Food History Pt. 1

It might be interesting for you readers to know that I type this whole blog with one finger on my iPad while I nurse. Sometimes, when I get really excited, I use two fingers! (no wonder I haven't finished the sequel to my book yet) Anyway, I committed to at least one post a month, so you're getting a lot of bonuses. 

As I post this, it has officially been a month since I weighed myself! This is not a record yet - In 2011 I went about three months when my husband had an internship in Texas and we left most of our belongings in Utah, including my scale. It wouldn't fit in the car. 

Here's where I tell you what I've been thinking in regards to weight: only 11 months left till my next weigh-in! I guess I need to focus on doing more forgetting and less fantasizing about how many pounds I might lose between now and then.

I know I said I would tell you about my history with food in this post, but I want to be in-depth, and I think the easiest way to do that is a bit at a time. I also don't want to incriminate anyone as I go - this blog is about cleansing, not about blame. This means the act of telling is going to take a lot of thought.

As a child, I knew what was health and what wasn't: wild rice = healthy, chocolate = not. Some little things might have been cultural, some particular to our family, but I think I had a pretty good idea. To be skinny, you eat salad and don't add chocolate syrup to your milk. That was around age five.

At age six, I told a friend that I didn't eat white bread ( interestingly, I remember eating a rice crispy treat with no guilt that same week). She applied peer pressure - she wanted me to take just one bite. I refused, proud of myself and comparing it to a situation where I might be offered a cigarette in the future (I never have been offered a cigarette, thank goodness).

Around age eight I started recognizing who was thinner than me.

By age ten, I understood food consumption could be connected to emotions. I knew it was a bad idea to add too much brown sugar to my cream of wheat. I knew the blue ice cream at Maggie Moo's was the worst choice of ice cream you could make, made only worse if you topped it with crumbled Oreos.

I should point out that these are mostly black and white thoughts. Children are black and white thinkers, so it was obvious to me that there were "good" foods and "bad" foods. Emotional eating was a new idea, but it was hard for me to think about it too deeply because it was so complex.

At age eleven, I went on my first "diet."