Thank you for your comments and emails after last night's post. I really do appreciate the understanding, the support, the sounding back of the "oh, so it isn't just me?"
What it comes down to is that I want to feel peace. I want to feel peace in my body, and peace in my eating. I want my body just to be my body, and my food just to be my food. I want my body to be just an intricate organic machine housing who I am. I want my food to be just the enjoyable fuel running the machine and rebuilding its damaged parts.
That's what I want. I want us to be at peace amongst ourselves. I defy that such a thing is impossible in this culture in general, or for me in particular. I defy and deny it and refuse to believe it.
Last week, my therapist and I discussed how bingeing and then purging acts as a vehicle through which I manage my desires, and try to regulate longing. For now, it's literal longing for certain foods I feel I can't have in moderation, for whatever reason. But underneath the literal food stuff lie the actual desires that part of me wants to regulate.
Maybe that's what the battle fever has been about lately: unearthing, via dynamite, the desire for peace.
4/12/2011
4/11/2011
Food Wars
Tonight I emailed one of Les Comtesses that "I mostly spent the weekend at war with food." I must not have an impartial view of my own writing style, because right until I typed out the words "at war," I would've said that was just too hyperbolic for me. But then I typed just those words, and they sure did seem just right.
I am at a point where every food feels as though it teeters on a fence. If the food falls one way, I can engage in normalized eating. If the food falls the other way, the food is either a total no-go, or a surprise binge food. (Binge foods and forbidden foods are not necessarily the same foods.) This is a maddening way to exist, when apples act as land mines.
When I say "binge foods," I don't mean necessarily that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, eat the salad, it turns into a binge food, and I go get three more salads. I mean that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, and proceed to eat the salad in such a way that I am not just eating a salad. I find I can't articulate better than that. Sometimes, I'm just eating a salad. Or an apple. Or whatever. But sometimes, I'm eating a dirty bomb. Or a biological weapon. Or a good, old-fashioned hand grenade.
This weekend, everything was the hand grenade.
On Thursday, the therapist and I tried to strategize. Rather, I tried to strategize and she tried to get me to quit strategizing and list-making and to possibly just be okay with observing. In my fit of battlefield mapping, though, I did realize that food journals and meal plans are not going to work for me right now. They work against my every instinct to resist taking things one day at a time, one meal at a time.
So at the moment I'm meant to be not planning, not strategizing, not going over the top just because I'm sick of being down in the trenches, only to be mowed down by the first truffled-colored bullet that plants itself in my gut. I'm meant to be above the battlefield, watching how it plays out, observing, accepting.
Apparently I really suck at that, because I still spent the weekend all at war. And while I was, by definition, just observing, not strategizing, it's hard to keep up troop morale with what I see.
I am at a point where every food feels as though it teeters on a fence. If the food falls one way, I can engage in normalized eating. If the food falls the other way, the food is either a total no-go, or a surprise binge food. (Binge foods and forbidden foods are not necessarily the same foods.) This is a maddening way to exist, when apples act as land mines.
When I say "binge foods," I don't mean necessarily that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, eat the salad, it turns into a binge food, and I go get three more salads. I mean that I go out for lunch, buy a salad, and proceed to eat the salad in such a way that I am not just eating a salad. I find I can't articulate better than that. Sometimes, I'm just eating a salad. Or an apple. Or whatever. But sometimes, I'm eating a dirty bomb. Or a biological weapon. Or a good, old-fashioned hand grenade.
This weekend, everything was the hand grenade.
On Thursday, the therapist and I tried to strategize. Rather, I tried to strategize and she tried to get me to quit strategizing and list-making and to possibly just be okay with observing. In my fit of battlefield mapping, though, I did realize that food journals and meal plans are not going to work for me right now. They work against my every instinct to resist taking things one day at a time, one meal at a time.
So at the moment I'm meant to be not planning, not strategizing, not going over the top just because I'm sick of being down in the trenches, only to be mowed down by the first truffled-colored bullet that plants itself in my gut. I'm meant to be above the battlefield, watching how it plays out, observing, accepting.
Apparently I really suck at that, because I still spent the weekend all at war. And while I was, by definition, just observing, not strategizing, it's hard to keep up troop morale with what I see.
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eating disorder
4/08/2011
4/06/2011
4/03/2011
Off Topic: The Perfect Vagina
I had my annual gynecologist appointment this past week. Aside from your run-of-the-mill stuff, I mentioned to her that I'd recently seen The Perfect Vagina, a 2008 documentary out of Britain.
The documentary itself got going based on the producers coming across the factoid that the fastest-growing elective surgery in the U.K. was vaginal surgery, that is to say, labiaplasty, hymen reconstruction, vulvoplasty, etc. The documentary is really quite moving - as well as eye-opening. (Be prepared to see vagina. A lot of it. Also, you get to watch a labiaplasty procedure performed on a 21-year-old.) (Yeah. 21.)
Anyway, my doctor and I got to talking about the fact that this has grown into its own industry here in the U.S. as well. She did her residency in L.A. and saw a bit more of it there, but she practices here on the Upper East Side, so still sees her fair share. She hadn't seen this documentary, but shook her head at the idea of a 21-year-old having cosmetic surgery on her labia, and generally at the idea that the visual definition of the vagina ought to be anything less varied than the visual definition of the human face.
So very many people visit this blog through my Brazilian wax post (a post I almost delete about every other month, mind). With bathing suit season approaching, I have the urge to fight against the cultural insistence that women's bits have to look just a certain way, an insistence I am reminded of every time I log into my IP tracker and see thousands of hits a month pouring in to the wax post, a post I wrote to be funny, and a post that people from all over the world read presumably for information.
So, Women's History Month may be over for another year, and I may be a good three years late to the game with this documentary, but, again. The Perfect Vagina. You have a perfect vagina. Don't believe me? Watch it.
The documentary itself got going based on the producers coming across the factoid that the fastest-growing elective surgery in the U.K. was vaginal surgery, that is to say, labiaplasty, hymen reconstruction, vulvoplasty, etc. The documentary is really quite moving - as well as eye-opening. (Be prepared to see vagina. A lot of it. Also, you get to watch a labiaplasty procedure performed on a 21-year-old.) (Yeah. 21.)
Anyway, my doctor and I got to talking about the fact that this has grown into its own industry here in the U.S. as well. She did her residency in L.A. and saw a bit more of it there, but she practices here on the Upper East Side, so still sees her fair share. She hadn't seen this documentary, but shook her head at the idea of a 21-year-old having cosmetic surgery on her labia, and generally at the idea that the visual definition of the vagina ought to be anything less varied than the visual definition of the human face.
So very many people visit this blog through my Brazilian wax post (a post I almost delete about every other month, mind). With bathing suit season approaching, I have the urge to fight against the cultural insistence that women's bits have to look just a certain way, an insistence I am reminded of every time I log into my IP tracker and see thousands of hits a month pouring in to the wax post, a post I wrote to be funny, and a post that people from all over the world read presumably for information.
So, Women's History Month may be over for another year, and I may be a good three years late to the game with this documentary, but, again. The Perfect Vagina. You have a perfect vagina. Don't believe me? Watch it.
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feminism
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