I thought this could be an interesting exercise/discussion for all of us. I’m very curious to hear what you all have to say.
I’m wondering, for those of you who feel you have lacked self-discipline in the past and/or issues with food: What about your childhood or adult life has led to this? And what sort of self-reflection or conclusions have you come across that has helped you fast?
This is not to pass all blame to parents, but I recently came across a passage somewhere that said people with abusive or neglecting parents often spend all their energy as kids walking on egg shells and catering to their parents’ feelings, so by the time they’re adults, they haven’t learned how to deal with their own emotions and self-soothe with food, drugs, etc. I personally thought that theory was pretty profound.
I live alone with no family in a foreign country, and I definitely have noticed in five days of fasting that I feel the urge to eat when I am bored, lonely or don’t know what to do. It made me realize I used to make an “event” out of eating to fill my day. My mother would also do this— a mealtime was the only time I ever got any semblance of her attention. In other words, as an adult, I used food to self-soothe but also to make sure my day on paper had some sort of “peak.”
I have so much self-discipline when it comes to work or virtually all other habits, even exercise. I have a do-or-die, success-driven or even unhealthy work ethic for most things. But the habit of overeating has eluded me. I still haven’t unpacked what that’s about but just wanted to share.
Anyway, not hoping for this post to be about me. Genuinely curious how all of you have reflected on your relationship with food, any conclusions you’ve drawn, or even any stream-of-consciousness self inquiry.
There was a period in my childhood that my mom didn’t feed us. We had no food in our apartment. She had a drug addiction. We only had free lunch at school. So I tend to overeat now as an adult. I’m working on it.
Food was connected to emotions from very early on for me. On one hand I was an unhappy child, on the other hand my mom was very self-conscious about how much and what we were allowed to eat. So for a good twenty years food was always either “bad” (from my family’s perspective) or “comfort” from my own perspective.To this day I’m an emotional eater, and even though I’ve lost a lot of weight in the past by cutting calories and/or carbs, fasting to me is easier because I basically only have to be disciplined in terms of time, but not necessarily in terms of what I eat (I still need to track my calories, and obviously I should still pay attention to nutrients etc, but only for 4h a day instead of 16).
My mom is a naturally very thin person (think Olive Oil from Popeye). My father is the smallest from a family of people who are morbidly obese with diabetes, hip & knee replacements and the like.
My childhood nickname was Porker because I cleaned my plate and everyone else’s. I loved to eat. I was a chubby kid. But when I was 5 I started dance lessons, and came out to show my mom my first leotard. She reprimanded me because my thighs touched. My dad constantly made negative comments about other people’s body (well she’s too fat to be wearing that). Always made comments about beautiful women (I’ll bet she’s not wearing panties).
I’ve been binging my whole life. I learned how to purge when I was 12. I’m constantly afraid of people commenting on my body. I’m embarrassed that I’ve gained weight. I hate eating with friends because I think they’re judging what I’m eating if it’s anything other than a salad.
I don’t have a great relationship with food. I’m trying to fast and have done great the whole month of august, but have only lost about 3-4 pounds. I’m trying to be patient and forgiving of myself but those childhood insecurities are so loud.
I did not come from a home without food security, but my heart goes out to all of the responders that did. That sounds like a really tough thing for a kid to go through.
I was a latchkey kid and had a mom that worked late. There were times I could make a meal for myself, but I would wait until my mom was home instead. I’ve noticed I do this now with my partner and not in a “oh, I’ll wait for you, no biggie” kind of way, but I just…can’t. The eating window helps stick to a schedule without this lost feeling of needing someone to come home to me before I can eat. I just eat at 4, alone or not. Idk it’s weird, I still feel uncomfortable eating alone.
My therapist suggested that maybe making a meal for myself as a kid would in some way be admitting that no one was there for me, to make me a meal, and I can see it.
I think it was a mixture of things. Number one, my family equates overfeeding with love — the family chihuahua had 3 heart attacks by the time of her death. By the age of 8 or 9 I could polish off an entire box of Kraft Mac and cheese to myself. I think my country (the US) has this insidious market of “kid food” which is food that is branded to be associated with kids and it’s usually gummies and sugary cereal and Mac and cheese and chicken nuggets and yada yada yada, and my family totally bought into that marketing so that’s all they fed me. My mom was also a single mom and went through a period of extreme poverty so we were sparsely getting things from the food bank and I learned to overeat because I didn’t know when my next meal would come, plus people tend to donate unhealthy things to food banks. Then of course I developed severe depression as a teenager because I was already very overweight before even entering my teens (which is the worst time to be overweight to be honest — kids are f**king mean) so my relationship with food just got worse and worse. I’m going to be 27 at the end of the month and I’m just so done with my WHOLE LIFE being dictated by the limitations of my body. My whole family is fat. My grandma is the only one who isn’t because after reaching 300lbs and being told by a doctor that she pushed herself into type 2 diabetes, she became militantly restrictive and is now like 150 and has been for pretty much my whole adult life. She is probably the only reason that I have a taste for healthy food, mixed with my compulsion for processed junk. She has always been terrified of my weight issue because of what happened to her, so over the years she’s tried really hard to “fix” my relationship with food and I’ve usually shoved her away for being overbearing. Only now as I’m approaching 30 do I realize that this whole time, she’s been trying to save my life.
