Guest Post : Morgan Weinert, Entering an open, honest relationship with food.

Morgan's guest post today resonates with me on a very personal level.   My own relationship with food is intimately connected to my sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Being able to embrace a positive attitude toward my own (and others') sexuality is extremely difficult, if not impossible, when the self-esteem is failing me.  I am so pleased to present Morgan's story.  You can follow their culinary adventures on their foodie blog, Chubb Gourmet, and they are a talented photographer to boot!     -Shilo

Copyright 2011 Shilo McCabe

24 years into my life, I’m finally entering into an honest, open relationship with food.

I have been fat for all of my adult life, and most of my childhood. Around age 7 or 8, I started getting “chubby.” By age 12 I was all out fat. It was no fault of my parents. They fed me well-rounded, healthy meals. Junk food was sparse in our household. I was active as a child, too. I don’t blame anyone for being fat. It just happened. I am a great example of the result of a Punnett square with a long line of fat family members. It just happens to be a dominant trait in my particular set of genes.

When I entered my adolescence, my fatness started to impact my self-image and social interactions. It stopped being cute “puppy fat” and started being a “problem.” My first diet and gym membership began at age 12. At 12 years old, when I should have been thinking about school crushes and what I wanted my birthday party theme to be, I was worrying about being the fat kid and why my diet wasn’t working.

This is when my relationship with food really started becoming abusive and problematic. Up until that point, food and I got along just fine. We enjoyed each other’s company in moderation. We had occasional bouts of wild excess, but more often than not engaged in respectful, mutual appreciation. The instant I began calorie counting and thinking “low-fat,” I began binge-eating. I became ashamed of eating in public, began worrying about what people thought about my choices in food, and had to start rationalizing my choices to eat “poorly” by promising those around me that I would be exercising later to offset the calories. At home, my mom worked hard to ensure I was eating “right.” At school, or at friends’ houses, I ate all the junk food available to me in an irrational response to being forced to think about weight loss all the time.

My mom and I tried every fad diet that popped up. We got multiple gym memberships. We tried personal trainers. We bought diet food. At age 16, my doctor prescribed me phentermine, a habit forming appetite suppressant that caused me to feel strung out and anxious. Sometimes we lost weight, but no matter how much we lost, we always gained it back. By this time, I wasn’t fantasizing about growing up to be a politician or graduating top of my class in college; I was imagining how perfect my life would be when I was finally skinny.

My junior year of high school, I jumped on the low-carb diet fad with gusto. I stopped eating bread, rice, pasta and even “high-carb” fruits like apples and bananas. The diet was supposedly most effective if you could force your body into ketosis, a state that causes incredible stress to the liver. I ate nothing but protein for a solid month, and started losing huge amounts of weight. At one point, I lost ten pounds in a week. And my energy levels plummeted. I felt sick, couldn’t concentrate in school, and was always hungry. I began binging on carbohydrates. I felt terrible, both emotionally and physically. I felt like I was failing myself every time I gave in and had my sandwich on bread instead of in between two pieces of lettuce. When my mother realized how sick the diet was making us, we stopped. And we almost immediately gained all the weight back.

I didn’t know it then, but I hated food. I hated eating. I hated myself.

I chased weight loss goals and flirted with diet after diet for FOURTEEN YEARS of my life. It wasn’t until I was introduced to fat-positive and “healthy at every size” movements in college that I finally started to seriously examine my relationship with food. I realized that I was causing myself huge emotional and physical harm by constantly berating myself for not being skinny enough or eating well enough or exercising enough. I started to food as something that could heal and create community.

Copyright 2011 Shilo McCabe

And the moment I resolved to stop dieting and exercising for weight loss, my life changed. I started cooking for myself, and learning about amazing foods like quinoa. I started getting excited about vegetables and learning which ones were local and in-season. I became more connected to local and slow-food movements, and learning about the science of food and how our bodies process it.

And when I stopped thinking about exercise for weight-loss I learned that I really enjoyed yoga and bike riding. I started training for long distance bike rides, and talked with a nutritionist NOT about how to lose weight, but how to nourish myself as I became more active. I started discovering new whole grains that made me feel full and energized. I learned how to cook in ways that were exciting and different and most importantly NOURISHED ME.

In short, I came back to healthy relationship with food. I’m still working on strengthening things. I’m trying to slow down, learn to savor every moment with the food I eat and stop when I’ve had my fill. And no, the pounds aren’t melting away. This is not a story about how I lost 100 pounds and kept it off. It’s about discovering what foods power me or make me feel satisfied. It’s about how I’m building a healthy, sustainable relationship with the food I put into my body and how this new relationship is making me feel better, mentally and physically. This is a story about how as soon as I started loving food again, I started to love MYSELF again.

Copyright 2011 Shilo McCabe