Apple, meet Tree.
My mom and I eat lunch together most days because we work in adjoining buildings and we’re both die-hard brown-baggers. Every day, there’s cookie exchange: I bring two Chips Ahoy! and she brings two Fig Newtons (they’re fruit and cake!) and we swap. That way, we get both chocolate and figgy goodness.
About once a week, we splurge and get a cookie from the snack bar instead; they bake these double-chocolate cookies fresh every day, and while we’ve agreed they make an excellent treat, we don’t have them every day because that would make them feel less…special. Yeah, we’re dorks.
Anyway, on Tuesday this week, she said she thought it was a double-chocolate cookie day. I just wasn’t feeling it; I really wanted the Fig Newton, so I told her she should go ahead and have the special cookie, but I was gonna go with the Newton. She became…well, pouty, and said if I wasn’t going to have the cookie, then she didn’t need it either.
And I just thought, “This is where it comes from.” No wonder I’m weird about food. It’s a lesson I learned at my mother’s knee.
I was telling my husband about this little exchange, about her inability to give herself permission to eat what she wanted without me participating, and he gave me this raised eyebrow kind of look. He said, “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”
I may have punched him. Or I may not have. But he’s right; that’s been me for pretty much our entire relationship.
But it’s not me anymore. And I said that to my husband and he agreed that these days, I’m having what I want whether he joins me or not. I want an apple fritter for breakfast and he’s just going to have eggs and toast? Hey, I’m worth a trip to the bakery for the fritter, and fritter-eating is not a team sport anyway, so I can do it alone. He wants pizza and I want a bowl of cereal, then I wish him and his pizza well, but I’m having my frosted mini-wheats, thank you very much.
This most basic form of self-care, the ability to choose something and eat it regardless of what others may or may not be eating, is so hard. It’s hard for my 58-year-old mother and it’s hard for me here at 30 and I know it’s hard for scads of other women, too.
Let’s just stop already. Eat what you want.
We don’t need anyone’s permission to take care of ourselves.
This gets really hard for me when I am actually in the presence of my mother. In fact, I think the closest my boyfriend’s ever gotten to dumping me was when we were all at the beach and I wanted ice cream but nobody else did, so I wouldn’t eat it, and I fought pretty hard to be allowed to NOT get ice cream. In that case it’s not totally crazy — someone really will judge me for it. At the time I just hadn’t figured out that the judgment is as disordered as the refusal.
I am eating Frosted Mini Wheats as we speak! MMMMM….vanilla creme…..mmmmmm.
Good for you for breaking the martyr tradition – I’m fighting like hell these days to do just that! You rock.
One of the big things I’m trying to get through to myself (besides food is not a moral issue) is that I don’t need anyone else to validate if I’m hungry or what I want to eat. But there’s so many messages that say it’s not a valid choice to be hungry seven or eight times a day or that anything less than plain lettuce and skinless grilled chicken is an unacceptable choice, that sometimes it’s hard to counterract that entirely on my own.
I’m getting better, but I think where it gets hard is where the line lies between doing what I want for me versus letting my desire to not be controlled by eating leading to yet more control. I think your story absolutely falls into the latter category. But sometimes I’m hungry and the boy is not quite done with work and we were planning on going out, or cooking together. As much as I am trying to eat when hungry and not let anything get me down, sometimes it’s just nicer to suck it up a bit until I can share dinner with someone else. I don’t want to demand sushi when everyone else wants burgers because while that’s going for what I really want, it’s also letting food be more important than friends.
That’s really only tangential to what you said. I definitely agree that this mentality of only being able to eat a certain way (whether it’s “diet” food or “treat” food, the behavior is the same in a lot of ways) is really messed up and has way too much emotion bound up in it.
You know, my mother does the same thing! We work in the same building and sometimes we go out to lunch or to the little snack shop for a treat. However, sometimes if I am not in the mood and she wants to go, she gets pouty about it. I watch her diet intermittently these days when she’s feeling particularly bad about herself, which is something I’ve done my whole life. I remember watching her take Dexatrim when I was six or seven and listening to her talk about her “fat” thighs. (She was not fat then.)
