New Years and a New Sense of Being Anti-Diet

It’s been a long, long lazy first day of the year - mostly because, well, I’ve really been needing to have the time to kick back and relax. Now, here it is a little after 8 and pretty much all I’ve managed to do today is to watch the Twilight Zone marathon on the SciFi Channel.

I tend to gravitate to it for a number of reasons. My fascination with the show which I’ve had forever - even back when I couldn’t understand it and was often frightened by it - is the primary reason, of course. The second reason is the same one that always makes me dread a New Year: dieting commercials.

It used to be, when I was actively anorectic, that I would watch all of those commercials; now I choose the SciFi channel because, well, because it airs fewer of them.

I say only two ads for fitness tools - one boasting that it will help bulk you up fast and the other featuring a handful of women talking about how much they love their abs (one of them giggling that her husband can’t keep his hands off of her). I’ve seen a number of ads for healthy eating, a number of weight loss products, and a few commercials about products designed by food scientists to add active cultures to cheeses and that sort of thing.

Food science is a cool field - don’t get me wrong, I even worked in it for a while - but it sometimes seems to me that, if more people had healthier eating habits we wouldn’t need so many food products designed to address the things we aren’t getting in our diets. Not necessarily being one to always eat a balanced diet - though at one point I worked really hard to get all four food groups in over the course of a week - that feels like a judgmental sort of thing to say, but. . .

Maybe I’m being irrational (it wouldn’t be the first time, I’m sure); but one of the things that I’ve realized while I’ve been in recovery from my disordered eating is that there’s a balance that’s essential. There’s a need to not categorize foods as bad or good, but a need to consider that it’s a good idea to take in more of the healthy than the unhealthy.

I’ve been terribly, terribly stressed out about cash lately - it happens to pretty much everyone from time to time really - and, per usual, that kinda brings me to the awkward spot of “maybe I should buy different foods,” or “maybe I should buy less food,” but for some reason yesterday when we made the trip to the grocery store I spent more money than usual on produce, lean meats (because, try as I might, vegetarian meals have never given my body the protein that it needs to function at its best) and whole grains.

It’s a little bit strange to me that that feels so indulgent. It’s odd to me that something in my thoughts still trails into “I don’t deserve. . .” and the blank is often filled in with “to be healthy.”

It’s probably that reason why sometimes it’s tough to focus on getting the right amount of exercise - a lot of times I skip it because I’m afraid of taking it too far. A quick bike ride that I’ve alloted half an hour for often gets me out for nearly two hours. A run in the woods in the park up the street from where I live often leaves me running laps on the trails; rather than one 3 mile loop, I take two, sometimes three, and don’t get back home until I’m exhausted.

The funny part is that these weren’t the forms of exercise that I spent too much time on when I was ill. . . So why does it flip me out so much?