My Relationship With Food

*trigger warning for discussion of an eating disorder*

My mom and I had rice, stir-fried broccoli (from a nearby farmstand) with ginger, and corn on the cob (from the same farmstand).  As we sat down to eat, my mom commented that she'd just been reading how corn and peas should be counted as servings of grains instead of vegetables because of their high starch content.  This caused a slightly heated discussion about counting food.

You see, I was anorexic when I was younger.  I never got to the point where I had to be hospitalized or anything, and since it was never diagnosed it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I'd suffered from an eating disorder.  My doctor, my mom, and possibly my dad suspected it at the time, but it wasn't until last spring that I told anyone about what I'd gone through five years before.

Because I obsessively counted calories when I was in the grips of anorexia, any counting associated with I eat makes me feel closer falling over the cliff back into the freefall of anorexia.  Thus the mention of counting servings of food groups made me a bit on edge at lunchtime.

My philosophy today towards food comes from the cookbook Laurel's Kitchen.  In it, the authors, including Laurel Robertson, a dietician, say:

-Move to a diet (not a reducing diet!) of low-fat whole foods

-Take up a program of daily aerobic exercise

-Withdraw your attention from food and its consequences and absorb yourself in activities that really deserve your interest -- activities where you have to give yourself to something truly worthwhile 

When I read the above section of the book while anorexic, it was revolutionary to me.  It was so contrary both to how I was living my life and to how American culture expected people, especially girls and women, to treat food and weight.  The basic sentiment of the passage, to eat whole foods, exercise, and not worry, has stuck with me ever since, though I'm not completely sold on the low-fat part today.

Why is any of this relevant?  Well, if it weren't for my eating disorder, I wouldn't be on the path I am on today.  I started baking bread, cooking meals, and eating more vegetables while I was anorexic.  At that time, it was because it made my control over what was going into my body even more rigid.

As I began to recover, my interest in food didn't go away.  When I was anorexic, I'd found not only control in making food, but also enjoyment.  Relaxing my control over what went into my body was very hard, even scary at times, and it took months and months.  As I pruned away the obsession with every calorie, I found the joy in making food, particularly in baking bread, was still there.  I think I found it reassuring, I didn't have to get rid of everything I had become since my anorexia began.  The calorie-counting girl had to go, but food-creating girl could stay.  I was only losing part of myself, and that gave me a foothold as I clawed my way back up the cliff towards a more normal relationship with food and my body.

I cannot say that I'm glad that I suffered from anorexia.  I am glad that I was able to find value in my suffering, to turn things that I hurt myself into an interest in good food that I will hopefully be aspects of helping myself, my family, and my community for the rest of my life.

As a coda, it occurred to me that a person complaining about counting food like I did in this post is an awfully strange person to be embracing counting food miles.  Perhaps because they don't pertain as directly to health and weight, food miles don't scare me as much as other things that get counted with food.  All that I know for sure is that when locavorism makes me proud, but it doesn't bother me to make a chocolate cake (with obviously non-local chocolate) for my dad's birthday or order a salad with my meal at a restaurant in January.  While suffering from anorexia, every calorie I ate was a failure, but sometimes I just failed worse than others (bran muffin = bad, second helping of spaghetti with lots of Parmesan cheese = very, very, bad).  Locavorism is positive for me, a self-affirming path of personal growth.  That doesn't scare me in the slightest, so I can feel secure as I count my food miles  this September.