Mindful Eating

I know that my body will always be my biggest insecurity. I am never gonna let go of it. There will always be something I will try to lose. Always something to hide or dislike for a short-term.

But I have come to terms with it, and normalize what I thought was a negative notion.

It's not a masochist move. It's about accepting that I am vulnerable.

Intermittent fasting was my first move towards it. But soon after I started it, I realized that style of eating was far from realistic for me. I am a student, and cannot possibly eat in a short span of time, then fast for long hours, as my schedule is pretty much controlled by the authorities. It was fun to eat whatever I want, and not gaining any weight from it. But that was the thing. Intermittent fasting still made me too unhealthily conscious on timing, food intakes, and my body weight.

Another day with a disordered mind, I sat down with a plate of food and stared at it for a few minutes. I judged the proportion, and calculated the calories of it. The macros. The level of sodium. It all went into my head. 

I lost my appetite for dinner. 

I remembered weighing the options of eating and then getting fat, or another gastric attack in the middle of the night. I was became torn between my choices. The choices I gave myself. With a foggy head, my fingers uncontrollably pinched a grain of rice and fed me. I was starving. And I had allowed myself to think that I am able to starve even more. There was some sense of shame within me. I couldn't distinguish of it was the same shame when I binge, or the guilt that I have given permission to the eating disorder to control me once again.

I took another grain of rice. I felt the texture as I chewed. The fiber it contains, the starch that wraps around the core. In that moment, I knew the nourishment it was supplying to me, without thinking about the nutrient labels written at the back of its packaging, and numbers on it. I kept going. That meal took me almost an hour to finish, but it didn't matter. Something suddenly made sense to me. An answer I spent years to unearth through tiresome showers of reading and research. And the glimpse of dying. And more search for the answer.

I am overwhelmed.

And it wasn't simple at all to get here.