The reasons that I ever even considered to start blogging was because people kept asking me about food. Food. Anything about food. Everything about food. Food theory. Food making. Political food history. Food serving. Food sourcing. Food for functions like loosing weight or gaining weight or building muscle or .... You name it.
It's true, food has become a passion. I'm good with food. I'd like to say that at times it is an obsession, but that's not at all true. Though it used to be.
To start, I'm 26 years old, 10 months post-natal and I weigh 105lbs. I know what your thinking... I've heard it all my life... Don't hate me, that's just ridiculous.
Ever since I was young I hardly weighed anything. I was so skinny that I was too embarrassed to wear two piece swim suits. I got made fun of a lot. And no one ever stood up for the skinny kid on the play ground. Making fun of obese kids is politically incorrect. But making fun of skinny kids... Well, we were all alone out there on the lonely playground surrounded by much larger kids.
People would always tell me that I should enjoy being skinny now because I would be fat when I was 30. Now, being closer to 30 than I am to the playground days, I realize that those women were just hoping I would be fat so that they wouldn't feel so bad about themselves.
Being the type of person that takes such comments as challenges, by middle school I determined in my heart to never be fat.
But, mean while my pediatricians told me I was in the unhealthy bracket and prescribed me to eat Ensure and milkshakes with meals on a daily basis. I was certainly confused.
All the while, I grew increasing interested in justice and social action and, ultimately, in where my food came from. And I was gravely disappointed.
So here I stood as a 5th grader. "Skinny as a rail" (as my grandfather would say), drinking Ensure with my veggie burger feeling the weight of this food world that was, frankly, just stupid! I had determination to stay skinny to prove to those fat ladies that I won't console their insecurities, yet force-fed milk shakes, and ethically motivated to ban anything unsustainable or potentially abusive of animals. And I hadn't yet even entered Jr. High.
Food became an obsession.
I can't say I ever had your average eating disorder by all conventional definitions, but I certainly had disordered eating. I knew I was skinny. But I didn't like my body. I didn't like where food came from. And I had those fat ladies to one-up. So I found it safest to bring extreme controle to my eating habits.
By the time I was in college, I was trying to calculate how much food I could eat to survive... Never asking what it took for me to thrive (though I never had valued myself enough to ask that question... But that story is for a different blogpost).
I hoped to save resources on food so as to donate the rest to starving children. It became a game for me. If I could live on just 1000 calories then I would donate the equivalence in money to World Vision. It was bad.
And to further belabor the issue, I was an avid runner. So I probably should have been consuming much over 2000 calories a day rather than less. It's called athletic anorexia. And no one knew I struggled with it. Not even me.
I won't bore you with my detailed journey of healing, but it has been just that... A journey. And it's been mostly through hard earned failures. And crazy grace. And my husband. I'm forever grateful for his perseverance my my life (he sees me for who I am, not for the baggage I carry).
But on this journey I have learned many things. The biggest being this: it it's not bad that I'm skinny as a rail and it's not bad that I care where my food comes from. It's also not bad that I am blessed to thrive and that I don't have to live off of 1000 calories a day.
I guess the hard earned lessons are the best, because I now have a store house of perspective from which I value communion. True communion. And I value locally sourced food. And I know how to eat good fats to loose weight. And I value eating those good fats. And I also value eating store bought pumping pie and cheap turkey when I visit with family on Christmas.
So, here is one of my first entries regarding food. That's my roots. And here are the fruits.
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