My Relationship With Food

I have spent an embarrassing amount of my short time on this planet thinking about food, and I’m done letting it have that much real estate! It just took me about a decade to get there.

I recently came across a journal entry my mom kept from when I was six years old. I came home from school and told her my thighs were too big. Six years old, how heartbreaking!!

I grew up in a family with a healthy relationship to food, it wasn’t something we talked about, in a good way. I ate whatever I wanted, danced constantly, and needed the fuel, but my digestion had been a mess since I was twelve, and by the time I got to college, I finally started looking for answers. After years of tests and doctor’s appointments, I got a diagnosis: sucrose intolerance. A real, legitimate thing, I couldn’t properly digest sugar.

The solution seemed simple enough. Cut out sugar, or maybe just cut out carbs entirely while I was at it, since keto was having its moment and I wanted to be thorough. I was always someone who liked to do things all the way (achieve, optimize, be “good”). So I labeled things accordingly as a Type A person does. Protein: good, fat: good, carbs: bad, sugar: bad. Even carrots were avoided during this period, too many carbs apparently!

What followed was about 1.5 years that I don’t talk about much. I was deep in stevia-sweetened everything, peanut butter by the spoonful, enormous salads, not a carb in sight. It was all I thought about, if I slipped and ate something “bad,” I’d spend the entire next day punishing myself for it. COVID handed me even more time and mental space to spiral. I missed dinners, connection, spontaneity, joy. I was so mean to myself, and I didn’t even look or feel any better.

The real kicker was that my actual diagnosis, the sucrose intolerance, had become a side character in a story that was no longer about my gut health at all.