In the last post I looked back at 2008 and a series of posts I wrote about, back then, learning to face some serious mental issues around food. I’m sort of looking at how far I have come, how my thinking has evolved over the years, and where I am now. Especially, I’m inserting some important caveats where I think my writing back then was really wrong—if you didn’t start there, please go back to see what I mean.
Skipping over some of those old posts now. I ended the series by wondering about the future:
Will I keep getting hungry between meals, ever? Will I never eat an entire pizza? Will I always ask for the half portion? Will I forget about ever filling up on bread, ever again? Will I roll over in bed when my stomach growls at 3 a.m., saving that appetite for breakfast? Will I throw out the kids’ sandwich crusts? Will it start to feel wonderful, instead of worrying, to believe that the eating-till-I’m-stuffed is over?
About two years after writing that, after I’d had another baby, I wrote this post looking back on the same questions:
That is the writing of someone who is frightened by the idea of never eating an entire pizza again. I write now as someone who is relieved by the idea of never eating an entire pizza again. Even by the idea of never having more than, say, a quarter of a pizza at a sitting….
If I learned I only had a few months to live … I still wouldn’t want to eat an entire pizza. I wouldn’t want to stuff myself with food, even really tasty food. I guess I might eat a higher proportion of my food from the Deep-Fried Group, but … “not stuffing myself” doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, like any kind of self-denial. It’s what I want to do now and for the rest of my life. I feel so much more free about it than I did when I ate whatever I “wanted.”
And now it’s seventeen years later and I will answer these questions again!
…Yes, I still let myself get hungry between meals. Meals are better when you are hungry! I am kind of addicted to that feeling, in fact.
…No, I basically never eat an entire pizza, with the rare exception of Neapolitan style personal pizzas, and even then I have to be really ravenous.
…Half portions: pretty much, if the “small” is a standard menu size, that’s what I order.
…Yeah, I don’t fill up on bread. Not a problem. Not even really tempted, unless caraway rye is involved.
…I cannot remember the last time I got out of bed in order to eat. Drink water, yes. Maybe if I was sick.
…Kids’ sandwich crusts? Not a thing anymore around here. I admit that last night I nibbled on their rejected salmon patties at the end of dinner.
…And for a really, really long time, I’ve preferred the feeling of “ate enough” to “ate so much I feel full.”
So I wish I could go back and reassure myself back then: I was really fixing some things in my head. A lot of things got better and they stayed better.
+ + +
In fact, I kept up all those generally good habits, and felt good, and stayed about the same size, for ten years, including two pregnancies. In 2018, when I was 44, a few months after I stopped breastfeeding for good—yes, if you’re doing the math, I’m one of those people that lets the child set the pace, so I’m not exactly sure when it ended but around there sometime—my weight started to rise very very slowly but steadily, and that without me changing anything at all. I chalked it up to the end of breastfeeding, but it could just as easily have been the onset of perimenopause; maybe both.
For a little while I stressed out about it and tried counting calories and things like that, but after the pandemic hit and there was a sudden new source of stress in my life, I decided to change my thinking and my approach instead.
For one thing: My teenage son installed a squat cage in our basement, and I switched from swimming and running at the suddenly-unavailable YMCA to barbell training and long walks. I figured that if I was going to be slowly putting on weight, I might as well try to nudge some of it into becoming muscle.
That turned out to be really good for my mental health and body image. Ever since then I’ve been too busy thinking about performance, and avoiding injury, and getting enough protein, etc. I’m really focused on the long term now. Eventually I added the running and swimming back in, by the way, though it’s hard to do that more than once a week now that I really prioritize not skipping weight training.
It isn’t too far off to say that I am thinking seventeen-plus years in the future. I don’t worry anymore that I will develop seriously disordered eating (in either direction) but I do wonder about that older, hopefully wiser me. When my youngest child is twenty-eight and my oldest child forty-two—when I am sixty-eight—how will I feel? Will that not-disordered-eating be something that is actually easy and natural by then, or will I still have to sort of think about it to keep it in balance? Will I still be lifting barbells? Will I have made it through to menopause with adequate bone strength? Where will I have landed in my endless waffling over wine consumption: “life is short, go ahead and enjoy this great pleasure of life” or “learn to cut back and live longer?” Will I have entirely, instead of mostly, stopped viewing my body critically in the mirror? Will I have gone full salmon-and-kale-and-avocadoes, or will I still demolish a plate of nachos or a bowl of spaghetti bolognese from time to time? (No judgment there, by the way. I’m just wondering.)
It’s tempting to think that I’m ahead of the game in a couple of areas. First, I’m not afraid of or ashamed of aging per se. I’m nearly the age my mother was when she died of cancer; I don’t take these years for granted; I’m pleased to have reached my fifties, pleased even by the visible signs of being older, the gray hair and the fleshiness around my chin, and by Mark (who has nineteen months on me) growing older beside me. Second, I’ve got a few really good habits that I’ve been keeping up since my thirties. I hope those can make up for the wine a little bit longer.
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