The Psychology of Food

I think I need to fundamentally reassess my relationship with food. When I was a child my family regularly went through financial fluctuations in our budget, there were times when we had extra money which was when we occasionally had takeout; there were also times when our budget was comfortable those were the times when we ate regularly and also had between meal snacks, and between-between meal snacks. Then there were times when money was tight so we'd only really eat at our regularly dinner time in the evening, and a light breakfast which was usually just cereal or toast.

There was an element of guilt associated with uneaten food, the times when money was tight this element of guilt was at its highest and conversely when money was expendable the guilt for not eating everything I was given was less, but not completely absent. That mentality prevailed for my childhood and teenage years. The problem with all of this was that I had never been able to regulate my metabolism no matter how much or how little I ate because my circadian rhythm - the time when I wake and sleep - was never in sync with my family. I have posited that this is related to my Nystagmus, the ramification being that I've never been able to sleep willingly or at a regular time because I only ever sleep out of exhaustion.

When my teenage years drew to a close and I started college, and came into my own as an adult, suddenly I had a lot more control over when I would eat, and when I would bother to try and sleep. That afforded me the ability to adapt a philosophy of "listening to my body" which entailed eating only when I was hungry, and sleeping only when I was tired enough to sleep. I wouldn't eat for the sake of eating if I wasn't hungry, and I wouldn't try and sleep when I wasn't tired to avoid the usual routine of lying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling unable to switch off - and to be clear this was a pre-smart phone era, and the infancy of broadband internet so neither of those can be argued as factors that drove my inability to switch off mentally at night.

On the face of it this philosophy of listening to your body has its merits, it sounds reasonable, practical, some might even say preferable. The trouble is it's perhaps the worst philosophy you can adopt. It completely ignores the motivation we have as humans to do both of those things in the first place, i.e. we don't eat because we are hungry, we eat to prevent hunger. Likewise we don't sleep because we are tired we sleep to prevent exhaustion. You're not supposed to wait until you reach the point of emptiness before you cater to that need.

When you eat only when you are hungry, it causes problems because there is a delay between your intake of food and the feeling of being full. When you eat only when you are hungry and stop when you no longer feel hungry, you are still "eating" for some time after, you have stopped putting food in your mouth but your body is still digesting what you put into it. By the time your hunger dissipates you've already been eating more than you needed to because of that delay.

The same applies to sleep for normal people who can fall asleep of their own accord, this element at least I can put to one side for now as I can't control that part of my life unfortunately, which is just something I accepted a long time ago.

Given the recent health problems I have been having and my discovery that I am allergic to rapeseed oil, I've been forced to reevaluate my eating patterns. Trying to force myself to go back to eating at a regular time even if I don't feel hungry is difficult that seems to be more for psychological reasons though, rooted in my childhood relationship with food. The thought of eating when I am not hungry feels as much like wasting food as leaving a plate full of food because both seem unnecessary in my mind. I've had to reframe that food as being a reserve or to use the analogy of a car, it's better to keep fuel in the tank at all times than to wait until the tank is empty before you fill it.

I don't know if this is actually going to work, but I don't have much choice at the moment because using my old philosophy of only eating when I am hungry isn't prudent when rapeseed oil is so prevalent, I still eat food only to vomit later and then discover that's an ingredient. There's an element of risk with everything that I eat now that it might come back up. If that was the only thing I ate that day then I end up running on empty which isn't healthy. As much as it may dismay me to eat when I am not hungry, the need to build up a reserve "in case" is now greater, in other words the unnecessary is becoming necessary.