perjantai 12. lokakuuta 2012

Day 21 - Food and eating, part 1

12102012

"Fuck, am I getting fat again?"

As I've been consuming a lot of energy lately I have also changed the way I eat and the amount of food I eat in order to get the energy and nutrition I need to stay healthy. When I kept my eating habits the way they were I lost weight and got weaker due to malnutrition, and I have been feeling quite good and nourished now that I've adapted to my current rhythm.

The good thing about all this is that I really enjoy food and it's awesome to be able to eat plenty and not have to feel guilty about it. The downside is I fear I'll get fat again; I'm hypersensitive to all changes in my body and react when I perceive myself to have gained weight.

The thing is, I have lived through times when I have simply eaten too much considering my energy consumption and consequently gotten overweight, and I have done it not simply out of the pleasure of eating but also as escapism. I haven't really looked into why and how I made food an escape route, and right now as I write I'm starting to realize that the current pleasure I get from eating may contain traces of the past experience. Right now I'm trying to balance not eating too much and not eating too little as I realize both will make me sick, but the fact that I have to balance between the two and perceive myself to “slip” to one extreme or another every now and then implies that I'm not stable, my relationship to food and eating is not stable. My body knows what it needs and how much it needs, so why not just listen to what it says? Even though I know how to listen to my body and mostly do, I still fall into fear of damaging myself and end up doing it as the fear distracts me (I as the fear distract myself) from listening to myself.

I may for example fear in advance that during a busy day that's still ahead I will not have the time to eat / I don't have sufficient food with me to eat on the go and thus end up eating too little and damaging myself. I will then go into a “survival mode” where I search for all possible ways to get food during the day and decide on one and focus on that one source of food, and as I get the food I eat it whether I'm actually hungry or not, because it's the “only” chance for me to eat during the day. That's where I stop listening to my body, not giving it food when it requires it but convincing myself I can “eat in advance”, as if the food would store itself somewhere, not realizing the body doesn't consume energy in big chunks but in moderate portions as I consume energy, according to the amount I consume. I end up eating because of fear of possible future events (not getting food when needed) and then it is not my body that eats, it's my mind.

Will continue with this tomorrow.

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