I'm in a funny mood. Publishing my sketchbook isn't helping, actually, so the therapy might not be helping. Maybe I'm missing my sponsor. I should call her, she's off skiing somewhere, but judging by one of my last posts, I may have a bit of a resentment of people who are travelling. Probably because I'm not. And I could, I could find the money to get away, but I'm not really trying to do it. It's much easier to sit and be ticked off. Hm. There's the nub of it really, I just want to sit and hate everyone. Ah. There. I've said it. It's much easier to sit in the kitchen, drink coffee, and hate the world than to do what I've got in front of me begging to be done. Go out and arrange for the food for my choir get-together on Saturday. Start painting the big canvas that is lurking in my studio and scaring the bejeezus out of me. That's much harder. Ok, so I guess there's not much to do but do it. After lunch. First, I want to make a nice vegetable soup for lunches this week. A good thing for a snowy day.
There it is again, food as comfort. It's cold, it's grey, and I want to hide. So, I'll make soup. I guess there are worse things to do: like get a bucket of chicken and eat it. Or a box of chocolates. Why am I not still 300 pounds? Because getting a bunch of food and eating it just isn't an option any more. I know where that leads. But I need to do some emotional work in order to keep myself from getting so desperate that bingeing becomes an option again. And that can happen in the blink of an eye. I have to reach out to others, but who, I don't know... Hm. Maybe another friend from the programme. Gotta chop. And get my phone out too.
It's 3/4 of an hour later, and I've got the giant stock pot on the stove (the one that doubles as an outdoor lobster pot on the propane cooker in the summer and has the flame marks on the side to prove it) and 2 trays of chopped vegetables roasting on the oven. All my anger and fear is chopped up with the turnip, leeks, garlic, celery, parsnips, carrots, onions and mushrooms, roasting with a good coating of oil and italian tomato paste. And the house smells wonderful. This is where I still go with food. I'm making something nourishing and tasty, and that is where I get my food jollies these days.
The food has been really good lately. I seem to have a surfeit of willingness. Funny sentence that first one, speaking of "the food" in the third person, as if it has a personality... Food with a capital F. Well, I guess that for a compulsive overeater, it does have a personality. A very intimidating personality, usually. It's a very polarized relationship and it can be extremely dysfunctional: I love Food and I hate it for what it has done to me in the past. I guess I'm trying to work on my relationship with Food here. And I have to, because I need Food to survive. It's not a substance like alcohol, that I can abstain from. Anorexics try to abstain from eating Food, it's their enemy, and it can have fatal results. My challenge is to put Food in a place where it doesn't rule my life. And I have more or less success on a daily basis.
Chefs, gourmands and the like often like to say they live to eat. Well, that doesn't seem to work for me. In my case, I was dying to eat. Because when I approach food in that manner, I can't stop. So I have had to pray for breaks to be put into my faulty operating system, and I have to change things, to build the breaks in. Write. Share. Reach out. Look in. Honour myself. In my case it is often the challenge to reverse the old Biblical admonition to love myself as I do others, because I think that one of the big triggers for overeating is making myself a doormat. And I do it so automatically.
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