I Have Food Issues

This is a post about food, but not about weight loss.  The thing is that I have food issues, which I know a girl can’t say without people thinking she has an eating disorder, but I do not have an eating disorder.  I have your average insecurities about my body, but my food issues are separate from that.

I’ve never written about it, because my food issues are strange and complex and I haven’t felt much about doing anything about them.  I’ll try to explain by saying that I am an incredibly picky eater and I always have been.  I have strange mental hangups about foods.  Things like, when I was in daycare as a kid, I accidentally spilled my apple juice into my Top Ramen and then ate a bite, which led to a 10 year moratorium on Top Ramen and 20 year ban on apple juice that continues to this day.  And that’s not even a good example.  If I can’t find the perfect thing to eat, then I’ll eat nothing and then I’ll get nauseous and sick.  I can for some random reason get hung up on a food and then not be able to eat if for years even if I’ve had it every day before.   People who know me really well don’t even understand my food issues; me, least of all.

Then there’s the thing where my parents both had terrible eating habits until they were in their thirties and though they’re just about the best people in the world, this is the one area they fell short.  My siblings don’t have the same mental hangups as me, but none of us have good habits.  It’s not enough to say I’m not interested in cooking; it goes beyond that into something like I have a serious aversion to wasting time planning, preparing, and cleaning up after meals.  It’s not even that I can’t do it.  It’s that I have no interest or motivation.  For years and years and years, I’ve eaten a lot of the same foods.  I currently hold the world record for most consecutive days one person has ever consumed a wheat bagel for lunch.

In Elementary School, I threw my sandwich away every day.  In Middle School, I ate chips and a candy bar for lunch every day.  In High School, I washed down my chips with a Pepsi every day.  In college, motivated mostly by weight loss, I finally started eating kind of healthy.  My hair changed from thin and straight to thick and wavy; I guess that says something about what adding the tiniest bit of real food into my diet did for me.  I was like, I’ve got this food thing mastered now! And it’s true that I’ve never completely regressed back to high school, but there have been some serious downs, the worst being my first year of grad school where I was so stressed out and so unable to prepare all of my own meals that I ended up making myself sick by not eating.

I’ve improved since then.  I eat regularly and decently, but mostly carbs and mostly simple ones.  A granola bar for breakfast, a bagel for lunch, and a sandwich for dinner (think one slice of turkey and one slice of cheese–not sprouts and the whole nine yards).  I’m not particularly insecure about my weird eating, but maybe I don’t mention in my mid-twenties conscientious blogger and liberal academic circles that I often eat at Taco Bell, that I don’t know where my food was produced, that I never cook ever, that I’ve never heard of that fruit you’re eating.  For the last couple years, I’ve been counting on marrying someone who cooks, because that’s my best chance of ever eating anything other than sandwiches for every meal.

I guess the hardest thing for other people to understand is just how hard it is for me to change the way I eat.  It makes all of my other goals seem like nothing; it’s moving mountains for me.  I have improved a lot over the years, but the progress has been so slow and the mental hangups and general apathy about what I eat have not gone anywhere.

For the last several months especially, I guess because I’ve been succeeding at others of my big goals, I’ve been thinking more about changing the way I eat.  It’s more for me than weight loss or even my own health, though feeling good is a big part of it.  I want to eat more ethically as well.  But, I haven’t read all the books people are suggesting or watched the documentaries or written anything about it here, because I just wasn’t ready to do anything about it.

I had a moment yesterday where something just changed in my thinking.  Changing the way I eat went from something that sounded like a good idea to something I was ready to do.  Considering my issues and my history, it’s going to be hard for me and while my instinct in everything is to jump into the deep end, I know that I’m going to have to make small changes.

I have a list of priorities and I’m going to start at the top and move onto the next when I’m ready.

1. Cut out process foods. I actually do a pretty decent job of this, except I eat fast food occasionally (less, of course, now that I’m dieting and working to pay off my debt) and I lovvvvvve my crackers.  Crackers and bread are definitely my weakness, so that’s the first thing in my diet I’m going to work to replace, hopefully with fruits and vegetables and protein.  (Of course crackers and bread aren’t bad, but they have been making up 80% of my diet for far too long now.) For the sake of my health, I’m doing this to cut out all the chemically stuff.

2. Eat a more balanced diet. Related to the first priority, I need to stop letting carbs make up most of my diet.  For all of our talk about lack of protein, most Americans actually get enough.  When I’m eating at my worst, including fast food, I probably do too, but as soon as I try to eat what for me is healthy, I don’t get enough protein.  I don’t know that I’ll ever track it this closely, but I’d like to eventually get closer to a 40:30:30 carbs, protein, fat ratio.

3. Start cooking dinner. There’s no chance of me cooking every meal, but I can at least do dinner.  And, I finally want to cook dinner, because I’m so tired of sandwiches and eating the same things all the time.  I’ve picked up a few cookbooks from the library and now that it’s Summer, I do have the time to prepare dinner.  I’m going to start slow with just a few days a week, but I hope to start cooking 4-5 days a week at least.  Healthy food is what I’m aiming for, of course.

4. Buy organic. While I’ll probably work on the first three all at the same time, this is a lower priority.  There are resources to buy organic around here and I’m sure that if I put the time in, I could even do it on a budget, but it’s just a lower priority right now.  Eventually, though, I hope to buy mostly organic to further avoid all that chemically stuff.  For ethical reasons as well.

5. Buy locally. There is a farmer’s market in my town once a week.  This is mostly for ethical reasons, supporting my local economy and limiting my carbon footprint, but it is a lower priority for me right now while time and money is limited.

6. Go vegetarian? There’s a question mark on this one, because I’m not sure whether I will ever go vegetarian completely.  I have never been a big meat eater and when I start eating what is for me healthy, I eat even less.  I think that when I get into more literature about eating ethically, I might be moved to eventually go vegetarian.  It will be hard for me, since I already struggle with protein, and that’s another reason it’s currently a low priority.  It’s something I’m thinking about, at least.

I just have to say again, because I know a lot of very healthy eaters who do not understand, this is like moving mountains for me  You don’t change 26 years of bad habits easily.  But, there has never been a better time in my life to do this and I certainly took my time getting to this point.

I’m not going for perfection here, because there’s nothing that could ever remove pizza from my diet and restricting my food really heavily leads me to bad thoughts, but I’m working on the long, slow changes that stick.  I’ll talk about what this means for my weight loss goals and keep you updated on my progress in my Friday weight loss vlogs.