There’s this really incredibly unhealthy thing that I do. See, right now I’m SWAMPED at work. I have too much to do and too little time (I am posting here because I NEED to take a lunch break and, as I will explain, I can’t make myself go get food). And so, while I feel hungry, I also feel repulsed by food.
Food takes time, that’s part of it. I resent the time I need to spend heating up my lunch and sitting around eating it.
But, also, I am headachey and tense and adding food to the mix, my head and stomach tell me, would be a very bad idea.
Of course, eating might also help my headache go away, but I am conditioned by years of disordered eating (or, rather, not eating) to believe that eating will just make me feel worse.
And so I feel myself backsliding into the habit of skipping meals. I ate a half cup or so of dry Apple Jacks (I’m allergic to cow milk and while I like rice milk, just eating the cereal dry seems the simplest route to breakfast) but it was a chore. I’m going to try to eat some lunch, but if I were not actively trying to do the right thing for my body according to what my rational brain knows, I would skip lunch.
And that would start me down the slippery slope to skipping meals on a regular basis and every time I wind up at the bottom of that hill, I feel like utter crap. There’s a 3-day adjustment period during which I am super crabby because my blood sugar is all out of whack. Then things stabilize and I’m just never hungry. Eating gets harder and harder to care about. After about two weeks, it becomes totally normal for me to feel incredibly sick after any meal I consume that is larger than a Coke and an apple or whatever.
That’s no way to live, right? Right.
So, I’m going to go heat up my lunch and make myself eat a decent portion of it. It’s okay not to finish it. But I need to remember: just as I put fuel in my car, I must put fuel in my body.
3 Comments
You’re right. That’s no way to live.
When I am really stressed out, or too hot, my stomach does this clenched-closed thing. Food is gross, hard-to-swallow, and often tastes like cardboard. But again, I know I’m going to crash out and be less able to cope with anything if I don’t eat.
At times like this, soy smoothies keep me going. I don’t have to chew them, they’re easy to swallow, and I can buy or make them with enough fruit, soy milk (I think they’d work with rice milk too), almond or peanut butter, and random other good stuff to keep me going. Somehow, the non-solidity of the smoothie means that the back of my head doesn’t acknowledge this as food and make my stomach reject it.
And no, you don’t have to eat all of it. Just top up the gas tank.
My soy allergy has proven to be the hardest to navigate. I really like the idea of a smoothie — maybe I can track down a protein powder (because what I really need at moments like this is protein and the rice milk is sorely lacking) that doesn’t involve soy…. I can blend stuff up at home, but I’m not sure how they’d feel if I brought a blender to work. It might go over quite well, actually, and I can see how a smoothie would be a lot less triggery for my stomach.
Eating is a good thing, though I didn’t always think so. Back when I was a secretary, I was very proud of myself for an accidental discovery that taking a Claritin-D with strong coffee made me immune to hunger and gave me more energy. I think I did end up losing some weight because of it, but I stopped when I started to have some unpleasant symptoms, including extreme tiredness at the end of the day and a feeling of breathlessness (but not actually being winded) that plagued me during everyday activities.
I’d rather just eat these days. The trick is doing so for the right reason – because I’m hungry, not bored or stressed out. Also, I need to get over the guilt of eating when I am hungry, even if that means eating a bit more or less than I did the day before. (The body is a strange machine, no?) Any tips for silencing the voices that say, “NO! You can’t have any more, even if you are still hungry! People will see you! What will they think? What will they say?”