​Fixing Our Broken Relationship with Food

Lost somewhere in the mists of fantasyland dwells the elusive unicorn who can eat as much as they want of whatever they want whenever they want.
 
This mythical creature doesn’t have to worry about their health, their weight, or their appearance. 
 
The rest of us have issues with food. Everyone reading this has body image issues, weight problems, and eating disorders.
 
We’re constantly at war with ourselves over eating too much or too little, weighing too much or too little, or thinking we’re eating or weighing too much or too little.  
 
Nearly every blog article or self-help outlet begins the discussion on food, weight, and body image with the idea that we should all just love ourselves a lot more.
 
That’s all really wonderful, but it doesn’t do much to improve our health. It definitely doesn’t help if we have an eating disorder. 
 
So what are we supposed to do about it? 
 
I struggled with anorexia for twenty years. Then I had three kids and struggled another twenty years to lose the weight I gained when I was pregnant.
 
So whichever side of this issue you’re on, take this as a message from someone who has been where you are now. 
 
Let me paint you a picture of a healthy attitude toward food. 
 
Let’s say we bought a prize racehorse worth $50million.
 
We would make absolutely certain that the animal got the right amount of the right kind of food at the right times of the day.
 
We would probably pay a lot of money to hire a veterinary nutritionist to tell us exactly what, when, and how much the horse should eat.
 
We would weigh every meal down to the microgram. What the food looked and tasted like would be so far down on the priority list that they wouldn’t even show up on our radar.
 
We would make sure the horse got exactly the right amount of exercise, not too much and not too little, balanced with adequate rest, to ensure the horse performed at its peak.
 
We would give the horse a comfortable place to sleep so nothing disturbed it and so the horse would feel relaxed and well taken care of. 
 
Why would we go to such lengths to do all this? Because we recognize the horse’s value. We would want to protect our investment and make sure the horse could run its best race.
 
Now let’s apply the same logic to ourselves.
 
We don’t go to the same pains to ensure that we get the right amount of the right kind of food so that we stay in the peak of health.
 
Why don’t we do this? Because we don’t value ourselves.
 
We think we don’t matter, that it’s too much trouble, or that we don’t deserve that kind of care, attention, and effort.
 
Disordered eating is a form of self-sabotage that keeps all our other problems going.
 
If we’re already overweight, we tell ourselves that one more donut won’t make any difference, so why not?
 
We tell ourselves that one more day of slouching on the couch won’t make any difference, so we might as well put off exercising until tomorrow.
 
We tell ourselves every lie in the book. Meanwhile, the negative health consequences of eating this way keep piling up and getting worse as we age.
 
Our bodies become less able to cope with the stress of dosing ourselves every day with toxic poisons.
 
These substances don’t just fail to provide the nutrition we need. These foods actually strip away any nutrition that we do consume.
 
They rob us of the building blocks we need to live. That’s why our bodies break down and stop working.
 
A healthy approach to food treats us and our physical needs the same way we would treat a high-value racehorse. It treats us as our most valuable investment. 
 
Food is not a form of entertainment. It is not a form of recreation. 
 
Food is not a carnival ride of sensations to constantly stimulate us with adrenaline rushes of excitement.
 
We do not eat food for pleasure. Food is not what we do when we go out with our friends or what we do when we’re bored.
 
It isn’t there to give our hands something to do while we watch videos.  
 
It isn’t a reward for surviving our stressful lives or to make us feel better about our how worthless we feel.
 
Food is a tool. The purpose of that tool is to maximize our performance, both mental and physical, and to keep us alive and in the peak of health.
 
If food doesn’t accomplish that, it isn’t doing its job. It would be better for us not to eat at all than to eat foods that doesn’t keep us healthy and alive.
 
There is no magical barrier between our brains and the rest of our bodies. The same blood that flows through your brain also flows through every other part of your body, including your gut.
 
Serotonin is the chemical most anti-depressants try to mimic and the majority of our serotonin is produced in the gut.
 
What happens in the brain affects the rest of the body and what happens in the body affects the brain.
 
