I have always ate very healthy (Except during I had anorexia and basically didn’t eat anything at all for over a year.). I think I learned good basics for healthy eating from my parents in my early childhood. So even I can’t give high scores to them for many other things they did, this anyway is one to thank them for.
We always ate healthy home made food. We never ate junk food. To be honest I found out what McDonald’s was when I was 18 years old. Our isolated tiny home town might have had something to do to it, too..
I remember especially one evening when we watched tv all family, instead of snacking potato chips we had a bowl of cabbage cut into small slices. It was so delicious! ..I still love cabbage slices! And I didn’t have any cravings for anything else as I had never tasted anything else. That’s what parents nowadays seem to forget.. Children are not born with craving for hamburger and chicken nuggets. They learn all that when they are introduced to those fast food restaurants as small toddlers. I feel sick when I see babies sitting in the high chair, their little baby fists full of greasy french fries, stuffing them in totally unaware of the fact that their parents are slowly but effectively poisoning them.
Back to my childhood. One day per week me and my brother were allowed to eat candy. We could choose what we wanted but the amount was carefully limited. Those were the times when a regular bag of candies contained around 10 candies. Not 2kg. No family-bags. No bulk bags. No 3 for 2. I remember we payed attention to every each candy in the bag. I still remember how many of them looked like. We tried to save them as long as possible so they would last the whole day. And then we ate them with a huge enjoyment. Without having a sugar rush afterwards. Without asking more. We knew there wouldn’t be more.
My mom baked sweet pastries time to time, we ate ice cream in the summer, we stepped off our candy day- rule sometimes during the holidays. But it was far from how it is nowadays when people pig out tons of sugar and fat on a daily basis, and somehow in incredible way justify all that shit to themselves. Nowadays the healthy days are exception in that madness. Luckily it was opposite in my childhood.
When I went to school I got a friend. My parents had already got divorced that time, so it wasn’t nice at home anymore. My mom was all the time in the bad mood, I think she lost her grip into life in the divorce. And now all her bad energy was targeted to me and my brother. So I enjoyed spending time with my friend’s family, never wanting to go back home. But in her family they didn’t eat healthy (Well maybe compared to today’s people yes, but I mean compared to ours that time.). I remember often wondering how could they eat white bread all the time (Something which we only ate very very rarely.). To me white bread was more like a sweet bun, some party food, nothing which you would eat for a breakfast. Also they ate a lot of white pasta without any fresh vegetables aside. Especially I remember one dish, -white pasta swimming in warm milk… yak!!! It was difficult to me to consider it real food. Basically the only fresh food I ever saw in that house were bananas sometimes.
And I still can recall the taste of the sweetest creamy hot chocolate they made. It was made with whole milk (which we never had) and a ton of hot chocolate powder. It kind of tasted soooo good but at the same time somehow soooo wrong that I couldn’t let myself get used to it. And I never stopped eating healthy at home. None of the dishes stuck to my diet.
When I came to early teens I took healthy eating completely to another level. The food at home that I earlier had considered healthy home made food became my enemy. I started to find so many fails in it. Now my food needed to be even much much healthier! It was the time when at school I got very into health studies. I investigated carefully what was healthy and why. What was needed and what was totally useless, empty calories, for us. And I figured out I could do it much better than we did at home. I systematically cut off everything from my diet which didn’t have enough value for me. Everything that I put into my mouth needed to have a very good reason for it. Everything I ate needed to be nutrient-rich, super-healthy food. If something didn’t have a clear purpose in my healthy diet, it could stay out of my life. I basically asked from myself every time I was about to swallow something, why would I do it. No exceptions. Not even one. And it became so easy to me.
