Making Food the Enemy : Our Bodies, Our Food, Ourselves.
- AuntieWicked
- Aug 27, 2010
- 9 min read
Making Food the Enemy:
An Investigation An Investigation
by Aunties Wicked and Lumi
..This blog has taken about a month to write. When I told Wicked I was frozen in terror and mixed up hateful and confused emotions about this article she was so kind as to have a google wave with me about it…I learned something…
Sometimes, you need a friend to face something that used to be and still could be such a big scary huge enemy...So without further adieu here is our long winding and searching conversation about food and eating and everything! Auntie Wicked: What and where is the line between self-discipline and self-abuse? What is eating healthy? What are the different body types? Genetics? Why don’t my doctors seem to account for this when even THEY are calling me fat?Auntie illumi: and Why does eating – automatically conjure up ideas about eating DISORDERS? Why has something that could be so simple become a major mental preoccupation of our young adult lives?Auntie Wicked: Eating is funny stuff isn’t? And like, Funny painful like watching Youtube video’s of ppl falling down the stairs. Some have a decent relationship with eating, but I think most of us have perpetual issues with it – so how to do it right? How should I not over do? Most women get left with the wrong impression… thatUNDEREATING is the way they should go, which for the most part, is wrong wrong,
Auntie Illumination: And our we clear on what our goal is? And for whom or what we are trying to achieve? prove? Most women I know are like curvy and roundish…what is all this? Some feminism gone awry? Are we trying to prove our equality to men by looking like them? is it the old everything that is deemed feminine is inferior? is it part of our absolute death/health failure paranoia? Is it part of exerting CONTROL in a world where most of us cannot just CHOOSE to change most things about our life? Is it a way to STAY relevant and ward off the prejudiced ideas about AGING WOMEN? Is it lack of knowledge about our own bodies and nutrition? As with all things concerning humans and especially women – we are all different and each women is going to have a different prevailing reason for their eating issue(s) but if we look closely there may be some larger themes we all have in common.
For some people bad eating habits started as children – others bad self image as a teen triggered a whole new complicated relationship with food – Wicked and I both stumbled on that road.
Wicked:
And although we speak of this as a ‘teenage’ issue, it’s really something that continued to be an issue, and peaked in my early 20’s, where I had my
worst relationship with food
and taking care of myself. Perhaps because of my personality, I seemed to think that exercise all had to be over done, and diets had to be under 900 calories a day. This is all ballz ladies and gentleman…
My bad relationship with food
left me with no Gal-Bladder, and a life full of health issues that I have to cope with as a result of my passionate pursuit to try and be something I’m not.
This is by NO means an encouragement to sit on your ass and do nothing if you feel there is a needed transformation for your body…
Lumi: But that’s just it – isn’t it? We have to do that new age actually old age thing and have sit-down/meditate/whatever you want to call it with ourselves about our bodies. We have to try and be OBJECTIVE about the effect of food on our bodies and whether we are pleased with the results. Lumi too has struggled through the twenties with not so much anorexia anymore but various high protein low carb – concoctions and like Wicked has suffered some not so great consequences of the extreme diet yo-yo – things like thin teeth, quick exhaustion, and intermittent swelling of my feet and hands. I would love to say that all gets better? and maybe one day it does after you eat sensibly for as long as you eat by way of urban legend and mad science!
How exactly food became Wicked’s enemy:My adolescence was rough. When it hit me, I turned curvy, stocky, overnight from a little girl to a c-cup. Busted out of mom’s bra’s by the time I was 12. She was always lost, what to do with someone who’s so different than you?Interestingly and sadly Lumi’s Food War started over the SAME THING:The mess – oh yes the mess – that was puberty – and a new house a new school – a step dad left behind having lost his ever loving mind…the curves – the boobs – the shaving…The PERCEPTION. It felt Instant really – I went from a stocky d-list girl to people staring-whispering – assuming I was SEXUALThe teasing and name calling and ostracism from their peers became and overwhelming issue for both aunties. That in itself would have been enough but what followed for Wicked was a terrible betrayal of trust in adults:
Wicked: There was a man who married my mother. Who’d spent his life following his libido. He was a womanizer, he diddled and flirted. I swear every time we moved (which was many times in those years) it was because he’d gotten a bit too involved with some local girl. At nine he offered to ‘show me’ how sex was done. By 12 he would call us his ’12 pack of wild women’ and eyeball me inappropriately in front of other males, as though intimating he had sexual possession of my mother and I both. The peak was sometime in my 13th year. He’d decided he wanted to be a masseuse when he grew up, and I had chronic panic attacks at night. Mom would send him in my room to rub my head so I could go to sleep easier.Head rubs became back-rubs. Back-Rubs became body rubs. The next thing I knew he was brushing places by accident that were not his to brush. One night he came in and kneeled by my bed, and said, “Can I kiss your breasts and yoni?” I said no, and he lingered. I told him no, wrapped myself up, and asked him to leave.My bedroom door remained locked in all the remaining years I lived with him.The story is an old one, in the morning he denied anything, claiming my ‘dream lover’ had come in and my hormones where to blame… he’d been fast asleep. Mom wanted to believe him, so she did.