I finally decided to stop dieting after my own insanity regarding perceptions of my weight and worthiness, and realizing that watching my mom as a young child had a good amount to do with it. I look at the women in my family, and our body shapes, and finally feel as though I can be comfortable in my own skin. After all, it’s not just my skin – it’s my heritage. To me, that’s something to be proud of.
fritter-eating is not a team sport anyway
Heh.
I’ve talked about this before (hopefully not here), but I used to have a friend I rarely see anymore, in part because I just can’t deal with her body/food issues. (And she is, of course, tiny.) She would ALWAYS try to get me to eat dessert with her when we went out for dinner, and about 9 times out of 10, I’d say, “No thanks, I’m full, you go ahead.” (The only reason I pass on dessert is that I’m more into savory stuff than sweet stuff, so I usually do fill up on the meal, ’cause I’m not terribly motivated to “save room for dessert.”)
And yes, she would get POUTY every time — to the point where it was as if she blamed me for depriving her of the dessert she really wanted, the dessert she’d saved room for, the dessert that, to her, was the whole point of going out for dinner. Didn’t matter how many times I said, “Order dessert! If you want it, have it! If you can’t finish it yourself, you are allowed to throw away part of it! I am not skipping dessert to be ‘good’! I’m skipping it because I ALREADY FILLED UP ON STUFF I LIKE BETTER.”
But she just couldn’t do it without an accomplice.
And for my money, she also couldn’t bring herself to order it when even the FAT chick wasn’t ordering dessert — despite the fact that the fat chick had eaten twice as much dinner as she had, because the fat chick never wanted dessert in the first place.
Sigh.
I love this title, “Apple, meet Tree.” At first I thought it was going to be about your fall adventures and had mental images of you accidentally biking into a tree with a snack in your backpack or something… anyway, I love your blog and think that you are incredibly brave.
Now, as for mothers. Always interesting to observe our interactions with them and food. My mom came to stay with me on vacation a while back, and I was practicing guilt-free eating. In other words, if I felt like something, I got it, and ate it, and tried hard not to be influenced by the fact that my mother was watching my every move. The funny thing is that she said she didn’t feel like certain things (dessert type things), so I believed her and just bought some for myself. And then she became (very mildly) pouty because she wanted some too and I hadn’t gotten her any!
I told her that I was just trying to respect her wishes, so we had a laugh, and she stopped saying she didn’t feel like stuff she did want, and I started buying shares for everyone. But it was pretty funny. These days I make a conscious decision to act on what people tell me, not what I think they are secretly thinking (even if I’m right). I think it’s healthiest all around.
You mean I’m not the only finicky one about that?!
My husband does this to me. I’m perfectly fine with not eating a snack some evenings, and he usually wants one every evening. He gets upset if I won’t eat with him, even when I tell him I’m not hungry, I don’t want it, go ahead and have your snack without me. I don’t know where he got the idea that he can’t eat alone, unless it was from 20 years in the Navy and having set times to eat with all the other sailors and not a lot of time for snacking when you’re on a ship (not sure if that’s true or not, tho, never been a sailor). I’m just getting into the intuitive eating, I guess I’m going to have educate him on it while I’m learning about it too.
For what it’s worth, the adage in the military is “he who eats alone, dies alone”. so that might come from there.
but i do this. so thank you for pointing out that i do it.
It’s so true.
The turning point for me came when I was pregnant and felt that my condition allowed me to do whatever the hell I wanted. We went for breakfast at a Denny’s or Shari’s type place, and I ordered boysenberry pie and mashed potatoes and gravy. While everyone else, of course, had the regular eggs and bacon fare. I tell you, I was giddy. And here’s the really amazing thing — nothing bad happened. It gave me courage to just keep on doing it. Now I don’t even think twice about it anymore.
It’s a very good thing.
I think I’ve done this before – and I think DH has done this to me, before, as well.