I Don’t Know How To Have a Healthy Relationship With Food
As you can tell with this picture, I am a child of the 70s and 80s. I also grew up in an abusive environment. Like a lot of children who do, I controlled my food intake because it’s one of the few things you can control when everything else is chaotic around you.
I don’t have a lot of pictures from when I was a teenager. There are less than five of them. I know that I was an angry teen and didn’t pose for a lot of photos, so my parents probably didn’t push it. This picture was taken by a friend after she gave me a makeover.
I used to have no choice but to eat what my mom put on my plate. If I didn’t like it, I was forced to sit there and eat it, sometimes for hours on end and was sent to bed if I still refused. If you didn’t like liver, put ketchup on it and force yourself to swallow it. The same with salmon loaf, which was canned salmon with eggs and breadcrumbs. It didn’t matter what it was.
My home was not a safe place for me. I had no protection from anyone. It was a place that I was emotionally and physically abused, emotionally neglected, treated inappropriately and sexually molested. Due to my repressed memory, I can only remember one molestation incident, but that’s enough for me at this time. I do know that my mom found out and protected the perpetrator and not me, the victim. I also told her about a molestation by a stranger and she did nothing about it. There were other incidents that I kept to myself due to her not helping me.
I believe that this led to my anorexia. It first began with me becoming a vegetarian. I watched my mother with a glove on taking the insides of a turkey out. For some reason it bothered me and I decided that I was done eating animal products. I informed my mother and she told me that she would not accommodate me, I could just eat everything else and avoid the animal products. So, that is what I did. I became anemic as a result. My mother, who took iron pills, took me to the doctor when I started getting colds quite often and was very tired. The doctor ordered blood tests, which I had to get every month. My mother still did not accommodate my dietary needs and just suggested I take iron pills, which I did not do.
At this time, I started to eat less and less. I liked that I was losing weight and no one at home noticed. It was easy to fake. Make a piece of toast and flush it down the toilet and leave the crusts on the plate. Make a salad with iceberg lettuce and use white vinegar for the dressing. Don’t pack a lunch. Since I was 13, I made my own lunches because that’s what my mom had me do anyways. She continued to make my brother’s until he moved out at 26.
The people who noticed and became concerned were my friends. They told me that they were going to drag me to the counsellor’s office if I didn’t go willingly, which they did. I remember a boy whose lap I was sitting on, telling me that my ass was bony. I was happy to hear that at the time. The counsellor called in a psychiatrist who tried reverse psychology. He said he wanted me to swallow pills or continue not eating and slowly kill myself. I remember hating him and I never saw him again.
I ran away from home at 17 and soon after I stayed at my aunt’s house for two weeks, who also didn’t care about the fact that I was a vegetarian. She made me one thing: hot dogs and beans in a hot dog bun. She told me to eat it or f….ng starve. I had nowhere to go and had been mistreated my whole life. I ate some of it and threw up shortly after.
After a few months of staying with family friends who left me alone while I finished high school, I rented an apartment with my high school best friend. We were both 17 and had no clue about being adults. I had no idea how to cook because my mom never taught me anything. She never wanted me in the kitchen. I ended up eating a lot of junk food and take out. I had no idea how to make a proper meal or even what it looked like. Weight started to be put on because I was no longer in a toxic environment, but not the good healthy kind. I was too busy surviving to exercise.
I moved out after a few months because my roommate was not a mentally healthy person. I found out several years later that she passed away. I believe it was from drugs.
The picture from above was taken right before we moved in together. She had a very kind soul. She was always chasing happiness but couldn’t find it. Sorry for my tongue, it’s the only photo I have of us together.
When I was 18, I met my first husband. He was 28, a man from El Salvador. I was looking for love and I think he was looking for youth and a particular image. We couldn’t have been more different and we led completely separate lives. This is where I became an emotional eater. I started our relationship in the image he wanted. I learned to cook and appreciate his native foods. But, when our marriage went south, I put on weight and more weight. I am pretty sure he cheated on me during our marriage. I ended up being the office manager of two corneal eye surgeons and after our marriage was over, I found out that he dated the receptionist with very suspicious timing. He, unfortunately, died from a brain tumour after our divorce, which is what his mother died from back in his home country.
After a period of being single where I lost the weight I gained, I met my ex who is a cross between a narcissist and a sociopath. I don’t care anymore what he is, he is evil incarnate. I fell for his love bombing, which he was able to do for a very long time. I thought it was love as I haven’t been loved before due to my childhood. My weight was healthy and my relationship with food seemed fine again. But when his mask started slipping and the abuse started, my relationship to food started to go south again. I hid my eating, it became a secret where I had stashes of junk food. It became comforting to sneak it.
I went on Weight Watchers after each child was born and lost all the pregnancy weight, but it felt like punishment to be on it and the meetings were torture. You step on the scale and you are praised or shamed depending on the result. Then you sit at the meeting and listen to the lectures. I loathed it. It’s not fun watching the family eat junk food while I am eating fruit or weighing my food and counting my points. I tried to go on it a third time but quit immediately.
The worse his abuse got, the worse my eating became. I also was jealous of my friends who don’t eat when they are stressed. Why can’t I become anorexic again? Why do I have emotional eating instead? I am ashamed to admit that I even went to a supplement store and tried some of their products to see if it would stop my appetite.
When I returned to school full-time, I completely stopped cooking. He had to leave the house due to an incident one week after I began, so at least I didn’t have to contend with him being physically present, although he still abuses us as much as he can.
I no longer had time to cook, so our dinners were now basically me heating up processed food. I tried to walk at lunch at school and to eat healthy lunches. But, our dinners were not very good nutrition wise. Friends tried to offer advice but none of them were single moms so they didn’t understand my plight. It’s hard to make a week’s worth of meals if you have 12 hours of homework and you are a full-time single mom. We got through it.
Mentally, I went through a very hard time these last two years which left me with very little motivation to cook and exercise. Yes, I know that self care helps with your mental health but you need to motivation to begin the process.
I want to lose weight. I have an entire wardrobe that is two sizes smaller than me. I also have another entire wardrobe that is one size smaller than me. It would be nice to fit into either of them. It would be nice to stop the cycle of going up and down. It would be great to no longer use food to comfort myself but to use other self care that doesn’t involve food.
I once spoke to my old therapist about why I emotionally ate. I used to eat foods with sugar until I felt ill. She explained that I did that so I could focus on the feelings of feeling physically ill rather than feeling sad or angry. I am hoping that I am done with that as I have spent several months crying every day. I have learned to feel my feelings and that it is ok to cry and be angry. In doing so, I am hoping that I will no longer feel the need to make myself feel sick.
I feel ready to begin cooking and to prepare healthy foods again. I feel ready to take care of myself again. I hope that I won’t feel the need to go on Weight Watchers, to starve myself or to binge until I feel sick. I want to learn to intuitively eat one day. I want to take care of myself.
Thank you for reading. Perhaps you will recognise yourself in reading this story.
