eating what you want

This is a difficult subject, because it touches on body image and family issues, which I'm still in the process of unraveling, but tonight I want to write about eating what you want.

Suffice it to say that it's only been in the past year or so, at age 36, that I've been able to eat what I want. Always before in my life, down to my earliest years, eating has been intrinsically tied to economy, and it was feasting on payday and ramen in between. It's always been about either finding what I wanted that I could afford, or eating what I could tolerate because I was broke.

Big caveat here- I don't like to cook, so for my entire adult life I've eaten mostly food that was prepared by other people, either in restaurants or pre-prepared food from grocery stores and whatnot. I know it's much less expensive to prepare your own food, and I have periodically gone through phases where I make myself a big pot of something or another and eat it all week, but that's not eating what I want.

Now I'm eating what I want, and it begs the question- what do I want? I think that there's a perception that eating whatever you want means eating unhealthy foods all the time, in enormous quantities, that we have to exercise self-control in our appetite, that otherwise we get fat. And we all wrestle all the time with how not to get fat, how not to be fat, wouldn't it be awful to be fat.

Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, says something similar about ethics, that you can't go around "doing whatever you want!" And he rightly points out that the person who thinks that assumes that you want something terrible- that what you really want is to rape and murder and go around doing all these awful things, and that it's only self-restraint that keeps people from acting like that. But in fact, if you look at what you really want, you find that most people DON'T want to do all those things.

And I've known for a long time that I don't ALWAYS crave things that are bad for me. Sure, sometimes it's waffles, but sometimes it's asparagus. And sometimes chocolate and sometimes fruit. So I'm experimenting with this expensive inclination to Eat What I Want, and to hope that my body is telling me the truth, that it won't steer me wrong.

This is hard because I've had such an antagonistic relationship with my body for so long, and my hunger signals, like everything else, are unreliable. I'll feel hungry when I've just eaten, and I'll eat when I'm not hungry. Or I'll feel hungry, but it goes away when I smoke a cigarette, so maybe it's a cigarette craving or just an oral fixation. In order for this whole thing to work, I need to learn how to hear what my stomach is saying to me, and to believe in it, which is incredibly difficult. Eating is so convoluted, after all, with family and culture and economy and body and self and feeling... it's hard.

What I'm trying this year, in my assuredly temporary prosperity, is to eat mindfully. To pay attention, to listen. To honor hunger and satiation, and to put aside, over and over again, any thoughts about fat. To retrain myself and to learn (so many things) that I didn't learn as a child. In 02010 I Eat What I Want, because I've earned it.