing, right? Every living being needs to eat things to survive. Regardless of what your own personal diet or dietary restrictions are, we all eat.
Personally, I’ve always had a very weird and sometimes bad relationship with food. I’ve talked about it a little bit before but I don’t believe I’ve ever really given the full story. I touch on it a bit in the book, but it’s still just a piece of a much bigger picture. Even just thinking about writing this now is giving me anxiety, but I’m going to push through. Are we ready?
Growing up things were fairly normal. Probably had cereal of some kind of breakfast, brought lunch to school, family dinner at night. Not much stands out so let’s jump a head a little bit. When my parents divorced, my sister took care of me. She made sure that I had dinner at night and was fed. However, when she left for college things changed drastically. There were no more family dinners. There was no one making sure that I ate. Hell, there was hardly ever food in the house to eat. Sure there might be some bread and cold cuts or peanut butter laying around, maybe a box of mac & cheese in the cabinet (though rarely milk to make it with), but no food. Nothing that you could put together and really make a meal. So what did I eat? Well, a typical day from 13-18 looked like this:
Breakfast: almost always skipped unless I had money for a muffin at school, but buying a muffin usually meant no lunch. I had to weigh the options
Lunch: if I was given money I had BBQ Lays, a Peggy Lawton’s brownie, and maybe a Snickers ice cream if I had an extra $.75. If I didn’t have money (which was more likely) I ate off of other people’s plates
Dinner: usually take-out or fast food depending on if I had an after school activity or not. If I was home, I had to call my mom at the bar to bring me something to eat. If I was at school for an activity, she’d bring me something there. Always fast food or take-out… always.
When I got to college I thought, “Great! A dining hall to give me food 3 times a day. I won’t have to think about it anymore!” The problem was… I didn’t know how to eat like a normal person! I often skipped breakfast and when I didn’t I always just grabbed cereal. Lunch was usually a grilled cheese, quesadilla, or burger (something fast from the grill) and dinner was the same. I rarely went for the “real food” as grab and go is what I was used to. There was a lot of pizza eaten in those days.
The one difference in college is that I had a work study job so every Friday I got a paycheck that I could spend on food. The issue here, though, is that because I hadn’t been around a fridge full of food in so long if I did go to the store I would end up eating it all in a matter of days. It was almost as if I had completely forgotten how to eat and make meals. Food was no longer just what was needed to survive but something of a luxury. If I had it, I had to eat it (hang onto this thought for a minute… I’m gonna come back to it).
All this time that I’m not eating properly because I don’t really know how, I’m also battling with weight issues. Throughout college I went through periods where I’d starve for a day and then binge a bunch of food but it was never anything that I needed to worry about. It never got to the point where it was dangerous. That is until the summer of 2007 rolled around. I won’t go into the exact details that were the springboard into my eating disorder (because there are parts of it that are not my story to tell), but I’ll just say that something happened that upset me so much that I physically could not eat for days. I would try and even just taking a bite of something made me nauseous. I remember very vividly in those first few days trying to eat a Hot Pocket and it took me an hour to eat half of one.
Well, what happens when you significantly decrease your food intake? Yup, eventually you’re gonna lose weight. I wasn’t doing it on purpose (at first), I was just too upset to eat. After a few weeks, though, I was starting to find that it was working and that while the rest of my life seemed to be in chaos, I could control this one thing. For the next year and a half (give or take) I rarely ate. I wasn’t healthy by any means, but I was losing weight and was the thinnest I’d ever been in my life so I didn’t care. Once I started to eat “normally” of course I gained the weight back, but that foray into anorexia is something that is still in me to this day.
Me at my thinnest, fall of ‘08,
dressed for a showing of Rocky Horror
Remember when I said that if I had food I had to eat it? Well, it’s all tied together. When you grow up never knowing when you’ll be getting your next meal, when you have to eat off of friends’ plates or mooch money off of them for an ice cream, you eat everything in sight because who knows when you’ll have another chance. Unfortunately, now as an adult, that has left me with this issue where I either 1) don’t eat, or 2) eat everything in sight. It’s a little better right now as I tend to be in a good holding pattern (so to speak) but that’s not always the case. You can call it stress eating, but that’s not even what it is. It’s more like hoarding. You eat as much as you possibly can just in case you wake up tomorrow and it’s all disappeared. You eat until you feel like your stomach might burst because you know what it’s like to go to bed hungry.
