{54} Eat to live, not live to starve
During my exercise in unrestricted eating, I’ve stumbled over a number of truths about myself, including the surprising realization that eating when you are hungry is very fulfilling.
It may seem like an odd realization to have, because isn’t that the way we are supposed to work? I’m pretty sure it is, but I also know for a fact that we don’t act that way.
I’ve been on restrictive diets since I was…young? An adolescent, for sure. The second I left “baby fat” territory my mother became obsessed with how much space my body took up. If I wasn’t on a restrictive diet, then I was stuffing myself with junk food (let us not ever discuss Captain Crunch cereal, ever again). Our home was literally “feast or famine” territory, in cycle with mother’s bi-polar swings. Upswing? Carrot juice, salads, and Weight Watchers. Downswing? Ramen noodles, cereal, pringles (pretty much anything I could “make” for myself by opening a box).
As I got older, I was taught by mother and the “nutrition industry” that eating is supposed to be hyper-regulated and restricted. “Eat until you’re full” wasn’t allowed, in fact it was specifically avoided like a very deadly plague. Eating according to schedule and to plan was the only acceptable way to be normal.
I’m only now coming to understand the true depth of that irony.
I’m also starting to understand how much the diet cycles affected my childhood health. It is born out of one of the most startling claims I’ve heard lately about body fat, weight loss, and metabolism: “maybe you aren’t thin because you run, but you run because you are thin.”
I was stunned when that sunk into my brain. I was not a sedentary child, at least as far back as I can remember, and I was also fairly trim…until I hit adolescence. Was it puberty or was it dieting that made me fat? I think it was the second; I think dieting also made me, for lack of a better word, lazy.
Which makes sense, because if I was swinging between not eating enough food and then overeating processed junk, then of course my metabolism would shut down as much as possible. I was a growing child and I needed all my energy for, you know, growing. Energy which I did not have to give from my diet, so my body compensated by making me tired and lethargic all the time.
I mean, honestly, the healthiest thin people I know eat A LOT. Like, platefuls of food, without a care in the world. The people I know who eat very little are either skinny-fat or fighting their weight. When I was a child, I ate whatever/whenever with only moderate oversight and I was a whirlwind of activity, always out on my bike or roller skates, or running around the back yard.
Then as I became less of a child and more of a dieter, I ate less, moved less, and carried too much fat. It’s just so obvious, in retrospect: my body was getting less energy (food) to work with, so it flipped the switches and started hoarding fat stores and lowering my resting metabolism.
I wasn’t fat because I didn’t run; I didn’t run because I was fat and exhausted all the time.
Which, overall, has been my adult status. Always too tired, always too fat, always restricting my food intake.
And I’m over it. So tired of “failing” at hyper-vigilance, a state of being that is impossible (or at least unhealthy) to maintain for long periods of time. So tired of obsessing about food I don’t let myself eat. So tired of the guilt of eating, not eating, being fat, being out of shape. So tired of being tired. Tired.
I’ve done this song-and-dance for 38 years. Damage done, time to move on. Thin or not, I want to recapture the joy of being energized and active. I want to return to dancing a lot, doing yoga, hiking, bike riding, eating until I’m full — without guilt or shame, and with a sense of joy.
How hard can it be?
