I used to hate eating. Cooking is a chore. Shopping for food is tedious and expensive (and oh so frustrating when you are pushing a big cart around small aisles that are filled with other people pushing big carts, or not pushing big carts and just standing in your way). Chopping up vegetables is time consuming. Cooking is messy, and cleaning up your mess often takes longer than eating ever does. Timing your food so everything is ready at once is difficult.

And worse than all that, after I ate I felt bloated. Stuffed. Tired. Fat. Ugly. I had pains in my chest and pains in my belly. Sometimes I felt so stuffed that I went to extreme and unhealthy means to unstuff myself. But I don’t really want to belabour the point at the minute, because something remarkable has happened to me.

It began when I stopped eating dairy. Suddenly I was less bloated after I ate, and I had less chest pains, and less bellyaches. It took me 24 years to make the connection…eat dairy, feel sick, eat dairy, feel sick…I’m lactose intolerant. Or, ‘lactose ignorant’ as my ex calls me. But once I realized that my body was ignorant to the ways of digesting dairy, I was on my first step to realizing that eating could be pain free.

Around this same time, I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and I’ll give the man full credit for shaking my food belief system to the core. In a matter of days, all the things that I had regarded as “food” –things that sat in boxes in my freezer, cans in my cupboard, bags on my counter, for months or years without the fear of going bad – these things were not ‘food.’ I was afraid of these things, and I still am, and I really believe that we all should be. This book precipitated my shift to eating ‘whole’ foods. Real food.

Last December I stopped eating meat. It came out of nowhere, and the reasons are largely unimportant to what ultimately happened to me. But it was this switch that changed me the most. Without meat, I had to look up new recipes. I had to buy new cookbooks. I had to put effort into planning and making meals. It seemed destined to be a short-lived phase for a girl who spent most of the summer heating up boneless frozen ribs in her microwave. But when I was sitting down to eat these meals, I felt something I had not previously associated with eating…I felt pleasure. And this is when I realized that while I was going to yoga and learning to be single and living on my own for the first time, I had been expecting that somewhere along the way I would ‘find myself’ (I am a 20 something after all). But all of a sudden I was finding out what it meant to taste, to savour, to revel in a delicious meal. I had found food.

Now, I can’t claim that I fully understand what has been happening to me in the past two months. I know I’ve turned a corner – whereas before I obsessed about food and how it would ruin my body, I know obsess about all the new recipes I want to try. I know that somehow spending a Saturday night cooking a big meal and then curling up with a new cooking magazine to plan my next big meal is a great Saturday night.

My body fears still haunt me. I still sometimes eat crappy ‘non food’ even though I’m never satisfied after. But I am challenging myself to enter this new era of my life with two main objectives. First, to immerse myself in this new love of food, and to find pleasure and joy in eating. And second, to find peace in eating – peace from my constant body fears, and peace from my alternating controlling and out-of-control eating.

My quick disclaimer is that I do not believe that everyone need give up meat, dairy, eggs to feel the way I do. But this is my current path, and it is what has led me to hope that I can find peace and joy and pleasure in food. I think that whether you eat meat, or don’t eat meat, eat dairy, or don’t eat dairy, eating will always be enhanced by stepping out of your comfort zone and discovering something new. And that is what I'm doing.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Food Related Insomnia

Like it has for so much of my life, food is causing me a little bit of anxiety. So much so, in fact, I cannot sleep. Lying in bed my mind is washed in food-related thoughts ranging from - why can't I think of a better snack that raisins and dark choclate chips (is it because a better snack does not exist...possibly)? What if I'm not meant to be a 'chef'? What should I cook this weekend, and what if I fuck it up? Why can't I come up with beautiful recipes like I'm seeing all over the Internet? Why am I so predictable in my desire to start a food blog? Why would I think that anyone would want to read yet another food blog, when I so obviously have nothing to offer that is new? How can one person have so much to learn when it comes to cooking? What the hell does it mean to zest a lemon - or anything for that matter? And, to be honest, I could go on for hours. I probabl have, at this point, seeing as I've been trying to fall asleep for a while now.

There were a few brief moments when I thought I had found peace with food.  Peace with eating. Peace with my body. They were nice moments. But tonight, I feel like I'm back where I started. But along with the body image issues, there is this new sense of being overwhelmed. I've stumbled onto something that excites me - I'm looking at food in a whole new way - but I don't quite know what to do with this new part of myself. Perhaps I need to become a little Michael Pollan, and come up with my own Food Rules. But, rules that suit myself - my history, my worries, my hopes, my interests. What would these rules look like? To be honest, I don't know. One word that keeps rising above all the clammering thoughts in my head is "peace." I want first of all, for my eating to be done in a way that supports peace at large - for other living beings, for the planet, for other people. But I always want my eating to bring a sense of inner peace for myself - and I'm not quite sure how to do this....
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)