I am not even hungry.
But I find myself doing this several times a day. And by several, I mean more than three but less than... well I am not really sure.
Eventually, my boredom - because that's the only reason I can think of why I do this - overcomes me and I reach. I reach for a piece of cheese, a handful of crackers, a cookie....
and I eat.
I am a time strapped, working mom of two who struggles every day to just step away from the doughnut and put down that extra scoop of spaghetti noodles, because let's face it five is already enough. I have never been "obese," but I live on a perpetual merry-go-round of eating, gaining weight, fat pants, low self-esteem, working out, losing weight, feeling better, indulging in little splurges I now feel I deserve... rinse and repeat. I am getting dizzy and I want off the ride!
I want to eat healthy, live healthy so I can really be healthy. Not just for myself, but for my kids. I want to have the energy to run and play and do fun things. I want to be fun.
I don't want to be "the fat mom."
I actually think that that scares me more than high blood pressure and heart disease.
Right now at 4 and 2, my Brown Eyed Girl and Mr Blue Eyes look at me and all they see is... Mommy. I am love. I am cool. I am smiles and laughter. I am beautiful. Yet everyday as their little minds grow and they are exposed to this unforgiving and real world, they look at things a little different. Nothing prepares you for a silly laugh, and a run-by love spanking as your daughter says, "Hahaha, Mommy I just spanked your BIG butt!"
She is funny. She is carefree. She is honest. BIG is as relative as saying I have LONG hair or BROWN eyes. Descriptive words. Innocent adjectives.
To her, my butt is BIG.
Daddy snickers just a little from the other room and I am embarrassed to even lock eyes with the man who sees my birthday suit every day. I cringe and feel like crying inside even though I know she wasn't being malicious, just playfully honest.
The next morning, I go for a run and eat fruit for breakfast.
By 10:00 am I have visited the fridge and pantry several times and I am now sneaking a bowl of ice cream, eating it quickly and discarding the evidence... and no one is even home.
Sneaking food.
I am an adult. The shopper of groceries. The chef to my kitchen. In my own home, I sneak what I make and what I provide. Just one more little bite after I have already eaten while doing the dishes and transferring the left overs into a smaller container. With a slip of the hand, I enjoy a cookie, or more recently a piece of Halloween candy, on my way out to feed horses. A bounty of empty rappers hidden in the trash, hay bale strings choking away the evidence. I do these things as if I am not entitled to food. Definitely not the candy, cookies, ice cream and other sugary false joys. Therefore, I steal them. I commit petty theft in my very home.
And it is... petty.
It is an indescribable feeling to not feel entitled to something. I despise not being able to sit down and enjoy food, every kind of food imaginable, and not worry about calorie counts, portion sizes, one more helping, one more bite, hiding. I don't want to wake up in the morning and step on the scale and cringe. I hate tight pants.
Willpower is hard. It's harder alone when you are the only one under your roof that has to battle with it every day. It feels unfair that your husband can eat a whole pizza and lose ten pounds while you only have to glance at it, smell it, while nibbling on celery and wake in the morning to see you have gained five. Then secretly, I think I hate him, just a little. I know it's not his fault. I am jealous.
In my frustrations, I eat. Secretly, I eat. I eat emotionally. Not binging. I just steal tiny little moments of false satisfaction. It's not every day. It just depends where I am on the merry-go-round.
After lunch with a friend this week, we talked about our relationship with dieting and food - let's face it ladies, most of us think about food (what we can/should/should not/can't believe we just ate) probably as much (if not more) as we think about our husbands, even our families, during the day. So it is a relationship. Sometimes it's healthy and beautiful. But most times it's abusive. It slaps us around, leaves us feeling small and insignificant. Unworthy of it's love. We'd never really let someone treat us this way, make us feel this way, not in real life. But we do... for food. We stay on the ride. Round and round fluctuating up and down.
Why would anyone do that?
I have never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I think I am smart enough to recognize the same addictive behaviors I have with food. I let the addiction to that five minutes of false joy overcome me, cloud my judgment. I know deep down when I am eating too much, eating the wrong things, but I do it anyways. It is an addiction.
I don't think food was always my vice. Once upon a credit card debt time and 8734010 black trash bags full of clothes off to Good Will, I was a retail therapy addict. Clothes, shoes, and things filled the voids and were used to cope with day-to-day troubles and uncomfortable situations. Failed a Chem test, a new pair of jeans made it all better. Fight with my friend, new shoes. Parents on my back, new tack or piece of equipment for the horse. I would open my closet, bulging and overflowing, and stand there staring, finding nothing. Absolutely nothing to wear. Especially on the hard days when my self-esteem was at rock bottom. If it wasn't in there... I had to go find it and off the the mall I went.
Then it all stopped.
I was so horrified of having Handy Man find out about my small amount of debt and addiction to shopping as our relationship got more serious that I cut up the plastic and slowly paid off the years of acquired debt. Slow and painful. Much like diet and exercise after years of eating.
Handy Man is your classic "Meat and Potatoes" kind of guy except he doesn't really eat potatoes and if he can't cut the meat with a fork then he doesn't like it. Not because the meat is not tasty or cooked well, but because it simply takes too much effort to use two utensils - a fork and an knife. He
We rarely eat vegetables as a family.
As infants, my children graduated from each stage of baby food eagerly experimenting with finger foods of all kinds. They were good little eaters. Their current stage is an exclusive diet of noodles, poptarts, hot dogs and chicken nuggets. Vegetables are four letter words. Ranch dressing is my only hope for experimental eating. My Brown Eyed Girl would live off bread and butter, just plain bread and butter, and chicken nuggets if I would let her. Mr Blue Eyes is still a little more willing, unless Sissy sabotages the meal by calling it gross or disgusting.
We struggle most meals. One more battle in our day. Over food. Especially with my Brown Eyed Girl. I just want to put food in front of her after a long day and have her eat it. When I voiced my concerns with the pediatrician this year, I was given a look of sheer terror and told that, "We don't fight over food." The lasting results are food issues, self-esteem issues and the leading causes of anorexia and bulimia in young girls.
I grabbed a bottle of wine and thought about jumping. I have been so worried my own self-image, thinking that if I was fit and healthy and ate good things every day she would too. If I am not "the fat mom" they will be healthy, have a healthy relationship with food. In the meantime as we struggle and push her to eat the broccoli on her plate and the rest of her macaroni and cheese we are inadvertently still creating a stigma with food. Eat when you aren't hungry, because I told you to and you can't waste your food. Vegetables = turmoil and arguing and a battle of wills.
No more fighting over food. If all I cook is healthy meals, eventually they will eat it. Food for fuel after all. That is my new mantra. Food for Fuel!
I have sat my husband down and said, "I need you do be on my side, do this with me. I am going to cook healthy meals for the family, because I want to eat what my family eats. I want to be healthy as a family." The first recipe I cooked was a success. Everyone was eating. I smiled, proud of myself, and told Handy Man how many calories were in each serving and he looked at me with desperation in his eyes. He asked me if these types of meals were going to be on the menu every night. If he meant healthy meals, then yes, they were.
As I smiled happily, he asked me if I was trying to kill him.
I just have one question as we enter the next seven months of sugary, cookie, candy nightmare that accompanies the holidays... How do I get off the merry-go-round but not feel like I am trapped on a hamster wheel for the next 30 years of my life?
How do I get my family to eat healthier? To BE healthier?
No comments:
Post a Comment