Hello my lovely readers. Answer me this: doesn’t everybody talk to their food? No…?
I have a love/hate relationship with food. I have worked hard to overcome an eating disorder that I let sneak in when I was 14. At 44, I still have to sift through the wreckage leftover from operating in that kind of dysfunction for so long. It has been a grueling battle for my heart and my body that I have been steadily winning for the last decade. As with any hard thing that we journey through, there are moments when we simply have to take a step back and laugh at ourselves and our own personal versions of crazy. Those brief moments of levity will help us not to take ourselves quite so seriously when the chips (no pun intended) are down. So, here I am bringing some of my crazy to you so that I can keep on laughing at me and now, you can too.
That’s right, I talk to my food. If you live through an eating disorder, food is both your best friend and your worst enemy. You hate it, you love it, you need it, you despise it. I have sneaked it, hidden it, deprived myself of it out of pride and hatred, used it to alter my mood and eaten ungodly amounts of it in a frenzy to offset stress and pain. And sometimes, I need to talk to it. Sometimes I need to tell it what I think. Sometimes I feel like it is only fair to tell it what is going to happen to it.
In light of the mental and emotional gymnastics I used to go through every day regarding food, pregnancy was a wonderful respite from restrictive eating. Four times in my life, for about nine months, I gave myself permission to stop caring. It was heavenly. I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and however much I wanted. I gained monstrous amounts of weight each time but at least I was able to silence the abusive internal dialogue for a bit. As a matter of fact, I turned the tables on food and started smack talking it. Threatening it. Telling it who was the boss. I pretty much only did it when I was alone because-what might people think? But one fine night, my husband was witness to my weirdest of behaviors.
He had been to 7-11 to pick up some Ben & Jerry’s to cap off a long day. I am a one flavor woman and he brought me home my favorite: “Coffee Heath Bar Crunch.” He knew from past experience that I would not be sharing so he also brought back a “Phish Food” for himself. My sweet, unsuspecting husband told me to just sit down at the table and enjoy my ice cream while he put the kids to bed. I gratefully obliged and got to work. He was busy with toothbrushing, jammies and pull-ups while I enjoyed my guilt-free pregnancy ice cream experience. I came to the end of my journey and felt like maybe I could go another round. Thinking I was alone, I glanced over at the “Phish Food” carton and said aloud, “Are you scared?” Barry had come back into the dining room without me noticing and happened to walk in at the exact moment that I began uttering threats at his dessert.
“What did you say?…are…you…talking to my ice cream?!?”
“Wha….no…ok…yes. Do you still want it?”
That’s when Barry knew he was neck-deep in the loony bin and that his ice cream would never be truly safe. I’m surprised he stayed. From that point forward, for the sake of the facade, I have tried to keep my aggressive tendencies towards food under wraps. I mean, if I only do it when no one is there and it doesn’t hurt anybody, why should I have to change or even call it a problem?
However, my bullyish attitude towards food that needed to be dominated continued beyond the age of pregnancy. Barry didn’t know that though. He thought that when the nine month feeding frenzies were over that dessert was safe once more.
One ill-fated day when my phone didn’t fully hang up, he accidentally discovered the truth. I had just come home from a particularly grueling work weekend and I had stopped at Walmart (don’t worry I was nice) to pick up a few grocery items. As a compensation for my stressful weekend I also bought myself some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I called him from the car to tell him I was just a couple of minutes away, said goodbye and thought I had hung up the phone. I put my phone down and reached into the bag where my stress reliever prize was awaiting it’s demise and pulled it out. I deliriously unwrapped it and decided to have a few words with it before I did it in. I didn’t want to use for real swear words because that would be CRAZY, but I did want the peanut butter cup to know that I was the alpha. So I said, in a seedy, Gollum-ish kind of voice, “You’re going dowwwwwwwn, mother sucker…..” and shoved it in my mouth. I was still in euphoric junk food conqueror bliss when I could hear someone far away talking.I looked around and saw my phone on the middle console, still fielding a call from…Barry Patterson. I swallowed hard, knowing I had been caught red-handed and slowly picked up the phone.
“Hello?…Barry…?”
“Uh, what were you just saying?”
‘Wh…what do you mean?”
“I heard you talking and it sounded like you were cussing. Who is in the car with you?”
“What? No one! No one is in the car with me! And I wasn’t cussing!”
“Michelle, I heard you. WHO were you talking to? What were you saying?”
“I…I…was talking to my peanut butter cup. But I wasn’t cussing!”
“You were talking to a peanut butter cup?? What the heck…what were you saying????”
I tried to explain what I had been doing but there was no understanding it for him. To this day, he still doesn’t believe me that I was even saying a fake cussword.
Maybe I’m my own version of crazy or maybe there are lots of people like me whose relationship with food is so personal that it requires a conversation. I googled it to see if it is a for real disorder and sadly, for my sense of belonging, it is not.
On a deeper note, for the last ten years of my life I have been working hard to figure out who is the boss: me or food. In that process, I have discovered that it was never even about food but about some much more important issues that just manifested themselves in controlling/out of control behavior. For all of you who are still sifting through the heavy wreckage of this complicated issue, I dare you to take a step back from yourself and have a giggle at your own crazy. Give yourself some mercy and keep reaching for the truth until it has ahold of you. In the meantime, if you need to threaten some ice cream, I think that’s ok.
Ladies and Gentlemen, here it is: the brand of ice cream that makes you talk to it.
