Mind Games

I have come to the conclusion that I am not normal where food is concerned. Again. I am eating much much smaller portions of food than I ever have before, even the Health Dept Diet. And yet I get this strange guilty feeling that I am eating too much when I feel full! Its wierd. As I have shared previously the 'full' feeling is a pretty novel thing for me. I think after gorging myself at Christmas dinner time and being unable to move off the couch would have given me a similar "full" feeling and that under those circumstances (of complete overeating) the guilty feeling is pretty congruent. But that feeling of fullness today is reached after eating very little. And I feel guilty. For so long negative feelings around food and eating have been a part of my life it will be a challenge to move past that into freedom.

While I was pondering on this, I thought back to my childhood experiences around food. Dinner time was chaotic - with my dad, who often would come home from work and then do the cooking, barking commands at us in the strange pidgin English that he picked up during his life in the Merchant Navy. "Chop chop jildy!" he would shout - which meant hurry up. Dinner was mainly chips (jockeys whips as he called them), and fried meat. Sausages, hamburger meat, or steak. Peas were our staple vege and gravy. We didn't like gravy on our chips and he would roar "Gravy? Yes? No?" as he poured the gravy non stop across our plates. Our little hands would shoot out to try and protect the chips and keep them gravyless, and we would get the backs of our hands burnt in the process. The main objective would be to eat as quickly as possible and get the ordeal of dinner over and be away from the shouting. If we tarried we would be "wasting british thermal units!" - another crime. So we learned to gobble our meals. It also seemed that there was never enough and my brothers and I sometimes silently fought over food. A worse nightmare was having to eat the things we didn't like. I learned to swallow broadbeans whole rather than chew the horrible taste.

How can a person grow up sane around food with that kind of chaos? Funnily, and by funnily I mean tragically, I married a man who was a dinner table tyrant. Even though I worked until 5 pm every day I still had to have dinner on the table by 6pm. Thankfully he's very much an ex now.

So my task is it be able to leave all that behind, and start to build new a new relationship with food. One that doesn't involve fear, panic, and guilt. Most of all not guilt.