I have become obsessed with food. Not that I want to eat a lot (that too!), but otherwise, I think of what to cook, what to have for lunch or dinner, and in between. It has become a source of constant worry also, is there enough cooked fresh food for Mustafa in the house, if not what must I make? what would he like? and when? Cooking is laborious, actually its not and is quite easy and quick but in my apprehensions and constant thinking about it it takes on a shape of a gargantuan task and I keep mulling over it in my mind again and again! Then of course is the issue of weight and poundage that I am carrying which must be shed sooner than later, so in all this I am also charting out a diet plan and trying to cook and eat healthy -- sometimes this excessive obsessiveness just cracks me up and I end up gobbling down a big mac and fries and not even enjoy it.
So, today as I am feeling high, I have decided to face my demons about food and pen the issues down as I try to understand them. Food became an issue I believe when I was twenty and in States for the first time, I loved their heavy carb laden sugary foods, the tastes the colors the textures were all very alluring and tempting and it became a kind of something that I could not have as and when I pleased like the home I had left behind. That had never happened to me before, it was a new feeling and it played on my emotions, why I know not. Since then food is an issue with me, either not eating much or eating a lot, but in both cases thinking a hell of a lot about it.
Food is of course all things nourishing, we associate it to first love of a mother, it betokens giving, caring, pampering either by another or later on in life by one's own self. We have to eat to live. But, when food becomes a problem or requires more thought than needed than one must stand back and see the reasons. Food also in every social set up means company, festivities, happiness, occasions, reunions and so on.
It fulfills a need to have and give, it is life-enriching, and therefore exceedingly symbolic of one's caring for another, hence candle light dinners, a mum's insistence that her child isn't eating enough when the evidence states otherwise, sayings like 'way to a man's stomach is through his heart.'
The ritual of buying food, preparing exquisite dishes, serving it, and then offering it to others and eating oneself all are life-assuring and survival acts that relate to some primal instinct in us which is self-preservation and growth. In that sense then my obsession with eatables has to do with an innate sense of survival, of enduring life threatening situations with a reserve and resolve, a part of my psyche is at all times on a sub-conscious level feels threatened with extermination, with hunger, with going without some essential life giving ingredient and therefore my mind and my primal instincts are at some unknown level working over time to save me from complete annihilation.
So instead of me whipping myself over my over eating I must respect my body and nurture its needs, perhaps my sub-conscious knows better and is going to get me as far as I need to go to feel mentally resilient again to stop this fascination with food. Till then I give in to all what my body requires of me.
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