Week Four: Food Morals

“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on The Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.”

— Erma Bombeck.

I’ve got food issues. So many. I remember being ten and so excited I after a long soccer match that someone had given me a doughnut. It was my favorite kind (maple frosting) and I planned to savor it the whole drive home. As soon as we got out of sight of my team though, my mom took the doughnut from me and threw it in the trash, I wasn’t allowed to eat that kind of food, not for any health reasons, but simply because my mom was a little health-crazed. I like to blame her for my issues, but in reality 2/3 of the issues are totally my own, and I share the blame with her for the other 1/3, she started ’em but I did the propagation. My therapist says I have orthorexia, which I had heard of but I assumed I wasn’t “bad enough” to merit a legitimate label. In my mind you have to be on the verge of hospitalization to get help. I don’t know why that is, but the more I thought about it, and the more I tried to purposefully break my food rules, the more I realized that I had a serious problem.

My issues stem from four places: assigning morals to foods (good and bad for you), terrible taste, weird rules that I haven’t consciously developed but are now law nonetheless, and can’t handle the texture

1. Morals: this one is tricky because the “good” foods are also the ones that are healthy and make my body objectively (think spinach/sweet potatoes vs chips/chocolate), but as a general rule my emotions are based upon what I eat, and that’s where I take it too far. If it’s been a good few days, all good food, I feel pretty happy and relaxed at baseline. If I’ve been breaking the rules and eating bad foods though, my baseline emotions are shame and disappointment. And I also take it to the point of irrationality, like yes clearly having a carrot is better than eating a spoonful of frosting, but for me eating a regular potato instead of a sweet potato would feel similar to choosing that frosting spoon, or eating brown rice with my meal would be just absolutely crazy.
2. Taste: Ok, we’ve all got foods we don’t like, but the points have been tallied and I take the title of “pickiest eater I’ve ever met” for many of my friends. Bell pepper, melons, coffee, dark chocolate, eggs, anything cooked in canola oil, seaweed… the list goes on. I try to spin it as “yay, that means more food is left for you!” But for some reason certain people take it on as their personal vendetta to try and get me to eat these foods, “c’mon it’s great, just try a bite, you’ll like it.” Ummmmm NO THANKS Karen, I’ve given bell pepper a hundred tries and it’s still disgusting. I can freaking smell if a bell pepper even enters the room. Please leave me alone as I am not bothering you whatsoever you psycho.
3. Random Rules: I don’t like it when my food touches, so I usually eat off two bowls and a plate for every meal (thank god for dishwashers). If my food does have to touch, like at a dinner party, I try to keep it as separate as possible, no touching. I don’t like foods with multiple textures, like a salad with random veggies sprinkled in or most sandwiches (burgers are the exception, as long as the meat is well done, yum). I also eat my food in a certain order, from least favorite to most favorite items. Trail mix is a good example of my weirdness, it’s actually a reverse of my normal bad to good order though: cashews first, then one almond with two M&M’s, then 1.5 peanuts to one M&M, then all the leftover raisins and peanuts all in one mouthful. I get inordinately angry when people pick through the bag, mining for the good stuff, just buy a bag of M&M’s if you’re going to do that you heathen.
4. Texture: This one is weird, mostly I just avoid these foods because I don’t like how they feel in my mouth, but a few actually make me gag from the gnarly texture. I don’t like breads or cakes or buns of any kind. I don’t like cooked leaves like spinach or kale. Cottage cheese, I tried it for the first time this year, horrible experience. Any meat that is less cooked than aggressively well done, throw it back on the barbecue for another hour or so.

Pretty much I only eat about ten different things if I’m at home. If someone cooks for me I don’t mind eating new vegetables or meats, but I HATE cooking. Cooking is really hard, I find it hard to motivate to get to the grocery store and then take an hour to prepare food, when I could just open a can of beans and eat a pile of leaves with some feta. The reward level is too low for me to invest time in preparing a meal, when the more readily available food is just fine taste-wise. Plus I have a habit of accidentally leaving burners or ovens on, and burning stuff because I get bored and try to multitask and then forget what I was doing in the first place. The only things I eat: yogurt with berries, apple and peanut butter, spinach and feta, corn tortilla quesadillas, frozen banana and milk smoothies, popcorn with nutritional yeast and butter, barbecued chicken (if my dad cooks it), tuna with mayo and pickles, most fruits, and sweet potatoes. I like cold stuff and crunchy stuff and chewy stuff, I want to be entertained during a meal, plus mushy is boring and gross.

Right now I’m working on getting more calories in my body, especially more protein calories. My therapist says my hunger signals don’t work right anymore, after ignoring them for so long, so I have to try and eat every three hours. It’s really hard and it makes my stomach hurt sometimes, right now I’m working on eating one protein bar during the 6-7 hours that I’m at work. 50% success rate my first week on the protein bar initiative, but I’m going to keep trying.

Orthorexia Definition (stolen from the internet, just for you)

• Compulsive checking of ingredient lists and nutritional labels
• An increase in concern about the health of ingredients
• Cutting out an increasing number of food groups (all sugar, all carbs, all dairy, all meat, all animal products)
• An inability to eat anything but a narrow group of foods that are deemed ‘healthy’ or ‘pure’
• Unusual interest in the health of what others are eating
• Spending hours per day thinking about what food might be served at upcoming events
• Showing high levels of distress when ‘safe’ or ‘healthy’ foods aren’t available
• Obsessive following of food and ‘healthy lifestyle’ blogs on Twitter and Instagram
• Body image concerns may or may not be present