fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-04-16 02:47 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-04-16 02:47 pm
photosynthesis: so appealing right now
I hate hunger, it is the worst and I can't deal with it. And there's not even anything keeping me from eating except my own brain, because I have developed such massive ridiculous food issues over the last few years--not anorexic/restrictive-type thinking, but pretty disordered in its own weird way.
Making and/or getting food is SO HARD, and my appetite has gotten weirdly warped to the point where thinking about eating something I don't normally find gross or unappealing but do not, at the moment, actively WANT actually grosses me out. I can't deal with the idea of putting stuff in my mouth and chewing, a lot of the time, and I tend to just ignore hunger until it gets abruptly, compellingly awful. This usually takes less than two hours from the first moment of "I kind of want to eat" to "I am so hungry that it's starting to make me anxious and twitchy." (It's only about 4-6 hours total, depending, from the end of one meal to the anxious-twitchy stage, unless I fall asleep.)
So I often ignore that, and it seems to subside, and then a couple hours later TOTAL FUCKING FREAKOUT. Which creates its own anxiety spiral, because of the abovementioned SO HARD at the best of times, and then I'm sitting there trying to think of and choose a food option that won't take too long and I can stand--when I hit the starving-panic stage, contrary to all evolutionary sense, that feeling of "if I put something in my mouth that I'm not actively craving, I will throw up forever" gets stronger. And it takes so long, and I panic over how the longer I take to decide, the longer it'll take to get the food into me. And if the only option is to go out for something, there's getting dressed and maybe having to spend time at the restaurant to worry about(to say nothing of whether I've showered in the last four days, because depression is the grossest of diseases). And I have to plan the timing and quantity taking into account when I'll be out of the house, when things will be closed, when the next externally-supplied meal will be if I'm not alone in the house that week--like, if I'm going to be at school for hours and hours, I need to eat a BIG meal right before I go, so I need to be able to do that, or if there's going to be dinner in three hours with actual healthy balanced food I don't want to cram myself full of crap now, or if I have school tomorrow then I HAVE to have something available for breakfast since there won't be time to go out (and for reasons that should be rapidly becoming clear, I can't just not eat before leaving even if the alternative is missing class) so I can't eat that thing now, and so on and on and on.
So all of that, plus if I have anything to be doing that day, which I usually do, I get anxious over wasting time and taking too long--and of course once the bad hunger hits, my brain drops down to like 15% functioning, and most of that 15% is dedicated to jacking up the anxiety and panic spirals and self-hate spirals and I KNOW that's happening, I know that I'm going to get more and more irrational and low-functioning with every passing second I don't feed myself. And the irrational "I can't eat THAT" feeling gets worse if there even is anything in the house that doesn't require too much assembly/cooking, and it's just a gigantic, awful mess that generally ends one of two ways:
1. Giving up and going to bed and crying and hopefully falling asleep for a few hours, at which point I either feel a little calmer(no idea how that works biologically), or my mom has cooked/acquired dinner, or occasionally I feel even worse and somehow drag myself downstairs for a spoonful of peanut butter, or
2. Eating whatever I can get ahold of fastest that least triggers the "why do I have to put THINGS in my MOUTH" feeling, which usually means going out and getting something dreadful and fast, or ordering a pizza, or microwaving some hot pockets or something along those lines. And then, guilt!
This whole spiral can also be triggered when I'm away from home and definitely going to a restaurant and they all definitely appeal to me, but there are a lot of them at varying distances that will be varying--usually unknown or only vaguely predictable--levels of busy, and I only start thinking about where to go when I'm starting to get hungry, and I also have to think about price and the intense, all-consuming emotional mandate I feel not to keep going back to places I've already been or I will be WASTING THIS PRECIOUS OPPORTUNITY FOREVER, and the hunger gets steadily worse and the anxiety along with it, and...so forth. I have spent several evenings in NYC crying over my "places to go" notes for just this reason.
So ANYWAY, that's been happening for like an hour now, I should probably put on real pants and go get that sandwich I desperately don't want.
Making and/or getting food is SO HARD, and my appetite has gotten weirdly warped to the point where thinking about eating something I don't normally find gross or unappealing but do not, at the moment, actively WANT actually grosses me out. I can't deal with the idea of putting stuff in my mouth and chewing, a lot of the time, and I tend to just ignore hunger until it gets abruptly, compellingly awful. This usually takes less than two hours from the first moment of "I kind of want to eat" to "I am so hungry that it's starting to make me anxious and twitchy." (It's only about 4-6 hours total, depending, from the end of one meal to the anxious-twitchy stage, unless I fall asleep.)
