Dear Diary, my relationship with food is complicated. i suppose i should preface with this a trigger warning. it’s nothing extreme, just complicated…
the way i view my body fluctuates greatly, but i do find that i almost always pay attention to my stomach. depending on how my stomach looks, dictates how i view the rest of myself. i find that often i have the desire to cut back on the amount of food i eat, but eating is compulsive for me. my appetite is also something that fluctuates greatly, depending on many factors. i find that when i’m particularly gloomy over an extended period of time then i have little to no appetite, and that makes me feel good. i rarely ever feel hunger because i eat impulsively, but every once in a while if i wake up in the morning and forget to eat, then i feel great satisfaction when i feel hunger. i never feel hunger and feel the need to eat, it’s always a feeling i want to prolong and it feels like a reminder of “progress”. even though i’m not committed enough to the idea of starving myself to lose weight like that.
i had an experience in middle school, where i was absorbing a lot of intrusive thoughts revolving around anorexia. it wasn’t because i wanted to, i was trying to help a friend and keep an eye on her alt social media accounts. i found myself being heavily influenced by the pictures and words on this account. i don’t blame her, i know she didn’t want me snooping through her alt but i did anyway because i was worried. there was a period of time where i found my appetite dwindling, but as i lost access to her account and stopped absorbing that content, things went back to normal for the most part.
i had a second experience with an ex friend towards the end of our friendship. this persons intent was far more malicious than the person before. i had mentioned multiple times that i am easily influenced by reading and absorbing ana content, yet this person continued to cross my boundaries and sent me poems they wrote about their anorexia, and always posted on their main accounts about counting calories, starving themselves ect. i don’t believe this person to be anorexic, though i do believe them to have an eating disorder of some kind. i could go into details about that person but they aren’t really worth my time. the point of mentioning them is to say, even relatively innocuous things like the mentioning of counting calories, and other habits, influenced my diet.
i find nowadays that my interest in developing that habit ebbs and flows. i already have one gross addiction that haunts me, i really shouldn’t be trying to add onto that list. even so the thought of losing weight seems like it would feel so good, and then i think of all the food i like to eat… for better or for worse, my willpower is extremely low.