My relationship with food: Why can’t I just eat normally?

When I was 14 I landed in the hospital due to a very heavy period that was never really explained. I had to get four bags of blood transferred into my body just to function. I was extremely thin and weighed next to nothing and the nurses asked my mum if she thought I might have some sort of eating disorder. She said I didn’t, and she was right, I didn’t.

I’ve never had a problem with food in a way that eating disorders are described. I don’t try to control my weight or looks with food and though I am often displeased with my body, I still try to love it as it is. This is and has never been an issue of controlling my looks or my weight. When I started writing this blog it was 9.30 pm. I had barely eaten (a banana and a few smarties) but I had taken out leftovers from the night before, not because I wanted to but because I knew I had to. It was the day Donald Trump had become president and I had been feeling a lot of stress, anxiety and fear all day. The food was delicious though.

I have a weird relationship with food. Let me explain.

Firstly, I don’t like cooking. I’m extremely bored by the action of preparing food and making food. I get so bored by it that sometimes I can’t even be bothered to toast a piece of bread, butter it and put a slice of cheese on it. That’s why a lot of the time if no one is cooking for me, I end up eating out or ordering in. A meal that comes to me ready. A lot of people say “Oh but it’s different if you’re making something fancy or cooking for other people” but to me it isn’t. I have had dinner parties; I’ve had a bunch of people over for Christmas where I had to get up at 8 am to start cooking for lunch. Yes, the feeling of having a feast and people complimenting you on the food is great. But not great enough that I want to do it again. Sometimes I will cook for people because I love them, and giving people food shows love. I’m not a great cook, obviously because I don’t have a lot of experience with it, but I do okay with what I know.

I realize this is a luxury problem and I’m being immature about it. I’m an adult, and sometimes adults have to do things they don’t want to. But why should I make something when I can order in or buy ready stuff?

Secondly, I’m an extremely picky eater. I’ve gotten better with age but when I was a kid I didn’t like a lot of food. I barely eat vegetables and it’s not been many years since I started trying sauces with meat. I don’t really know where it comes from. Some of it probably comes from imitating after my older brother, if he didn’t like something I didn’t like it either. When you’re 5, you kind of want to be like your cool 13-year-old brother. Like I said, I’ve gotten better with age. I can eat some vegetables now, though I rarely do, I love most sauces and I try to try most things. I’ve gotten to know that I do in fact like a lot of things I thought I hated. Part of this is also a gag reflex. I have a weird gag reflex. For the longest time I didn’t eat Skyr (thick yoghurt-y type of thing) because I couldn’t deal with how thick it was, it made me want to vomit. I like Skyr now but sometimes, at the last spoonfuls the feeling comes back and I have to stop. It’s like my body just rejects some food. And I get that people have gag reflexes for foods they don’t like, but it’s always been so many different foods for me and such heavy negative connections.

Thirdly, I also think that part of it is a sort of a control thing because ever since I was a kid I hated being told what to do. I hate being told what I might like or what I need to do. Yes, I realize it’s immature, but that’s the truth. If someone tells me “oh you’ll love this” my automatic system goes “You don’t get to tell me what I love!”. It’s very much a “I’m cleaning my room because IIIII want to, not because you told me MUM!” type of thing. I want to control myself, I don’t want to be controlled. Some might say “fiercely independent” (which sounds nice), others might go for a “extremely childish”. I think it’s a mix of both.

Because of these things, disliking cooking and being a picky eater along with the control issue, I’ve generally never eaten much. When I was 18 I had to do an essay on vitamins and the like, where I had to write down what I was eating for a week, analyse it and understand it. In the same semester I participated in a research where I also had to write down what I ate, and come in for a physical. In both cases I reported eating way too little, except when I was eating a lot of candy. I was having pretty much no food. It wasn’t on purpose, I just didn’t eat. I’d buy a sandwich at school and then possibly eat dinner. When I realized it, I lied on the reports. I made up eating more, because I knew I was supposed. In my head I’ve always been like this, I don’t know if that’s true though. But I’ll eat once before dinner usually, and a lot of the time that’s because I know I should eat, not because I want to. But more on that later.

Last but definitely not least, and probably most importantly, feelings. When I was around 18 I was in an unhappy relationship, and we lived less than a 10-minute walk from a 24-hour store with a big selection of sweets. At that point in my life, I ate when I was unhappy. After we broke up, I ate a lot of junk food. A lot of it. From 18 I had started gaining weight. But in the past year or so, it’s changed. I wonder if I was always like this but somehow always ate the junk food before because that’s what I thought you did. In the last year I’ve often gone to the store to buy junk food, and either bought much less than I expected or bought stuff and then didn’t want to eat it. But I did. In April I moved into a house which was further away from a store than previously. I was also writing my thesis for school and it was a very stressful time. It’s not that I never went to the store, and I did indeed often buy junk food that I then didn’t want. But I lost weight from the stress this time, and that’s the first time I remember losing weight dramatically enough to notice it. I do often crave junk food but that’s probably just because my body knows it has to eat. But I don’t want it anymore, I don’t have the appetite. I’ll order a pizza and hate it while I eat it. Junk food is still somehow the only thing I know how to eat. I know how to eat simple food, simple carbs. Candy is easy because it’s ready. Previously, I’d eat when I was unhappy, but now I don’t. And eating is already something I struggle with on good days.

I need routine, heavy routine, and even then I have problems. In the summer of 2015 I was working a 2-2-3 system and on the days I worked I was eating pretty well. I’d have a kale and berries smoothie for breakfast and some yoghurt. I’d drink enough water and take vitamins. I’d have a sandwich for lunch and an afternoon snack and then dinner. I felt great. I know I felt better. But when my work routine changed, so did my eating habits.

This summer when I was traveling I also barely ate. I’d have one big meal a day usually, and maybe some yoghurt. But I also didn’t eat a lot of sweets like I’m used to so I lost weight. Honestly the more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t even remember what I was eating. I remember eating a lot of croissants in train stations and I always tried to make sure I had enough snacks for long train rides. For some reason I’m always very careful to have a lot of snacks when I travel. Healthy and unhealthy snacks. After I came back I started eating sweets more and I’m sure I have put on weight (I don’t weigh myself and haven’t for many years. It’s not helpful). When I had just come back people around me commented that I had very obviously lost weight. It didn’t make me feel good because I couldn’t see it myself.

My relationship with food is a weird one. I eat way too little, for all the reasons mentioned above. I probably generally eat less than 1000 calories a day of actual food. Some days I make up the calories by sweets, but lately not as much. I just don’t want to. I eat food and junk food because I know I need to eat and because in some way I think that’s supposed to be a coping mechanism, but it just isn’t. It used to be for me, it used to somehow help but it doesn’t anymore. I try to use this chance to not eat unhealthy, but the main problem is – I’m not eating anything instead either.

I’m writing this post because I believe writing things and letting them go by posting them can help. Writing them out helps me get my thoughts in order and posting them helps me try to take responsibility or even just feel some support through people possibly reading it. I want to stress that my odd relationship with food has nothing to do with weight loss or controlling the way I look. I don’t starve myself on purpose or feel bad for eating. Maybe now that I’m posting this I’ll finally get into a routine, start eating like I’m supposed to. But most likely, I might do it for a few days and then fall back into the same habits. We’ll just have to see.