An overview of my food issues
You might be saying, "So, hey, what the fuck are your food issues, anyway? Because sometimes you mention a whole lot of different types of things, so, like, are you an overeater? Are you anorexic? What's going on with you?" You'd be right to be confused. My food issues, like all my issues, just refuse to be cut and dried. Can't I just have an issue that fits into a neat little box with a label on it? *shakes fist at sky*
Anyway, the actual category I fit into is called EDNOS, eating disorder not otherwise specified. And I'm not alone! Most of us with disordered eating patterns fall into the EDNOS category.
I went through a very long period of binge eating. I was a secret eater even in my teens -- I couldn't bear to eat in public, for example, so I never ate lunch at school -- but as I got older and started living on my own, it just got worse. It's a way to deal with anxiety and not about food or hunger at all, really -- at least it never was for me. It was a facet of my OCD, one of the behaviors I could use to relieve the obsession related anxiety, to quite those pervasive, scary thoughts that always wanted to swim around in my noodle. I would eat a lot. A lot a lot. Always in secret, and never because I was hungry, but because I felt compelled to do it. My stomach could ache from how much I'd eaten, and I'd keep going, because the anxiety was worse. When what you're doing is a compulsion, you know it doesn't make sense. You know that you're being completely irrational, but that doesn't matter. You do it anyway because you have to. You're compelled. Compulsion, get it?
I've always had sort of a weird relationship with my body, too. Like yeah, okay, it's mine, whatever, but I think of it as a spaceship, just this thing that transports the real me, my consciousness, around. I don't actually think of my body as part of myself any more than an astronaut thinks of a space shuttle as him or herself. But my spaceship was always this giant, clumsy, inelegant thing. It always got in the way and it never did what I wanted it to do. I wanted it to be sleek and shining silver, the newest thing, but it never was. I know its every flaw, every weakness, have catalogued every shortcoming, know how ugly it looks from every angle, but what are you going to do? I couldn't trade it in for a better one, so I just lived with it.
I eventually got therapy. Well, I got lots of therapy over lots and lots of years, from lots of different people. And I feel like now, finally, all that work is paying off. I live my life mostly not controlled by anxiety. I know how to step back and take a deep breath, and I can mostly even identify the emotions I'm feeling without having to work too hard. I used to have to carry a sheet of paper around with me that had lists and lists of feeling words on it, and I'd have to go through the list, trying to figure out what the fuck the feeling fluttering around in my chest was. Anger? No. Guilt? No. Annoyance? Yes! Yes, this is annoyance! This is what it feels like to be annoyed! I mostly don't need that list anymore.
So as my crazy decreased, so did the behaviors I used to keep it at bay. I didn't have to tap my ring finger against my thumb. I didn't have to crack my neck. I didn't have to eat a tub of cottage cheese, three quesadillas, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half a gallon of ice cream, two bags of marshmallows, and half a roast chicken. In twenty minutes. You might notice that pretty much everything I binged on was soft. No chewing means faster eating.
Chewing is weird. It upsets me. I'm not used to it, okay? Now that I'm not binge eating, I'm trying to eat like a normal person, but I don't know how. I don't know what hunger feels like. I can go days without eating and I don't feel anything, really. Sometimes I feel weak and sometimes I pass out, but that's not hunger. Sometimes I feel hunger, especially around my period. I feel ravenous, and it's so new that I'm startled by it, kind of tickled. Hey! I can tell that my body wants me to put food in it! Isn't that wild?
Anyway, backing up, when I first got to the point where I wasn't binge eating anymore, I didn't really think about it. It was just something that fell away when I got a handle on my other issues. So I wasn't paying attention when I basically stopped eating. I'd never had to worry about getting enough food before -- I'd always gotten more than enough. Then I stopped. And nobody noticed because I never ate in public, anyway, so it wasn't like my behavior changed to them. And I didn't notice because I just wasn't thinking about it.
Eventually, I started to notice because my clothes started falling off. Within a month, nothing I owned fit me. I bought some new clothes. Another month, nothing fit me. I was losing weight fast, really fast, scary fast. Sometimes my blood sugar would drop and I'd start to shake and break out in a cold sweat and once or twice I passed out at work. Roughly a year ago, my boss, who was the type of guy who'd rather stab himself in the face than get involved in our personal lives, sat me down and said, "I'm really worried about you. What the hell is happening?"
