I have a weird relationship with food. During some times of my life, food was strongly linked with pain. During those times I didn’t want to eat, because I felt that any decision I made with what to eat or how much or when was always the wrong decision. It felt like I any decision I made would just worsen my problems. So it became a big, scary responsibility that I just didn’t want to do anymore, and enjoying it was completely out of the question.
At one point I got the burden lifted from my shoulders for two months, which was a really fucking weird experience. I went on IV nutrition. You don’t realize how much of your life is built around eating until you just don’t eat anymore. I wouldn’t notice it had gotten late because I hadn’t eaten dinner and in my subconscious it just doesn’t get late until after you’ve eaten dinner. That kind of thing. My family tried to eat away from me, because they thought it’d be cruel if I smelled their food, but I wanted to smell it. Smelling became a replacement for eating for awhile. It’s better to at least get a sniff than it is to get nothing. Luckily I wasn’t exactly hungry, though. My body was receiving the nutrition it needed, which prevented the sensation of extreme hunger. But at some level it is just very confusing to have nothing pass your lips, and to have a totally empty digestive tract, for 60 days.
After that experience was over, as you might imagine, I appreciated food very very much. In some ways it was the first time I ever appreciated it, really.
Nowadays I have days where it just feels like a responsibility and other days where I appreciate it very much. I recently have subscribed to Soylent for the tough days, and it is a life-changer. I am no longer doing harm to my body by skipping meals or eating junk on the days that I can’t face cooking. But I can’t imagine doing what some people do, and stopping consuming anything else besides Soylent, because there is still the part of me that occasionally gets great pleasure from food, and I think that’s the way it should be.