A revelation about food
Jan. 29th, 2021 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sadgrlI can call myself lazy and without willpower for my eating habits. It might even be true. But it’s not the whole truth.
I, like everyone, have a lot of murky, complex and difficult-to-solve problems in my life which cause me mental/emotional/physical turmoil. I’m going to refer to this turmoil as “stress”.
All stress has the potential to be managed, but some stress can be resolved. Once stress is resolved, it’s usually downgraded to “maintenance” mode.
Resolving stress usually requires some combination of the following: willpower, dedication and a lot of time.
The average human has a common toolkit for coping with stress. Imagine a spectrum from healthy to unhealthy, going from yoga to hard drugs or murder. Every person has a different relationship to each of these coping mechanisms. Some of them help a lot more than others. Food falls somewhere in this spectrum. You can take a wild guess how much this one ‘helps’ me :)
Food, tho. Okay, just hear me out. In some cases it’s not so much about the act of eating and consuming the food itself. It’s about imagining the palpable relief you’re going to feel when you first get the food.
It’s also very much about how “wanting the food” is your desire – a pretty modest one compared to all of your others, and how “acquiring the food” is so infinitesimally easy compared to how much of a struggle everything else seems to be. It costs money, but so does my car payment? What is a $2 doughnut compared to a $15k loan I get to see inch down month after month? When you weigh a doughnut against drugs and alcohol that may impact your health (or just are hella expensive…) the decision becomes simple.
This is my everyday struggle. Do I think grabbing a doughnut in the morning is going to make me feel better about the soul-crushing state of the world? I mean, in the moment… absolutely. Because at least I’ll have that goddamn doughnut.
I, like everyone, have a lot of murky, complex and difficult-to-solve problems in my life which cause me mental/emotional/physical turmoil. I’m going to refer to this turmoil as “stress”.
All stress has the potential to be managed, but some stress can be resolved. Once stress is resolved, it’s usually downgraded to “maintenance” mode.
Resolving stress usually requires some combination of the following: willpower, dedication and a lot of time.
The average human has a common toolkit for coping with stress. Imagine a spectrum from healthy to unhealthy, going from yoga to hard drugs or murder. Every person has a different relationship to each of these coping mechanisms. Some of them help a lot more than others. Food falls somewhere in this spectrum. You can take a wild guess how much this one ‘helps’ me :)
Food, tho. Okay, just hear me out. In some cases it’s not so much about the act of eating and consuming the food itself. It’s about imagining the palpable relief you’re going to feel when you first get the food.
It’s also very much about how “wanting the food” is your desire – a pretty modest one compared to all of your others, and how “acquiring the food” is so infinitesimally easy compared to how much of a struggle everything else seems to be. It costs money, but so does my car payment? What is a $2 doughnut compared to a $15k loan I get to see inch down month after month? When you weigh a doughnut against drugs and alcohol that may impact your health (or just are hella expensive…) the decision becomes simple.
This is my everyday struggle. Do I think grabbing a doughnut in the morning is going to make me feel better about the soul-crushing state of the world? I mean, in the moment… absolutely. Because at least I’ll have that goddamn doughnut.