So I often ignore that, and it seems to subside, and then a couple hours later TOTAL FUCKING FREAKOUT. Which creates its own anxiety spiral, because of the abovementioned SO HARD at the best of times, and then I'm sitting there trying to think of and choose a food option that won't take too long and I can stand--when I hit the starving-panic stage, contrary to all evolutionary sense, that feeling of "if I put something in my mouth that I'm not actively craving, I will throw up forever" gets stronger. And it takes so long, and I panic over how the longer I take to decide, the longer it'll take to get the food into me. And if the only option is to go out for something, there's getting dressed and maybe having to spend time at the restaurant to worry about(to say nothing of whether I've showered in the last four days, because depression is the grossest of diseases). And I have to plan the timing and quantity taking into account when I'll be out of the house, when things will be closed, when the next externally-supplied meal will be if I'm not alone in the house that week--like, if I'm going to be at school for hours and hours, I need to eat a BIG meal right before I go, so I need to be able to do that, or if there's going to be dinner in three hours with actual healthy balanced food I don't want to cram myself full of crap now, or if I have school tomorrow then I HAVE to have something available for breakfast since there won't be time to go out (and for reasons that should be rapidly becoming clear, I can't just not eat before leaving even if the alternative is missing class) so I can't eat that thing now, and so on and on and on.
So all of that, plus if I have anything to be doing that day, which I usually do, I get anxious over wasting time and taking too long--and of course once the bad hunger hits, my brain drops down to like 15% functioning, and most of that 15% is dedicated to jacking up the anxiety and panic spirals and self-hate spirals and I KNOW that's happening, I know that I'm going to get more and more irrational and low-functioning with every passing second I don't feed myself. And the irrational "I can't eat THAT" feeling gets worse if there even is anything in the house that doesn't require too much assembly/cooking, and it's just a gigantic, awful mess that generally ends one of two ways:
1. Giving up and going to bed and crying and hopefully falling asleep for a few hours, at which point I either feel a little calmer(no idea how that works biologically), or my mom has cooked/acquired dinner, or occasionally I feel even worse and somehow drag myself downstairs for a spoonful of peanut butter, or
2. Eating whatever I can get ahold of fastest that least triggers the "why do I have to put THINGS in my MOUTH" feeling, which usually means going out and getting something dreadful and fast, or ordering a pizza, or microwaving some hot pockets or something along those lines. And then, guilt!
This whole spiral can also be triggered when I'm away from home and definitely going to a restaurant and they all definitely appeal to me, but there are a lot of them at varying distances that will be varying--usually unknown or only vaguely predictable--levels of busy, and I only start thinking about where to go when I'm starting to get hungry, and I also have to think about price and the intense, all-consuming emotional mandate I feel not to keep going back to places I've already been or I will be WASTING THIS PRECIOUS OPPORTUNITY FOREVER, and the hunger gets steadily worse and the anxiety along with it, and...so forth. I have spent several evenings in NYC crying over my "places to go" notes for just this reason.
So ANYWAY, that's been happening for like an hour now, I should probably put on real pants and go get that sandwich I desperately don't want.
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(I still have the showering issue though...depression is gross.)
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Made me feel less of an outlier!
Is there cereal or canned soup or frozen meals you like? I have about six fixed things I stock up on that I can eat like that, or Milo with milk. And people will give you grief about eating the same food over and over, I ended up yelling about it to get a compromise where they cook new stuff and I will try a bite and then go back to my staples. I would have the same meal for six months easily - Oliver sacks, the neurologist does this too. You are weird, but there are lots of us out there. It can get manageable.
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Although I was interested to see in that letter (haven't looked at the survey yet) that the guy complained about texture--that's my number one food issue. Every single thing I hate to eat is hateful because the texture bothers me; I almost never hate flavors. I wonder if my mouth might just be incredibly oversensitive, because I've always had a lot more trouble putting things in it (not like that, mostly) than other people seem to. I can't eat crusty bread because it hurts, I can't use toothpaste that foams and even so I still gag every time, etc.
I try to keep stocked on fast stuff I like, but making it to the store is tough most of the time, and we don't have much freezer or fridge space to keep large quantities around of anything besides pantry goods. Also, I actually don't like eating the same thing over and over for weeks--or rather, I do, but then after a few weeks I need to take a long break from it. I really don't know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 75% psychological rather than physiological/genetic.
...I don't know why I just wrote a dissertation on this, apparently I just really wanted to talk about my food problems?
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