on food, UPDATED

UPDATE: This post posted prematurely due to my weird computer doing bizarre things I don't understand! But I finished it. Here it is, finished.

Over the past week, I've found myself redefining my relationship with food.

Food is a funny thing. We all need it. There isn't anyone alive who doesn't eat, who doesn't need to eat to live. Sorry to be controversial, but the Breatharians are lying! We all eat.

But we all eat different things. And in different amounts. And at different times. We've got vegans and vegetarians and fruitarians and straight up carnivores and people who only eat at Subway and people who only eat at McDonald's. Then you have the people with eating disorders: people with bulemia and anorexia nervosa and compulsive overeating.

The way we relate to food really colors our entire lives.

A few days ago I was watching one of my friends eat--we were eating together, PS, I don't just like watch people eat--and I noticed how when everyone else got up for seconds, including me, she didn't. She just wasn't hungry for more.

That was the first time it ever occurred to me that I, myself, might eat more than I need to at mealtimes, just because. Maybe that makes me stupid, that I never thought about it before. But oh well. I'm twenty-three years old and I just realized that at dinnertime, I usually eat more than I need.

And then I came across an article in the NYT about how junk food is actually way more expensive than home-cooked food, despite the rumors to the contrary. Honestly, I'd heard the same lines over and over myself: that junk food is far cheaper than healthful food. But it turns out, that's a LIE! And when you think about it, of course it's a lie. You can make healthy food for cheap, if you actually bother to make it.

I know in my life, I've had strange relationships with food in the past. For the first six months of my first pregnancy, I couldn't keep down a single meal, pretty much. I lost 15 lbs from the whole ordeal. I had to force myself to eat in the hopes that my body would absorb a few nutrients before the morning-afternoon-night sickness kicked in.

In high school, since my schedule was jam-packed from 5:45 am until 9 pm at night, with literally no breaks (I skipped lunch to take extra class... yeah. not my whole high school career, but a significant portion of it), I would do nothing but eat from 4:45 am until 5:45 am. Then I would snack a little around 1 pm in between classes. That was pretty much how I dealt with food. Tons and tons of food in the morning, and then nothing all day.

Then I went to college, and had an opposite problem: as the opening baker, I had to be up too early to eat before going to work (on campus, the cafeteria wasn't open when I left... for obvious reasons. I was the one opening it, basically). So I had to put off eating until the afternoon, and that changed up all my eating habits, also for obvious reasons.

One year for Lent I gave up sweets: chocolate, sugar-based things like cake and cookies, anything with corn syrup in the first five ingredients. For the first week it was killer but then after that it was so easy. I was going to do it forever but a few weeks after Lent I got back into my old habits. A few candies was all it took to bring back the "need" for them in my life again.

I've always had the problem of when I get super stressed, I stop feeling hungry--but then I force myself to eat more than I need, because I know starving isn't healthy but I can't always sense when my body is satiated.

Now that I'm a stay at home person, it's both surprisingly easy and surprisingly hard to eat whenever I want. Most of the time when I'm hungry, it feels like, Nathaniel gets hungry too, and he comes first most of the time. So there are days when I spend all my time nursing and don't get my first meal in until the afternoon, sometimes even late afternoon. On the other hand, I am the captain of my day now, and if I wanted to tell my baby to suck it up and take a binky, I could probably spend the whole day eating if I wanted to.

Food is complicated.

Our relationships to it are complicated. And even worse (or better?), they change over time. It's kind of like reading your scriptures every day. Some weeks, or months or years, you can be really good at daily scripture study. And then sometimes you lapse and forget to be intentional about it, and the lapse can last just as long as the disciplined times did. With food, sometimes we're good about it, and sometimes we're not. As we saw in the last season of The Biggest Loser, a person can go from being an Olympic athlete to being hundreds of pounds overweight in a single lifetime. That is amazing to me. Every person has the potential to go to extremes with food. Just because you took care of your eating habits for the first 25 years of your life is no guarantee that you'll continue for the next 25.

This whole synchronicity of food thoughts popping up in my life has got me thinking: I'm going to be more intentional about what I eat. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thoughts, anyone? Do you have any thoughts about food you'd like to share?