I call this my accidental anorexia period, though I was never actually anorexic. I wasn't eating, but I wasn't afraid of being fat and I wasn't losing weight on purpose, I just didn't eat.
I worked with my doctor to find ways for me to actually eat, and I resisted it for a long time. Eating was horrible, food was horrible, chewing was the worst thing ever invented. Couldn't I just walk around living my life and not having to worry about this annoying food thing? It became an issue, and because that's how my brain works, I started to become afraid of food. I'd think about heating a bowl of soup up in the microwave and burst into tears. I look at a bowl of pasta on the table in front of me, and it was like a staring contest, like we were mortal enemies. I fucking hated that pasta. I couldn't bear to go to the supermarket or even make a sandwich.
Yay for drive-thrus!
People say drive-thru fast food is unhealthy. I don't give a fuck. Know why? The reasons people call them unhealthy are the very reasons I fucking love them. High calories in a small amount of food. That's fucking heaven, you guys. On the really horrible days when chewing makes me angry, I can have a milkshake and some mozzarella sticks and know I got half the calories I needed.
I try to eat meals most days. I'm trying to get myself in the habit of eating on a regular basis. My job makes this easy, since I have breaks roughly every two hours. I don't want to eat most of the time, but I do it anyway. Just a little bit, I tell myself. Just another bite. Chewing's not so bad, see? Doesn't that taste good?
I actually really like food. I love the artistry involved in it, love the passion of people who love to cook. I love to listen to people who love to cook talk about why they love to cook, and then I love to eat their food. Talking about food removes the shame, somehow. The need to only eat in secret disappears when I'm around people having conversations about eating.
Obviously, I've still got issues. I'm always going to have issues. Even if there comes a day when I no longer have food issues, I'm going to have issues.
I've maybe got a handle on my food issues, now. I don't have my food issues under control, but at least I know what I'm dealing with. Mostly. At least I know to eat oatmeal in the morning even though all I want is coffee. At least I can feel joy when Bananas makes me a bowl of steaming hot homemade soup and puts Sriracha in mine because she knows how much I love it.
And I'm kind of figuring out that my body is me, too. It's still kind of weird, but it feels less like a vessel and more like part of a whole.
This entry was originally posted at http://janesays.dreamwidth.org/23750.html. Comment wherever you'd like.
Anyway, the actual category I fit into is called EDNOS, eating disorder not otherwise specified. And I'm not alone! Most of us with disordered eating patterns fall into the EDNOS category.
I went through a very long period of binge eating. I was a secret eater even in my teens -- I couldn't bear to eat in public, for example, so I never ate lunch at school -- but as I got older and started living on my own, it just got worse. It's a way to deal with anxiety and not about food or hunger at all, really -- at least it never was for me. It was a facet of my OCD, one of the behaviors I could use to relieve the obsession related anxiety, to quite those pervasive, scary thoughts that always wanted to swim around in my noodle. I would eat a lot. A lot a lot. Always in secret, and never because I was hungry, but because I felt compelled to do it. My stomach could ache from how much I'd eaten, and I'd keep going, because the anxiety was worse. When what you're doing is a compulsion, you know it doesn't make sense. You know that you're being completely irrational, but that doesn't matter. You do it anyway because you have to. You're compelled. Compulsion, get it?
I've always had sort of a weird relationship with my body, too. Like yeah, okay, it's mine, whatever, but I think of it as a spaceship, just this thing that transports the real me, my consciousness, around. I don't actually think of my body as part of myself any more than an astronaut thinks of a space shuttle as him or herself. But my spaceship was always this giant, clumsy, inelegant thing. It always got in the way and it never did what I wanted it to do. I wanted it to be sleek and shining silver, the newest thing, but it never was. I know its every flaw, every weakness, have catalogued every shortcoming, know how ugly it looks from every angle, but what are you going to do? I couldn't trade it in for a better one, so I just lived with it.
I eventually got therapy. Well, I got lots of therapy over lots and lots of years, from lots of different people. And I feel like now, finally, all that work is paying off. I live my life mostly not controlled by anxiety. I know how to step back and take a deep breath, and I can mostly even identify the emotions I'm feeling without having to work too hard. I used to have to carry a sheet of paper around with me that had lists and lists of feeling words on it, and I'd have to go through the list, trying to figure out what the fuck the feeling fluttering around in my chest was. Anger? No. Guilt? No. Annoyance? Yes! Yes, this is annoyance! This is what it feels like to be annoyed! I mostly don't need that list anymore.
