For the first time in weeks, I don’t feel like aliens are chewing my face from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep. For this, I am thankful, and I find myself in a much better mood as well. There’s a spring in my step, and I can smile rather than moan and groan the whole time. In addition, I can check in on my social media without feeling like it’s a big chore to tweet/post or respond. I’ve written many times about how I used to think my body was separate from the rest of me, but being sick makes me realize how connected everything is.
When I was sick, I was also really depressed. I felt as if there was no reason to be alive, and it’s mostly because I just hurt. I was discouraged by how little I could do and how little energy/motivation I had to do anything. I know this isn’t anything new, but I haven’t been this sick in quite some time, and it really underscored how important it is to take care of my health. I’m not the best at this. I do taiji every day, which is good, but I don’t do any other exercise; I sit on my ass for several hours at a time (with bad posture to boot), and I eat like shit.
I have a very complicated relationship with food. I was a fat kid, which was a horror to my weight-conscious mother. She put me on my first diet when I was seven, and it’s fucked up my eating ever since. She would tell me, “You’d be so pretty if you were only thinner,” and I believed that I was a lumbering pile of goo that didn’t deserve to to live. I learned at an early age that as a woman, I had to keep my body rail thin, which isn’t my natural body type. I may be Taiwanese, but I’m sturdy as fuck. It’s probably the peasant side of my family, but I’m solid through and through. I used to be anorexic/bulimic, and when I see pictures of myself from that time, I look ill and unnatural. I looked as if a good stiff wind could blow me over, and I had no energy at all. I still thought I was fat, however, and kept trying to lose more weight.
Once I quit that nonsense, I went the other way and decided I wouldn’t control what I ate at all. I reverted to overeating, and I quickly ballooned past my original weight. Through it all, I’ve hated the way I look, and I rarely look in mirrors. Any time I do, I wince at what I see. Intellectually, I know I’m not ugly, but I still don’t like looking at myself. My body looks alien to me, and I have a hard time making friends with it. I’ve become more at ease in it through eight years of studying taiji, but I haven’t completely accepted that I am trapped in my body for the rest of my life. I know I need to stop hating on it, and I think the one upside to being sick is that it’s forced me to accept that there is no separation between my mind and my body.
Back to food. I’m slowly doing better by adding fruits and vegetables back into my diet, cutting back on junk food, and cutting back on Coke Zero. I have a problem with knowing when I’m really hungry because of the years of fucking up my body. I can ignore my hunger for hours, and then when I eat a few bites, I’m full. I know ideally, I would be listening to my body, eating when I’m hungry, and stopping when I’m full, but that would mean eating every few minutes, which isn’t practical at all. Another method suggested for people with a history of eating disorders is to set a schedule and stick to it, regardless of hunger levels. I’m skeptical because part of my eating disorders is that I rigidly schedule/count everything and don’t listen to my body at all.
I have gotten better at recognizing I’m hungry, but I have a harder time knowing when I should start. More to the point, I don’t stop when I should. I’ve written several posts about this, but I still don’t feel as if I’ve made significant progress. It’s as if my emotions are overriding the rational part of my brain, despite my best efforts. It’s frustrating because I can’t seem to find a solution that I’ll actually do. I’ve read plenty of articles about the healthiest way to eat, and, yet, I don’t do it. I still view food as the enemy, albeit one I love in an unseemly fashion. Food is amazing. I love food. It’s so fucking delicious. I just had a breakfast calzone with scrambled eggs, cheese, sausage, and a side sauce of maple syrup. The calzone itself was good, but a bit bland. Dipping it in the maple syrup really pulled the whole thing together and made it amazing. However, I know it was too heavy and not very good for me, and, yet, I didn’t regret eating it. I’m not feeling great about it now, and remorse is always 20/20. I always have that constant battle in my mind of, “This is tasty and I want it in my belly” and This is so bad for me, and I’m a bad person for eating it.”
I think I’m more prone to being sick because of my unhealthy habits, but I don’t know how to change my mindset about said habits. You would think how much better I feel when I’m not sick would be enough for me to be diligent about what I eat and the amount of exercise I get, but it’s not. It’s frustrating because I can usually get to the core of why I do things, which is the first step to changing behavior. In this case, though, there’s a block in my brain that repeats over and over, “I do it because I want to.” I’ll have to think about it some more and see if I can get past the block, but for now, I’m just grateful that I’m back on my way to healthy.