Journal SolemnDragon's Journal: On food 8

I will never be normal about food.

I accept this. Not gladly, but i accept it.

Completely apart from the foods i can't eat for physical or personal reasons (Such as gluten in the first case, or meat in the second) there's just no way i'm going to be normal about food.

Not weight, but food.

I respect rdewald for his recent journal about weight and food. It's tough stuff. I don't think i could deal with it, but i don't have that issue, so i don't know.

I'm battling food. Not food addiction- i am not sure i believe in that. But certainly disordered eating.

Here's how it works. Food is love, except when it isn't. There are a lot of foods i can't eat because they have bad memories attached. Other foods are great, because eating them automatically propels me into the "loved and special," bracket.

That's not how food is supposed to work, in case you didn't know.

Some foods more than others. Sweet things. Fruits and vegetables- we didn't get much fresh produce, growing up. High-calibre junk foods. Chocolate (although the chocolate is more something i've grown to appreciate over the years.)

Some of my favourite memories are wrapped up in foods. To this day, pancakes are a comfort food, especially thin pancakes cooked extra crispy in butter. A friend made me a pancake once to comfort me when things went wrong. It made a lasting impression.

Buit mostly, food is worth. And lack of food is lack of worth.

When things go right in my life, i overeat because i can and feel i deserve to.

When they go wrong, i stop eating, sometimes almost entirely.

When i got assaulted, i stopped eating, except for a few 'safe' foods. When i started again i was underweight, so i felt oke eating extra. Then we changed my meds, though, and i've shot up several sizes. We aren't at 'oh my gods' proportions, but we're no longer at, 'damn, you thin!' either.

Lately, i've had a lot of stuff go on, AND i've got all the extra weight. So i'm trying to lose it without letting my selective eating issues win... those 'safe foods' that make things better don't solve anything, and really screw things up over the long run.

So... what am i doing about it?

"just stopping," isn't an answer. It never is. If you 'just stop,' without dealing with the root cause of an action, the cause will crop up in your life in another form.

I know, because i tried that last time.

This time, i'm trying something else. I've picked up some good books and i'm trying to process my emotions from my childhood. All of my food concepts are related to childhood, for me. FOods i tried as an adult are automatically, "Safe," foods because there aren't any associations linked to them (except perhapss for a profound sense of relief to not have to think about the issues involved.)

I'm ditching the books on food addiction. That's not my problem. The problem is not that i eat, it's that i eat for a nonphysical hunger. This one is going to take a while to sort out, and in the meantime, i'm struggling to eat at all. Food turns to sawdust. I ate an apple for dinner yesterday.

Well, part of an apple.

So with the chaos in my life again, i've drifted back into 'restriction,' and am trying like hell not to let my daily calories under 800. (Or over 1200, because i'm not all that active and really DO need to lose that weight i put on. Remember i'm tiny and relatively sedentary except for my thrice-weekly exercise nowadays.)

When i found myself thinking everything would just be magically easier if i were thin, i knew i was on shaky ground.

Nope, i know i will never be normal about food. Not ever. But eventually, i hope to come to some kind of truce between my pain in the past and the stuff on my plate, and be able to at least work on my issues in the area that they come from. To do otherwise is like trying to fix your car's engine from the drawing room: not very messy, but not very effective either.

This is going to get messy.

I brought a salad for lunch. I've tried the whole over-eat in healthy directions thing. No use. I need to really approach this from a where-it-comes-from standpoint. And it comes from my childhood, so i'm reaching down in the well past the sharp things and the growls to work on it. It will bite. I will not bite back.

It makes me cry to think about, it makes me angry. Starving is control, for me, it's control of something in my life. More than even that, though, it's that food just turns to sawdust for me when i don't feel deserving and good. So i'm strugglng against the sawdust, trying to get myself together enough to use the superhero powers i learned at dragonschool. Trying to choke down a half an apple just so that i can feel as if i've triumphed over this another day.

Starving isn't easy. Not starving is harder. If there is someone in your life with an eating disorder, respect them, because they are so strong of will that they could die of it. It requires fighting the primal push of survival that comes built in, and if that will could be harnessed in another direction, it could shred cities and tear down mountains.

Right now, i'm using mine to not let the restricting/overeating periods win out over my effort to have a normal life. An apple is not dinner. Food is not a reward or a punishment. It is not about deserving; it is only about food.

This is very, very hard. It's a desensitisation process, and those are hard.

What i tell myself:

food is not my enemy.
food is not my friend.
food is not a reward.
starving is not a punishment.
eating is not a substitute for anything but eating.
Eating is not bad
but i need to remember that it is only eating.