So as my crazy decreased, so did the behaviors I used to keep it at bay. I didn't have to tap my ring finger against my thumb. I didn't have to crack my neck. I didn't have to eat a tub of cottage cheese, three quesadillas, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half a gallon of ice cream, two bags of marshmallows, and half a roast chicken. In twenty minutes. You might notice that pretty much everything I binged on was soft. No chewing means faster eating.
Chewing is weird. It upsets me. I'm not used to it, okay? Now that I'm not binge eating, I'm trying to eat like a normal person, but I don't know how. I don't know what hunger feels like. I can go days without eating and I don't feel anything, really. Sometimes I feel weak and sometimes I pass out, but that's not hunger. Sometimes I feel hunger, especially around my period. I feel ravenous, and it's so new that I'm startled by it, kind of tickled. Hey! I can tell that my body wants me to put food in it! Isn't that wild?
Anyway, backing up, when I first got to the point where I wasn't binge eating anymore, I didn't really think about it. It was just something that fell away when I got a handle on my other issues. So I wasn't paying attention when I basically stopped eating. I'd never had to worry about getting enough food before -- I'd always gotten more than enough. Then I stopped. And nobody noticed because I never ate in public, anyway, so it wasn't like my behavior changed to them. And I didn't notice because I just wasn't thinking about it.
Eventually, I started to notice because my clothes started falling off. Within a month, nothing I owned fit me. I bought some new clothes. Another month, nothing fit me. I was losing weight fast, really fast, scary fast. Sometimes my blood sugar would drop and I'd start to shake and break out in a cold sweat and once or twice I passed out at work. Roughly a year ago, my boss, who was the type of guy who'd rather stab himself in the face than get involved in our personal lives, sat me down and said, "I'm really worried about you. What the hell is happening?"
I call this my accidental anorexia period, though I was never actually anorexic. I wasn't eating, but I wasn't afraid of being fat and I wasn't losing weight on purpose, I just didn't eat.
I worked with my doctor to find ways for me to actually eat, and I resisted it for a long time. Eating was horrible, food was horrible, chewing was the worst thing ever invented. Couldn't I just walk around living my life and not having to worry about this annoying food thing? It became an issue, and because that's how my brain works, I started to become afraid of food. I'd think about heating a bowl of soup up in the microwave and burst into tears. I look at a bowl of pasta on the table in front of me, and it was like a staring contest, like we were mortal enemies. I fucking hated that pasta. I couldn't bear to go to the supermarket or even make a sandwich.
Yay for drive-thrus!
People say drive-thru fast food is unhealthy. I don't give a fuck. Know why? The reasons people call them unhealthy are the very reasons I fucking love them. High calories in a small amount of food. That's fucking heaven, you guys. On the really horrible days when chewing makes me angry, I can have a milkshake and some mozzarella sticks and know I got half the calories I needed.
I try to eat meals most days. I'm trying to get myself in the habit of eating on a regular basis. My job makes this easy, since I have breaks roughly every two hours. I don't want to eat most of the time, but I do it anyway. Just a little bit, I tell myself. Just another bite. Chewing's not so bad, see? Doesn't that taste good?
I actually really like food. I love the artistry involved in it, love the passion of people who love to cook. I love to listen to people who love to cook talk about why they love to cook, and then I love to eat their food. Talking about food removes the shame, somehow. The need to only eat in secret disappears when I'm around people having conversations about eating.
Obviously, I've still got issues. I'm always going to have issues. Even if there comes a day when I no longer have food issues, I'm going to have issues.
I've maybe got a handle on my food issues, now. I don't have my food issues under control, but at least I know what I'm dealing with. Mostly. At least I know to eat oatmeal in the morning even though all I want is coffee. At least I can feel joy when Bananas makes me a bowl of steaming hot homemade soup and puts Sriracha in mine because she knows how much I love it.
And I'm kind of figuring out that my body is me, too. It's still kind of weird, but it feels less like a vessel and more like part of a whole.
This entry was originally posted at http://janesays.dreamwidth.org/23750.html. Comment wherever you'd like.