I think this all started because I had some sort of addiction to sport and I realised I could improve my scores by eating healthier. Or maybe more than addiction to sport, it was addiction to the results, and further more to the outcome of it. I took part in several running contests even I hated competing from the bottom of my heart. Only thing why I wanted to do it and win over and over again was to see my dad’s happily smiling face when he heard about my success. I saw how proud he was of me. And that meant the world to me. Every win, every record braking carried me a bit further with the belief he loved me. This obsession got created in my when my parents got divorced and my dad left. That was so big shock to me. And as lacking of any better explanation the 5 years old me basically reasoned it been my fault. I thought I wasn’t good enough daughter so he left. So of course I needed to do my best to make him love me again..
Except sport I was so into examining how food effects to human body. I was so inspired by learning nutrient contents of foods, counting calories etc..Testing and seeing how my body obeyed these laws. It became an exciting hobby to me.
Because everyone in our family had a different daily schedule with work and studies I spent a lot of time home alone and I managed to follow my new diet for a while without others noticing anything. But of course when my overly controlling mom heard about this she got pissed. I remember how excited I was when I asked my mom to come and hear about my dieting plan. I wanted to show all my carefully prepared and calculated nutrient tables. I wanted to tell her about healthy food and how could we change our eating habits to even healthier in our family. But my mom cut me short. ‘No. Absolutely no. This case is closed. And we wont talk about this any more. Period.’ Very typical answer from my mom when I tried to introduce some of my own ideas and opinions to her. She wanted to control everything. She resisted everything that wasn’t her own idea. She couldn’t cope, she got so nervous and locked inside of her own head if something didn’t go her way.
She didn’t like me having my own meals. She wanted me to eat the same food than the rest of the family. And she didn’t want our family to adapt any of my new visions of healthy eating. Neither she was interested in knowing why I wanted this change. She just wanted me to shut up and continue quietly living my life, be an easy one for her. So of course this lead into troubles as I wanted to keep up my new eating habits, the reason behind it was so important to me. And I didn’t see anything wrong in eating healthy! I wanted to eat mainly vegetarian food with fish time to time. But I didn’t want to fry my fish in a huge amount of butter in a frying pan, I wanted to cook it in oven instead. I didn’t want to use hard fats, sugar, white grains at all. But my mom was against it. And she was very persistent, nothing was negotiable with her.
Finally I realised something amazing! There was a loophole in my mom’s ability to dominate me! And this realisation made me feel so liberated, so powerful! And I didn’t waste a second more.
I realised that no matter how much my mom could emotionally control me, set rules, ignore my feelings and opinions, she could not force me to eat! I knew she could not physically hold me and stuff food into my mouth, no way. So after that it was easy to me. My dieting became a manifestation of my freedom, of the biggest ‘FUCK YOU, MOM! I WON!’ And without this feeling, this very very deep need of win my mom and break her unfair reign in our family…I would say the dieting would have stayed in healthy lines. But I felt too good seeing my mom unable to get it her way this time. I enjoyed the power over her so much. She shouted and threatened and tried all her tricks. But no. She was powerless!
That pleasure to see my mom pissed and disempowered become more important than my life itself. I forgot the healthy diet, I just went to the extreme in starving myself as I noticed it made my mom more and more pissed. I didn’t want to stop! Later on she fell into misery, crying and begging me to eat. But I knew I would rather die than give her the pleasure to see me eating. She was helpless. And I was powerful. The first time during my mom’s reign.
I ended up loosing almost half of my body weight, starting from my IBW, ending with being morbidly underweight. Barely walking human skeleton. Medical miracle, as they said in the hospital. Well…one needs to accomplish some goals in life…mine was to make my dad love me, and to mentally torture my mom for revenge on what she had put me through. I did it quite well I guess..
After that madness..hmm..I found some new goals in my life.
Still today I think a lot what do I put into my mouth. I eat very healthy. Actually healthier than ever before cause I have studied more and more about it and cause I am mentally in balance. Keeping myself starving for so long during I was sick made me extremely disciplined. That unbreakable built-in discipline helps me in my life still today. But was it worth the madness…? It doesn’t matter to think about it. Cause it wasn’t for me to choose. Our family just was a perfect growing media for this shit.