If we have any mental health problem at all—which is most people reading this—our first project should be to start eating correctly. 
 
Depression, anxiety, body image issues—they all come down to what we put in our mouths.
 
What we put in is what we get out. Food is the foundation of everything. Garbage in, Garbage out. 
 
Food is not our friend. Food is a tool. 
 
Food is not optional. What we eat, when we eat, and how we eat are not optional, either. 
 
Athletes, dancers, celebrities, supermodels, bodybuilders—all the people whose bodies we admire—they all treat food as a job.
 
These people aren’t out there eating whatever they want. No way. They count every calorie going in.
 
They don’t eat trash. They weigh their food down to the microgram and account for every macronutrient.
 
These people wouldn’t dare to treat food as anything else because everything they do depends on what they eat. They can’t eat a bunch of trash and expect to get the result they want. 
 
They value the result so highly that they make certain they eat accordingly. They treat food as a job because it IS their job. 
 
I can hear the protests now. Some might argue that this approach robs eating of all its pleasure. I would ask just how much pleasure we’re getting from this kind of disordered eating. 
 
Eating compulsively or unconsciously doesn’t give us any pleasure from our food. This kind of disordered eating is exactly the thing that is robbing us of getting any pleasure from our food.
 
If you went out and stuffed your face with a candy bar right now, it wouldn’t give you any pleasure. It wouldn’t make you happy. You would get a few seconds of a nice taste in your mouth.
 
You’ve probably tasted that same candy bar a million times before. You could probably get exactly the same feeling of pleasure by NOT eating the candy bar and simply remembering what it tastes like.
 
Eating it won’t do anything for you except to make you ashamed of losing control of yourself.
 
Disordered eating habits definitely aren’t giving us any pleasure if they’re causing us mental illness or unhappiness. Anorexics definitely aren’t taking any pleasure in food. 
 
Disordered eating habits make hate our bodies and feel terrible about ourselves. This feeling isn’t worth the few seconds of pleasure we get from putting something sugary in our mouths.
 
We can take far more pleasure by valuing ourselves. What could be more pleasurable than biting into a crisp, juicy tomato or a ripe strawberry?
 
We can experience a rush of gratitude when we put this food in our mouths and truly appreciate the taste for the joy that it is.
 
We can get more pleasure and genuine fulfilment from that than we would from cramming a whole chocolate cake into our mouths.  
 
The energy, well-being, and pride we feel from being healthy and active gives us far more pleasure than eating a whole pizza at two o’clock in the morning. 
 
Expressing gratitude for our food is another essential key to changing our attitude about what we put into our mouths and why.
 
I love the scene from The Road Warrior (1981) where Mad Max is sitting next to his car using a spoon to eat dog food out of a can. He finishes eating and throws the empty can to his dog to lick out.
 
This is what food is. It’s there to keep us alive. That is its only function in our lives.
 
Imagine we were prisoners in a concentration camp. We would get maybe two small bowls of rice a day and maybe some vegetables if we were lucky.
 
We would feel so unbelievably grateful for that food. We would cherish and keep track of every grain of rice.
 
We would get far more than our current allotment of calories—and it would be enough.
 
We wouldn’t resent not getting more. We would be too relieved and happy to get our daily food. We would thank God every time the prison wardens put the food into our bowls.
 
We could all feel that way toward our food right now. We could experience that level of bliss, gratitude, and appreciation every time we sit down in front of our meal to eat.
 
We wouldn’t care what the food is. We wouldn’t care if it’s a certain number of calories less than what our entitled brains thinks we deserve.
 
Now imagine what that prisoner would think if he or she could see us stuffing our faces with all this trash.
 
Imagine what that prisoner would think if he or she saw how dangerously overweight we are and we’re still out here stuffing ourselves as fast as we possibly can with the absolute worst poison money can buy.
 
We are all so unbelievably lucky to have good, nutritious food in front of us to keep us healthy and alive.
 
Changing our broken relationship with food requires a key change in perspective.
 
We need to realize the food’s true role in our lives and fully appreciate what a blessing it can be—but only if we treat it with the respect it deserves.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.