Food and Me

I’ve had a cantankerous relationship with food my whole life.  Since I became an adult,  I’ve been some level of overweight from really overweight to “you need to lose a few pounds.” And for most of those years, I hated my body. It was fat. Not the American ideal, but curvy and round—not one bit skinny.  For ages, all I wanted was to be THIN. Oh, I’d say, “I just want to be healthy,” but it was a lie. I wanted to be THIN.

And I tried every way there was to get THIN–diets, exercise, fasts, laxatives, fiber, you name it…outside of radical chemistry or surgery, I was there. Sometimes I was smaller, most times I wasn’t. But all the time,  I hated, hated food. No, that’s not true, I hated thinking about food. And when your body isn’t the ideal shape, you think about food all the time. When your mind isn’t absorbed with what you’re eating at the moment, you’re thinking about what you want to eat later or feeling guilty about what you ate earlier.  Not a single bite went into my body without my being totally aware of its effect—how many calories, how much fat, where it would end up—my favorite thing to say was, “I may as well apply this *fill in any food here* directly to my ass because that’s where it’s going to end up anyway.”

Wisdom has come late, but food and I are finally developing a rapport.  I’ve figured out that diets don’t work, so now, I eat when I’m hungry and I eat only what I love. That’s so key, I’m repeating it, I eat only what I love. The difference is I’m controlling the food, not the other way around. I’m in charge now—I say what, I say when, I say how much. I eat what I want in reasonable portions because I can have whatever I want—there are no bad food choices anymore.

The decision to be in charge of what I eat has made a remarkable difference in how I feel, my energy level, and what I see in the mirror. I’m the same overweight woman…my weight hasn’t changed in ten years. But now, I love my curves, I enjoy food rather than obsess over it, and I like the image in the mirror.

Shall we celebrate with a glass of wine?