As a baker, I knew I could make her something beautiful and delicious, so I blurted out, “Don’t get those they’re terrible,” and then I had to pause. I find them inedible, overly processed and gross. Toward the end of the shopping, my niece grabbed a small pack of chocolate covered donuts, the kind that taste waxy and stale. My wife and I took our niece, ten, and nephew, thirteen, to the grocery store to get some groceries and a few treats for them because we don’t have a lot of food in the house that would interest children. I’ve dealt with disordered eating, highly regimented eating, dieting, food tracking, binging, all of it. It had to be wrong, or I wouldn’t be sneaking the food, right? In the ensuing years, my eating habits and feelings around eating have been all over the place. That’s when the shame began because I felt like I was doing something wrong. I knew I was eating too much and needed to hide some of what I was eating but I certainly didn’t stop eating. As a teenager, once I understood that food could be a source of comfort, it was the one thing I could turn to that would not judge me, that would make me feel better.
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I haven’t had a healthy relationship to food in more than thirty years.
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It’s incredibly challenging to deprogram myself from the food messaging most of us receive over the course of our lives. Over the years, I’ve worked hard, with nutritionists and therapists, to decouple judgment from food, to stop thinking of this or that food as good or bad or healthy or unhealthy, to stop obsessing over calories, to stop guilting myself all the time.