Intuitive eating has been an easy concept to grasp for me. I get it, it makes sense. But putting it into practice has been near impossible. My struggles with mental illness, disordered eating, and fat acceptance are all heavily intertwined. To the point that I don't think they can be untangled. It reminds me of those cheap plastic knock-off slinkies you could get from vending machines in the 80's. They'd go down about 6 steps and then they'd get miserably disfigured, tangled, messed up... once bent, the plastic stayed bent. Even if you untangled the whole thing, it never looked the same again, never functioned properly.
When I listen to my body and try to figure out what it's telling me, I hear voices and compulsions instead of hunger cues. I can't decipher what vitamins I might be lacking in, based on what foods I crave. I can't distinguish a textural craving from a nutritional craving. All I can hear is the pounding of my head, the uneasy nausea in my stomach from not eating, or alternately, the pain in my stomach from binging. Gray area? Happy medium? Middle ground? What on earth are those? All my body knows is withholding and going overboard. Back and forth, over and over.
The evenings are my safe space, my haven. They are filled with sensible dinners prepared for my family. Foods that bring nourishment and satisfaction to 3 very different palates. Things like lasagna, gratin potatoes with carrots and asparagus and broccoli and zucchini and shallots, chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans, taco salad, corn chowder, burgers, or like in the picture, salmon cakes with corn and tartar sauce. I can make sense of the evening meals.
My daytime eating leaves much to be desired. I generally skip breakfast, which might not be an issue for some people, but I skip it under 99% of circumstances. Pounding headache? Stomach growling at 8am? No energy whatsoever? These are all common parts of my morning routine, yet I can't force myself to ingest more than a couple cups of coffee and my chewable vitamin. Lunch is also problematic... I make myself eat about half the time. The other half I may not eat until dinner - at 6pm-ish - when Seth gets home from work. There have been many days where I've gotten all the way to 6pm with nothing in my stomach but coffee, diet dr. pepper, and a handful of ritz crackers or the two apple slices Silas didn't finish at lunch. I know it's a large part of why I feel the way I do... lethargic, achy, in pain. Instead of fixing it, I let it build and compound and perpetuate itself, because this is what my mental illness tells me to do. And on top of having a brain that doesn't want to function, I have a deep history of disordered eating and compulsive dieting, lurking behind me, watching my every move.
So this is me when I'm on healthy terms with my body and weight and my identity. My behavior when I wasn't ok was pretty extreme. I don't feel like recounting it here. It glorifies it in my mind and makes it hard not to return to those habits and compulsions. I used to work with a girl who suffered from bulimia & anorexia both. She had to stop discussing her actual in-detail behavior with her ED therapist because she realized that every time she did, the drama and control of these habits would become irresistible. Her confessions would almost turn into bragging and then she'd catch herself falling into the same patterns. I don't want to do that with my own history.
I'm still learning how to make this all work, obviously. I'm not ever going to claim I've got it all figured out... No one ever has it all figured out. But I'm working on having some of it figured out, atleast.
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