Over-eating

I have, for a long time, had a very challenging relationship with food. I would say when I am active and engaging in a lot of physical activity my body helps me to make better decisions and I find vegetables and meat naturally more appealing.

When I’m physically active, it’s much easier to eat the right things. When I wake up in the morning, I feel well rested. I feel like my body is thinking about itself and its composition. Coffee, scrambled eggs, bacon and avocado feel like very natural ways to start the day. Like going for a run. Those periods in my life where a morning 5K has been a bit of a staple are also those times when I’ve found eating the right things to be the most straightforward and I have felt the best about my fitness and health.

I do benefit from structure. When I was in a relationship with L, one of the things she liked to do was to plan meals. So she would say, on this evening we are going to eat this and we’d go to the grocery store and buy the things she needed to make it. She had really quite an excellent repertoire of dishes and is a detail person, so there would be little touches to make the food more visually interesting and appealing. We would regularly eat well-balanced, nutritious and interesting food in the evening. And that was generally enough for me.

The problem is, or at least one of the problems is, my relationship with food is a dual purpose. Food is both a way of keeping myself healthy and fueled and also a way of managing my emotions. When I feel stressed, anxious, nervous or under pressure, then one of the coping mechanisms I’ve adopted during my life is to eat something sweet or just a lot of savory food, or both. I will eat chocolate cake, biscuits, umm, sweet things in volume. A whole packet of biscuits, a whole chocolate bar, a whole cake. And the problem is that these are relatively inexpensive and extremely accessible.

I will eat so much of these extremely energy dense foods that I feel physically uncomfortable, but this is not really a limit. Say I eat a whole chocolate cake and feel physically ill and greasy shortly after. That feeling of discomfort passes in about an hour, or it can be moderated. For example, if you eat too much chocolate, you can drink some semi-skimmed milk and that sort of resets your sense of having eaten too much chocolate.

Then you’re free to go and eat some more. And when you’re eating to assuage your feelings, it’s not about eating to achieve some sort of contentment. It is the process of eating itself, the act of picking up a sweet thing, putting it in your mouth, chewing on it and then swallowing. So there’s, there’s not much enjoyment. It’s more about this sort of mechanical form of relief that you get from your feelings, your situation but only while you are chewing.

What fascinates me is how autonomous this process is. Consciously I might be thinking I shouldn’t eat this, I don’t want to eat this, I don’t need to eat this, this is far outside of my nutritional requirements. It’s not something sensible, healthy or nutritious. And yet I’ll find myself picking up the keys to the car, driving to the supermarket, buying this stuff, and then often in such a rush to get it into my mouth opening the packet before I start driving home.

I think this is one of the ways I know that I’m under a fair amount of stress and pressure at the moment is because eating has been very difficult to manage lately. I was for a while on Mounjaro injections and I found those useful, but I feel like the effect tailed off, or rather the effect was overwhelmed by my emotional state. Although I was taking the injections I was still eating uncontrollably. And what’s worse than eating uncontrollably than paying several £100 a month for medical support to avoid doing that as well. So I stopped the Mounjaro stuff.

As I write I can feel a fold of the flesh from my chest resting on my belly. I can feel the fold of my belly resting on itself, you know, over my waist. And I feel unpleasant in myself. I don’t feel attractive. I don’t feel confident. And I don’t feel relaxed in my clothes. You know, the selection of trousers that I can wear is shrunk to the largest pairs I own. Three go to pairs of jeans and I’m down to two of them fitting well.