Food For Thought - Prologue
/Food Diary - A prologue
About the nutritionist and the housekeeper
“So, we’re going to try and keep a food diary.” She jotted something down on paper. By “we” she meant me. I was going to keep a food diary. The task seemed daunting and highly judgmental. I didn’t want to do it. She looked up at me. Toward me. I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing me.
She said, “Write down everything that you eat this week, and we will look at it next week when we meet again.”
“So you mean, every time I eat something, you want me to write it down?” I heard myself say this, knowing that I must’ve sounded absolutely ridiculous.
She nodded.
My counselor referred me to a nutritionist after deciding that I needed to speak to someone else about my restrictive eating habits.
“I need to make sure that your health is in order before we can move forward with your trauma work” she explained.
I understood, however, the nutritionist didn’t fully grasp that it wasn’t even about the food. It was never about the food. Her calorie counting and weight-gain-goal approach to my disordered eating was not going to help me at all. I wasn’t sure what to tell her, she seemed like she had good intentions.
I had learned at this stage in my life that good intentions, no matter how good, weren’t always enough. I needed someone that truly understood what I was going through, and she was not that person. As a matter of fact, I wanted to tell her that keeping a food diary was making me want to restrict more. I wanted to tell her that I was going to either come back with a blank diary, or worse, a forged diary. I was preparing to lie and I hadn’t even left the office yet.
“Let’s get on the scale” she said.
I didn’t want to, but I knew that this ritual meant that the office visit would soon be over. I walked over to the scale, removed my shoes, and stepped onto the platform, turning my back to the weights. I heard the soft clanging of the metal bars behind me, and a frustrated sigh escaped from the nutritionist.
She said, “You weigh less than last week. I don’t understand.”
I hopped off the scale and slipped on my shoes. I already knew that. I had gotten in the habit of weighing myself at home, something I never did before I started seeing her. I didn’t even like weighing myself, however, I felt the need to please this woman that I barely knew.
This whole situation kind of reminds me of the time I hired a housekeeper because my house was so out of control. I couldn’t keep up. But, before she came, I would tidy up so that she wouldn’t have to see the real issue. I would toss clutter in drawers, making sure there were no visible signs of what may be perceived as laziness. The shame of feeling like I was totally capable of cleaning my home, but was neglecting to do so, was so overwhelming that I would actually clean my house before the housekeeper would arrive. It was my attempt to fix what I had messed up, before anyone found out how messy I really was. How messy my life was. I was hiding.
I guess weighing myself was my way of “tidying up” before my appointment. I would even try to cram in a few extra calories to see if I could “fix” my weight before I had to see the nutritionist. I knew that these appointments were a waste of time for both of us. I was still restricting between visits, which meant I wasn’t meeting her weight goals. I would binge for a few days prior to the appointment in an attempt to make weight.
Tidy up.
This song and dance went on for months; me trying to please her; and her, trying to figure out where she had gone wrong. The problem was that we weren’t addressing the underlying issue. Like my messy house, I didn’t know how to maintain between visits. I would fall right back into my sloppy habits whenever I wasn’t being watched. Clutter would gather, and I would “binge clean” in order to hide my inability to keep up. Eventually, I stopped calling the housekeeper to come because I felt like I was wasting her time and my money. I knew that it wasn’t about the clutter, or even my cleaning habits for that matter. It was something else altogether. And until I got that under control, nothing would ever change.
Restricting. Clutter. Tidying up. Binging. Hiding.
I returned to the nutritionist’s office the following week with my food diary. It was difficult, but I managed to write down what I ate for an entire week. She flipped through the pages, frowning the whole time.
She said, “I like some of your choices.”
I heard, “You need to make better choices.”
She suggested we give it another week and motioned over to the scale. This went on for about a month or so. I stopped bringing the diary. I had fallen back into restricting and most of the pages were blank anyway. I didn’t want to show her an empty diary. The scale was telling enough. I realized that no matter how much I tried to “tidy up” and “binge clean”, I was never going to get better if we didn’t fix the underlying reason for my mess. We had to clear the clutter. Eventually I stopped seeing the nutritionist.
At the next visit with my counselor, she asked me how my visits with the nutritionist were going.
“I quit going.” I told her.
“Okay” she said. She didn’t say anything else, just waited for me to continue.
“It’s not about the food.” I stated.
“Okay” she said.
