My Complicated Relationship with Food

A few years ago my friend Charisse recommended to me a book simply titled “Heavy” by Kiese Laymon. This book is one that I can say I resonated with in so many ways. Him writing about growing up as a fat kid in the south spoke to me on some levels. I didn’t grow up as deep in the south as he did but I definitely was usually one of, if not, the biggest of all of my friends. Kiese wrote about how food was his comfort when he was trying to understand the confusing and traumatic experiences he went through from racism to abuse from his mother to the lack of a father. While our traumas are not the same, one thing that spoke to me was the usage of food as comfort. As I get older and constantly struggle to succeed and fail at losing weight I have deeply thought about why I have such an unhealthy relationship with food and I think I have figured out a piece of it.

One of the struggles of writing this is that I don’t want it to come off as an excuse to describe why I am fat or why I struggle to lose weight. I really want people to just try to understand why they have the relationship they have with things they turn to when they feel out of sorts. As I think back and reflect on my childhood, teen years, and even early adulthood, I often think about something I heard from my mother a lot. She once said that she knew what it felt like to truly be hungry when she was growing up and she never wanted her children to experience that pain. She made it a goal to always make sure that if we had nothing else in the house, we would have food. She wanted to make sure her children would never be lacking in simple food and I wholeheartedly appreciate and love her for that. What that also made me realize was that with all the traumatic events of my youth that often caused things to be uncertain, the one constant certainty was the presence of food. When we would be lacking money and the water was turned off, we had food. When I had to take a cold shower in the morning before going out to catch the bus to school in the middle of winter because the electric bill was overdue, we had food to eat. When we were homeless and living 5 people to a 2 bed motel room, we had food. Food has been one of the only constant things in a constantly uncertain upbringing.

This has influenced my life in every possible way. I remember when I got hired on my first long term project after graduating and I was so scared to actually buy a bed because I kept thinking “what if they kick me off the project and I have to pay rent”. I spent months sleeping on an air mattress before my roommates at the time told me to stop living like that. There was no reason I should be a young professional sleeping on an air mattress that got punctured and would cause me to wake up on the floor every night. You know what my roommates never had to tell me to do? Buy some food. I made sure that I would have that. I thought nothing of it at the time but as I look back I definitely see how I made sure one of the only constants in my life remained just that.

One of the most difficult things for me is trying to figure how to, if I even can, break this unhealthy attachment to food. The problem lies in the fact that stress is not a stranger to me. I will write, and have written, about a lot of the things that stress me out from familial, work, romantic, platonic, and fraternal relationships to self image issues. When I get stressed it brings back all too familiar feelings of discomfort and stress growing up. I may not have had to deal with living in a cold apartment due to no heat but when I had a parent dying in the hospital and felt there is nothing comforting nearby, it was easy to turn to what was there when I dealt with stress in the past. I have gotten way better with dedication and willpower but when dealing with serious stress it is so simple for me to want to turn to  what I know, even if it is detrimental to my weight or health goals. I do believe that my understanding why I have this relationship will help me continue to manage it better. It’s funny though, people have asked me what my vice is so many times because I don’t drink or smoke and it seems I was avoiding the obvious answer. Guess this whole post is food for thought… (sorry)