Food is not my enemy
food is not my friend.

what made those foods comfort foods
is the people and the love
and the not having to starve
if i stop starving, i might stop needing the comfort
but it will still be there for me.

Food is not my enemy.
Food is not my friend.
feeding people nourishes them
but i have value in other ways
and can nourish people in other ways

feeding me nourishes me
but i can nourish myself in other ways

***

the hardest thing in the world is going to have to be when i start trying to eat GF versions of some emotionally unsafe foods.

No, i'm serious. This is something that i'm going to have to do, i'm going to HAVE to learn to reduce the powerful associations carired by food. I'm oversensitive to them and they damage me. This is no different from someone who got abused near a storm drain getting over the fear of the sight of them. Facing the memories, fighting the associations, acception the anger and the pain involved.

Let's face it- i have a weird past. There's no way it's going to be made normal. Lots of people have pasts like mine, maybe not in the particulars, but in the overall trend. More than you think. WAY more than you think. I had a close friend recently tell me about the traumas of his youth, and i can't imagine those things happening to him, or how he became such a wonderful, real, honest and good person anyway. He said he pretty much feels the same way about me and my past. We've known each other for years and never knew these things about each other... despite knowing each other when these things were secretly happening to one another.

You have traumas i will never know. You probably have traumas YOU barely know. I have traumas you will never know, and in that regard, i am just like you.

Mine have affected my eating. I'm not going to just stop obsessing over food. I AM going to work on the behavioural aspects of this at the same time that i work on the underlying issues (again.) I'm not going to worry about the surface habits too much: I will let myself restrict, up to a point. I know i'm playing with fire, i know that this stuff is dangerous. But i'm not just damaged and i'm not dumb. I have bigger things to worry about than whether i think i'm fat, and i'm going to work on those while i try to stay 'reasonable' about food.

I don't aim for perfect. I'm aiming for reasonable. Would a reasonable person think i've eaten enough so far today? Probably not. They would probably advise me to have most of my lunch (i only brought a salad and some grapes) and later maybe a glass of milk when i get home. They would approve of the protein drink that i finished most of. They would probably approve of my effort to at least eat most of what i serve- i might not finish the apple, but i ate something. I might not eat all my salad, but i brought slightly more, just to let myself have that margin for refusal. It eases the tension and i can eat better next time.

These are all band-aids. Want to know something about band-aids? All they do is keep other stuff out of the wound. A band-aid won't fix an infection; you have to do that. But they work very, very well at providing some shelter for the damage while you work on that.

I'm exercising 3 times a week again. It's hard, i'm tired and hurt a lot, but i get very anxious if i don't, so i'm using this madness as a spur to better my overall health. I'm letting myself get anxious about it if i don't. I think that's the healthiest use i can put it to while i work on lowering my overall anxiety about feeling like i'm lacking control in my life. It's a band-aid. It's very effective as what it is.

Like food, it isn't anything more than what it actually is- and i can't treat it like more, or let it play the role of something else.

My food issues aren't about food. They are about neglect, and hunger, and loneliness, and anger. They are about starving in ways far more than food, and it is going to take a lot for me to resolve them.

On the bright side, dealing with them may resolve a lot more than my issues with food, as well.

Yes, blinder has been good about this. He has not tried to parent me, he has not been enabling me, he has challenged me on a number of my actions and this has resulted in some of these insights. He's working on a lot of his own stuff, so we work on it together. Some days he offers the perspective that maybe a reasonable person might offer me a glass of milk with dinner just to round out my food intake for the day, other days (when i ask him) he says, maybe don't worry about it, a reasonable person could call that a meal.

Some days i don't ask, and he doesn't volunteer, and that seems like a healthy mix to me. I still keep track of my food, and he still cares about my health, but we're both on self-ownership kicks, so we talk about it from that perspective most often.

So that's what i'm up against, right now. I'm back in restrictive mode, because i've gained a lot of mass from the combination of the point i'm at in my cycles, the meds i'm on (that one was a surprise element that kinda threw everything off more than i was prepared for- they warned me i might gain weight, they didn't warn me i'd gain enough to trigger these issues. That's my job to think about, and i didn't.) and the flares i've been in. These are not excuses, just circumstances i'm dealing with, and in a way i'm kind of glad, because i'm getting the chance to do some more serious work on conquering the shadows of my past.

I'm not ready to try the trauma foods yet. When that time comes, i'll worry about it then. For now, ii'm just exploring the edges, taking it (literally and figuratively) one bite at a time.