Mansi

It's not about chocolates, curd rice with pickles, warm crepes, hot chocolate sauce, caramel, murkhs or garlic bread. It's not about what you're eating.
I learnt yesterday that it's about eating itself. I have a dependency (addiction is extreme) with eating. The ability to pick up food, play with it some and then feed myself constitutes eating. With some of us, it's more than just nutrition or meal time.
It's about those times when we want to talk to someone but can't. It's about those times when we want to feel something but can't. It's about those times when we feel something but don't know beyond that. It's about the times when we need to take a break and only know one way to break.
I share that kind of a relationship with eating. It lets me keep my fingers busy. It keeps my mouth busy. Beyond that, the feeling in my fingers, mouth and sometimes stomach, I really can't feel much else. In that sense, eating is an exclusive relationship. There isn't space for anything else.
Admitting to my dependency on eating is very hard. It isn't a conscious process. One can't fill out a questionnaire, add up the points and announce to the world - 'I'm dependent on eating'. It's a realization as painful and wonderful as any other relationship.
When the going is good, a relationship with eating is quite numbing. You aren't thinking about it. It's as natural as anything else you do and even more. It's addictive. Soon you won't realize that you are inseperable. I eat when I am happy. I eat when I am down. I eat when I want to take a break. I eat while I work. I eat while I do everything. I plan my activities around eating. Going for a movie is about what to eat before, during and after. Going shopping is about what to eat before, during and after. It isn't always junk food - Eating is good as long you're doing it. Be it salads, negative calorie foods, wholewheat, wheatgerm, dunking doughnut, pasta e fungi - that's all consolation for souls in denial (just like eating likes it). Like a long, loving relationship, eating grows on you, into you and then becomes you.
Eating is a over-jealous lover. I can't find time to do anything but eat. Eating seems to take priority over everything and everyone else.
Eating is a manipulative lover. There is no wins - just levels of measuring up. Have I had enough to eat? (you'll never ever find out!!) Does it feel good? (almost never matters..)
Eating is devious with my emotion strings. Last week my father in law insulted my eating relationship and boy, I've been in part sulking for the better part of five days.

Eating tapdances across my emotions like they aren't mine anymore.
Anybody reading this would figure by now, like I did last night, that this was not 'alive' or 'kicking'. It's not about substituting chocolates for carrots. It's not about eating salads instead of bread. The fine understanding of food groups and food qualities is well and good but don't count.
This relationship is physical: starting at my fingers, to my mouth and then a little beyond.
This relationship is all consuming: I can't tell myself apart.
This relationship is secretive: I can't really introduce eating to anyone, nor will eating allow it. All the denial only further deludes me to thinking there is no relationship at all.

Five weeks back, I decided to take part in a weight loss program. Something about eating salads, dals and fruits, exercing at least once a day jolted me out into the open.
Into the fourth week, I used to tell everyone about how I have two selves - physical and emotional and their nutritional needs are different. Or so I told myself.
Into the fifth week, I slipped. I ate, I didn't exercise. And then something snapped inside me. The frustrations, the bruised emotions of the past week rolled into one big outburst.

I was angry at the world and at myself. I was upset with the world and myself. I felt rejected and I knew I was the one doing the rejecting.

Something did snap. It was my relationship with eating.
I realized that I didn't crave chocolates more than I did cucumber. When I was hungry, I was happy with the cucumbers. And I hated myself for it.
How could I turn my back on eating? How could I betray the many years of loving? How could I be so ungrateful?

How can I go on without eating in my life?
The truth is, I can. The truth is that I can't go on with the dependency. The truth is that this relationship is doing nothing for me. The truth is my relationship with eating leaves no space for me to be with other things /people. The truth is this relationship has in the past kept me from growing. Any time I was in conflict with someone else or myself, I always had eating to turn back to. And yet by turning away from conflicts, I stopped growing. I lost out on opportunities to get past minor bumps with my relationships with other people.

My relationship with eating is like a pimple, dried from the inside out. I can't wait for it to fall off.