I know, it’s a provocative thing to say. I hate healthy eating. Those four words carry so much meaning for so many people. They also speak volumes about me. To most people they translate as something like
“No wonder she’s fat”
or
“She doesn’t care enough to take care of herself”
because that’s just how most people roll in this culture, we’re all trying to be armchair Dr. Phils and shit*.
I’m not going to apologize for having feelings about something. Fuck that. I beat myself up enough as it is, but I’m in no mood to put on that kind of show today. But I’m cool with explaining further. What I hate about healthy eating isn’t the healthy eating itself. I hate that every time I attempt this I wind up feeling more than a little bit psychotic.
On the one paw, I get into a headspace where I want to nitpick every little thing that goes into my mouth. You know, we get these messages from society that we’re supposed to watch what we eat or we won’t be healthy, which is actually logical since for the last 10,000 years we have had an experience unusual in human history of having to choose between blatantly unhealthy foods that don’t immediately sicken or kill us, and the type of healthy foods which we evolved eating. 10,000 years isn’t long enough for us to have adapted responses to this that don’t make us feel crazy–mostly because having to deal with the situation is not an immediate life-or-death decision. (It tends to be the mutations or environmental changes that result in immediate death which shape our evolution one way or the other.) So it makes sense that what you eat affects your health and therefore we should make good choices, but the process of choosing can still make a person neurotic, because we should be able to eat anything edible within our immediate environment and still be healthy. That’s what our evolutionary experience tells us, but it doesn’t reflect reality anymore. It’s maddening. I shouldn’t have to measure every damn thing that goes into my mouth. I should just be able to eat til I’m full. ARGH.
The other crazymaker for me is that I go through phases of defiance against the whole affair. I’ve sort of stepped back mentally and assessed, as neutrally as possible, what my mental state is when I decide to eat things that are unhealthy for me. What seems to happen is I get fed up with the situation in the kitchen, or the fact we haven’t seriously grocery-shopped in three weeks, and don’t feel like cobbling something together, and I wind up going, “Fuck it, I don’t care, let’s just order a pizza, I LOVE pizza goddamn it, and I’ll eat it if I like.” Then afterward I wonder what the fuck I was thinking, as I start bloating up and my joints start aching and I generally feel like crap. (If I don’t have celiac or at least gluten sensitivity on top of the extreme metabolic response to carb intake, I’ll be very surprised.)
I hate all this shit. I wish I could just eat the foods I like and be fine. I’m tired of it. I can’t even imagine myself slender again. I don’t see how I could ever possibly get there.
I know everyone who has 100 pounds to lose goes through this, or something like it, therefore I’m not special or anything. Granted. I just had to vent. This is what goes on with me. I know the theory, I could quote chapter and verse at you all day… but when it comes time to implement, I woefully fall short.
And I hate it. And I hate healthy eating. A whole lot.
—–
*Which is pathetic because the guy’s already making a living as an armchair psychologist (amazingly he has a degree in psychology, unlike a lot of these TV bozos, but he diagnoses people he’s never even met, which is not cool in my book) and now everyone else wants to be like him, which is sort of like being a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy. How’s it feel to be faded with indistinct details and lots of blemishes? Think for yourself for once.
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