A Story About Food

Since the day I started a Pinterest account I have had a board called “recipes” and I pinned recipes to them since it was hard for me to find recipes.

It was hard for me to find recipes because there are so many rules about which recipes I would allow myself to cook.

When you cook something, you are making it on purpose, so it’s easy to make yourself follow a lot of rules even if it causes you to give up and seamless a burger a lot.

My doctor keeps telling me there there is no “good” food or “bad” food.

She says there is just food.

She says you can make room for any food in your meal plan.

This honestly sounds like a science fiction novel about aliens who speak french to me. I am trying to accept it as true because one of us has a medical degree and it isn’t me but the whole thing seems extremely far-fetched. Why would aliens speak french of all things. That’s just fucking lazy.

Everyone on the internet knows that there are good foods and bad foods.

Before the internet everyone in magazines knew there were good foods and bad foods.

Sometimes growing up we would have “bad” foods in the house and I would eat them and then someone would make a comment about how the foods were bad. I don’t know why the people who were buying food to put into our cupboards were buying bad foods.

I grew up and became a person who would never buy bad food to put in her cupboards.

I still ate a lot of bad foods, but I didn’t buy them and put them in the cupboard.

That’s called a “food rule” and I have a lot of them.

I used to follow someone on Twitter who made fun of people’s food rules and it made me so angry like going to see people who are in physical therapy and making fun of the way they are just trying to move their bodies like a normal person.

The reason my doctor says I have to think that there is not good and bad foods is because people want to be good and doing bad things makes you crazy. (She doesn’t say “crazy”). Since people aren’t robots you are probably going to eat a bad food and then you will go into a cycle of experiencing shame and inventing disordered habits in order to get rid of that shame and you go into a cycle where everything gets worse until you don’t even realize all of this is happening because you thought a food was bad.

When someone has been eating healthy a lot of the time they will say “I have been so good lately” and I deeply understand what they mean. I just want to do the things I think are good.

I just wanna be like a fucking good person.

I read on a business blog of all places that people’s primary needs are security and understanding so I try to make the people in my life feel like I am a safe person to trust, like I am not going to hurt them, and like I see their flaws and accept them.

I am pretty sure I don’t feel safe with myself, as if I’m not going to let myself down or tell myself something ugly when I am in need of understanding instead. It feels messy and hard to control how I treat myself, so nebulous when I can just put my energy into other people. That’s easier to control and measure.

Being good to people feels very sturdy. Being good to myself feels like I am a baby. I feel guilty about needing it.

A truly insane thing I am doing right now is that there is a container of peanut butter cups in my cupboard. If I want to, I can eat a peanut butter cup after a meal. The container just sits in there and I eat one or two or zero of them a day, but I try not to feel proud when I have zero. I try to just think “I didn’t feel like eating a peanut butter cup today.”

I was on Pinterest procrastinating work and looking for recipes and I practiced pinning a pasta recipe onto my recipes board because it looked good. I still don’t like to eat pasta that much because it fits into my meal plan but it’s not very filling compared to other grains so I prefer to eat other grains. In any case, it feels weird but nice to know I could have some pasta if I wanted to. It’s strange to give up the concept that carbs are a life or death situation. It feels like I am at the beach and I can read a magazine if I want or else I can just lay there.

Last week I had this thought for the first time I can ever remember which is that I think I have a really good therapist and I think I am actually going to learn how to be more gentle with myself and feel more neutral about a lot of things I have really intense feelings about right now. Like, I think in a few years I will have realized a lot of news ways I am messed up and what other cognitive distortions I use, but that the things I am getting stuck on now (and have been getting stuck on for decades) are going to be a lot better. There are things more insane than keeping a container of peanut butter cups in your cupboard, and I might be able to do them.