No major traumatic past here; if there was trauma, it was probably of the sort that flies under the radar while slowly accumulating over the years.
My main issue is that I’ve either innately or at least since early childhood have always been a sucker for dopamine. By default, day in and out, my mood on a scale of -10 to 10 fluctuates in the -1 to 1 range. In the rare event I should come across something that triggers any significant response, even negative, chances are I’ll rapidly form some degree of behavioral addiction on it.
Food for me – not specifically ultra-palatable stuff, it just as well applies to “healthy” snacks, think a carrot – has for a long time stood as an overrelied upon provider of positive emotion; occasionally one in the role of a coping strategy but predominantly one allowing me to merely get some enjoyment out of life (think +2 or +3 on said scale). I never paid much attention on the dependence until several health-related alarm bells started going off over extended periods of time (my mind-body connection is frail to say the least). Then one morning I simply decided that whatever dopamine food was delivering was not worth the deterioration of my physical health anymore.
And, cliché as it may sound, everything just clicked after that. I adopted IF/OMAD as a convenient black and white boundary around food, cleaned up my diet bit by bit, progressively decoupled other enjoyable activities from food; a few months later food-induced affective impact had reverted to the familiar +/- 1 range of pretty much indifference. Eat the world’s greatest culinary invention in front of me and I won’t care; cut me a piece and I’ll eat it if within my window without much care either. I guess I did attain moderation after all – there’s just no “responsible enjoyment” facet in it.
“But, but – that’s disordered, you are supposed to enjoy food!” Nah, screw “you” and your definition of “disordered” – I’d much rather be able to breathe and walk effortlessly into my 40s even if it means one fewer cookie and one fewer happy memory which my dumb brain would fail to hold onto for long anyway. :)
My mother was a Type 1 diabetic and my dad struggled with weight gain and an unhealthy relationship to food for most of my childhood. Since there was a lot of food restriction in the household I would binge on “forbidden” food whenever I was out of the house. I was a chubby preteen and then learned to manage my weight through exercise through college, mostly by dancing, running, etc. but still had a very unhealthy relationship with food. This mostly worked through my early 30s when a stressful job, undiagnosed ADHD, and a bad relationship formed a toxic storm that manifested as continuous weight gain, with fallout from the end of the relationship and continued work stress got me to a breaking point, and here I am.
My foster parents used to deprive me of food for extended periods and made me eat food with mold on it, would eat in front of me without feeding me, and make me throw icecream in the trash and laugh that I couldn’t have any. I was also a homeless runaway and also homeless after aging out of the system and lacked regular access to food then too. I would panic whenever I was hungry, especially in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep unless I ate something. IF was consequently very difficult at first, but learning to stick with the feeling of hunger and reassure myself that I have access to food and this is my choice has been psychologically beneficial. I don’t get as hungry during fasting periods anymore as my body adapted.
I was always home alone as a kid. My mum being a single mother, working full time, and a professional body builder not only was away all day but also didnt really pay attention to was I was feeding myself with when she wasnt home. She is a cruel person with no feelings but anger, and certainly no love for her son.I always got fat shamed ever since I went into puberty. My relationship with food and eating and my body is very f-ed up because of this.All my knowledge of food (and what is “good“ or “bad“ food) is the few years I have since I am an adult and moved out. I cant really cook, but I‘m trying my best.Severe depression and recovering from being suicidal for 2 years has been tough and probably the number one reason why restricting my diet is a hard thing for me.Since I got meds, life is finally better. More colourful. And I enjoy feeding myself for the first time again. So I rather enjoy nice food some days instead of doing strict fasting.
My parents divorced when I was a junior in high school. My mom worked evenings and tried going back to school. I was home alone a lot. I had to scrape up dinner for myself several nights a week. I remember selling peanut butter cups for school. They were packs of 6 and I’d eat 3-4 of them. I’d down a bag of Hershey kisses watching tv by myself. I ate a lot of pickles. Just stuff I could grab. I didn’t cook. Not really certain what she thought I was eating for dinner. At school I would eat a huge cookie instead of lunch. In my 20’s I tried to eat as little as possible. Then I began gaining the rest of my life lol
Mother used to calorie count and did the Fibre and Fat free diet in 80s/90s. She refused to cook anything in oil (fat was the enemy in 1980s) and food was quite dull. I was always a tall and well built child while she was short and bird like so I stood out. Didn’t want to stand out so became obsessed with taking up less space. Didn’t always succeed!
I believe the binging I’ve struggled with my whole life is due to:
I turn to food when dealing with emotions I can’t handle (good or bad). We rarely got treats as kids so I have an incredibly difficult time controlling myself with certain foods. ADF has made a huge difference in binging and food obsession, to where I almost think I might be able to have a normal relationship with food.
Food scarcity, “clean your plate” rule, diet culture … it’s hard to fast sometimes. In fact, I broke a fast early once because a food I thawed wasn’t going to keep long enough to wait till my planned end, and there was too much for my family to consume it all without leaving a portion to go to waste. I just keep my hands busy when my kids leave food on their plates (so I don’t eat it) and I remind myself often why I’m doing this.