Welcome! Everything is Fine!
Y’all like that The Good Place reference? Me too. Anyways!
I’ve been putting off writing this for two main reasons.
For one, blog posts get a bad rap. As someone who considers herself a writer- I hate hate hate how movies and TV generally depict people who write. But I have a special distaste for the portrayal of bloggers. They’re always these picture perfect people writing about the most self absorbed, irrelevant topics. I particularly couldn’t stand Barney from How I Met Your Mother. Were blogs ever really popular enough to warrant him saying “this is going in my blog!”? I cringed every. single. time!
Then I watched Julie and Julia, a precious little juxtaposition of the life of cooking legend Julia Child and Julie, a writer living in New York. Julie’s job slowly but surely sucks the life out of her until she starts a blog, and voila! Her whole life turns around. All of the soul crushing elements from her life miraculously disappear, and to top it all off multiple publishing houses offer her a book deal. Best case scenario, right? You should really watch the movie if you haven’t.
My point isn’t to give this movie a glowing recommendation, though. As if any Meryl Streep movie would ever need it, right? My point is that Julie’s blog is transparent. She documents her failures and she’s up front about her frustrations. We see her most validating successes right alongside some of her worse failures. This way, her endeavor garners much more success and she’s better for the whole experience.
I plan to use her strategy as my tentative roadmap. Ideally, my writing will also act as an honest account of my progress and sometimes, yes, my back-tracking. Will I get a book deal for it? Meh. At the very least I’ll have some writing samples to show my employers and I consider that a win.
Alas, I’m neglecting to mention the second reason I haven’t yet written a blog.
Because it’s fucking difficult, that’s why. And quite frankly, I don’t have the time for it. With seventeen credit hours this semester, a job, and an internship, I’m pretty well spent. When I do have free time, I don’t want to spend it chained up to my computer writing about myself. I will more than likely write this blog on the bus, in my bed, and with something else in my other hand. For this I apologize in advance.
So, why a food diary? Why not just write a blog about every day life like a normal person?
For me, this is a typical day in the life. I have a notoriously terrible relationship with food. There’s hardly a moment in my day-to-day that I’m not thinking about food, or evaluating it in some way. I won’t get into it, but in periods of immense stress and emotional turmoil, I tend to go off the rails and then it’s even harder to get a handle on things.
My hope is that this can function as sort of my food diary except without all of the meticulous calorie counting that makes me spiral so badly. I’m going to preface every blog post with everything I ate that day. I won’t spare y’all aaaaaaaaany of the gory details. If I ate a fistful of sour candy that I found left in my car, you’re going to know about it.
Maybe I’ll add in what kind of exercise I did that day? If I didn’t drink enough water or something, it might be important to note. But in addition to my food diary, I’m also going to have an actual diary/essay component. Those parts of the post will be formatted much like this one. I’ll discuss what I think drives these eating decisions, what makes the difference between a good and bad decision, and some of the other mentalities associated with disordered eating. I promise I won’t be a huge bummer, though. After all, this is tagged under personal growth.
See y’all tomorrow,
Maddie