OR
You don’t eat anything so that the food is there for you when you need it. You force yourself to go to bed hungry so that when you wake up the next day there’s still food waiting around for you to enjoy.
Are you catching on now? This thing that is a necessary part of life because without it you die has become something that is so distorted within me that meals don’t even mean anything anymore. Pizza for breakfast and cereal for dinner? Why not! It’s food and should just be eaten. I’ve come to realize in talking to friends in the last year, though, that apparently this is not normal thinking. I had one friend tell me that I had to convince her to eat eggs for dinner because “eggs are a breakfast food.” My response was, “It’s food. Why does it matter?”
So what brought on this deep dive into my disordered eating past? Well, in the middle of my financial crisis I had a few people reach out and offer me free trials of meal delivery boxes. You know the ones where you get 2-3 meals a week with all the ingredients included in the box plus the instructions to cook the thing? Yeah, those boxes. Knowing that it would be food and even if I didn’t follow the recipes I’d at least have ingredients to throw something together I redeemed the free trials and within a week I had 5 meal kits.
Now you might be reading this thinking, “But Danielle, you don’t cook,” so allow me to set the record straight.
I 100% know how to cook. I can follow a recipe and make things or I can throw a bunch of shit in a pan and say fuck it. I have never once denied that I can cook. I’ve also spent many years watching the Food Network and, honestly, watching people cook things has taught me some basics that I didn’t get elsewhere (i.e. taste as you go, always sear your meat, etc.). The problem is… cooking is never my go-to. My brain is always going to think of the quick grab and go, the “just add water” meals, or take-out. So while I can cook and I do on the rare occasion that I’ve bought all the necessary ingredients for something, it’s never the first place that my brain goes when I realize I’m hungry.
So here I have these meal boxes with 5 meal kits just ready for me and I’m like, “Well, this shit is gonna go bad if I don’t cook it so I’ve got to.” I have so much anxiety tied to making food that actually being in the kitchen and cooking a meal, regardless of outcome, is a feat in and of itself. There’s a story I tell in the book about one drunken night when I attempted to cook frozen hot dogs. That event, and the subsequent comments that followed for years, simply added to my kitchen anxiety. I have to 100% full commit to cooking a meal and pep myself up for it or I’ll never get through it. Working through that plus the disordered eating is a full-time job.
The meal kits are now gone and, if nothing else, this experiment has taught me how to rethink my relationship with food. That setting out and cooking a meal is an ok thing and I shouldn’t feel any anxiety about that, but also that if I just wanna have a sandwich for dinner that’s ok too. I’ve done so much work in the last 3 years on retraining my brain while recovering from all the trauma, but there are all these other things that I didn’t even realize would take so much work. There are people who eat dinner at the exact same time every single night because that’s what they’ve always done, right? Well I grew up and got used to take out every single night so that’s been my normal. Retraining my brain to say, “Wait, maybe we should cook that thing,” instead of going for the easy option isn’t something that’s just going to happen overnight.
My therapist and I have been talking the last few weeks about really tackling this issue. I’ve never really dealt with my food issues in therapy before because talking about it causes me such horrible anxiety. I always feel that, no matter what, I’m doing something wrong. But I came up with a system that I think will help put me on the correct path. The issue is that I can’t look at numbers. I can’t weigh myself or count calories because I’ll just go right back into anorexic mode and not eat. I have to look at the day as a whole: not just what and how much I ate, but how do I feel physically and mentally at the end of the day. Do I feel sick? Am I satiated? Did I over/under eat? These are the questions I’m asking myself at the end of the day and it’s helping to approach this from a place I’d never considered before.
I wanted to be open about my struggles with this because, well… I’m always open and honest about everything, but also because the last year has been incredibly hard. I currently weigh more than I ever have in my life and it’s hard to look myself in the mirror each day. I’ve fallen into some horrible bad habits, on both sides of the spectrum, and all I can hope is that I can break the pattern.
- Danielle
