Intuitive eats | Banana almond butter toast & learning to love yourself
"I mean it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10?"
*TW: disordered eating*
I caught myself making myself a mid-afternoon snack this week. Caught myself making a snack because I was hungry. No internal strife about trying to make it a little longer without eating. No mental gymnastics to calculate how many calories I’d already consumed that day. No feelings of deservingness or justification because I’d already worked out that morning. Nope, I just casually made myself a snack and was about to take the first bite when I realized what a monumental moment that actually is.
This might not sound like a big deal, especially if you’re new around here. A little backstory: from my teens to my early twenties I dealt with and attempted to conceal various degrees of disordered eating. Even once I thought I finally kicked my eating disorder—I just transferred that obsession to “the wellness diet”. Something with the word wellness in it sounds healthy, and when you compare it to full blown anorexia or bulimia…I guess it is a small step up? I always refer to that period as a sort of limbo. I was stuck between full fledged eating disorder and still being “weird” with food and exercise. *Not a girl, not yet a woman, if you will.* It was a time of cleansing and detoxing, the concept of eating an entire banana made me fear sugar “addiction”, finding out there was dairy in something I just ate was enough to make me cry, and the biggest one: feeling like I’d only earned food if I’d already worked out (and worked out hard) that day.
It was a different time— 2015 already feels like a lifetime ago. My peers in the fitness industry praised me every day for my discipline, my self control, how committed I was to being “good”. I talked a big talk about how devoted to my health I was, despite still being pretty depressed and remained convinced that if I just tried the new fad diet, I’d start to feel like a human again. The most confusing part was, I didn’t look as outright “sick” to the naked eye as I had when I had my “real” eating disorder. In fact, most people with eating disorders are not underweight. It was too easy to hide all my food rules and ticks in plain sight. I even asked my therapist at the time if she thought orthorexia was real and she clumsily responded with something along the lines of Maureen’s mom in Center Stage. “So you try to eat healthy? That sounds healthy to me.”
Speaking of memes—do you ever see a quote or a meme online and just feel like it was meant for you to see it? That’s how I felt when I came across the following quote on Instagram in 2015—peak food limbo. Reading it was like being smacked on the nose. It resonated so much that I keep it on my phone always.
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