For Lumi:
My grandmother and stepfather both made issue of my weight – that was hard…but the kick down the cliff came when the first boyfriend – became sexually forceful…and emotionally and psychologically strange and abusive. This photographer captured it perfectly… He would pressure me saying he wanted me – he would threaten and cut saying I didn’t want him. Sex and Violence and Food quickly became a knotted same-same to me. It was this boyfriend’s violent strange supposed attraction to me that led me to finally and fully reject this woman body and stick food in my sites as girl enemy number one.
The aftermath of abuse:The aftermath of abuse:
Wicked:
Within a few months I went from a solid 140 pound stocky farm girl to a 190 pound jelly-ball. I wore huge shapeless clothing. It had somehow been my attractiveness that had done it, and I fixed that.
Lumi:
Went from my 135 all the way down to about 100? I was weak and cold all the time. I wore lots of makeup to hide my face and huge ugly clothing or tiny all black ensembles. anything as Wicked said to fix that whole attractiveness thing – because when u have that it seemed – people have the right to hurt you.
And now?
Wicked: It started a struggle that I didn’t clear out of until I was in my very early 30’s… which as some of you know, is quite recently. It took work, and the need to dissociate pleasures from wrongness. Even further, I had to stop using food as a way to torment myself, and change my own mind about how to feel about myself, my shape, and my past.
Lumi’s first conclusion:
Food is a power source. This power can be accepted, rejected, abused, manipulated, or fully embraced. throughout these Aunties lives we have drifted in and out of many of those choices. More recently we have tried on acceptance and maybe even a little embracing of the power and potential non-obsessive or dangerous enjoyment of eating and food itself. During the desperate running around trying to find a way to end this blog other than write four hundred pages I came across ideas I should have assimilated a long time go. Lumi likes to think herself very very original – and she is…as is Wicked as well… but the idea of eating and not eating as a powerful tool or protest has a long history in humanity and literature – even animals at times overeat or choose to forgo food. Fasting for instances has been long associated with closeness to spiritual guides. Yet, even the gods themselves have been said to feast and get really mad when humans feast and do not offer to share! Monsters, weaklings, and witches have insatiable appetites. We learn that self control and discipline around food is necessary – it is a temptation – we need to resist or like the little girl from Pan’s Labryinth risk death by monster! Alternately we learn that not eating is holy – a way to make a point – a way to reject filthy corporal human ways – a way especially to reject the very unlinear lines of the female body.
During these rompings and searchings for a way out of the maze that was this blog I ran across
at Harvard. To think Food, Sex, and gender was the entire topic of the night – lends some no punz intended weight to the idea that eating is no simple bodily function – it is a mind body heart action – it is as one woman said at the symposium – a voice. We need, as a society, of people to actively listen to that voice – and discover what secrets it has about food and body image. This voice is telling a story – a long complicated story that points to a great number of issues we might otherwise deem impossibly old fashioned topics of talk!
Things long ago labeled solved but left unfinished have a way of coming around again and again – the Victorians starving girls are back – maybe they never even went – maybe we just stopped noticing? This is not about big bodies or small bodies being in vogue – it’s about stopping the crazy train of bodies being so objectified that teenagers reject and abuse them to try and free themselves of it all. This is about refusing to allow body types to be a fad.
It’s about acceptance of whatever form a healthy body takes. It is about desexualizing bodies – so that we might make the choice to make a sexual statement rather than have our bodies perceived firstly and foremostly as sexual objects. If that could be done…if women and men could make friends with their bodies – their human-ness and become sovereign over when it becomes a sexual statement…then then Lumi would feel like she could stop staying up all night worrying about people eating and not eating and dieting and puking and all of these things…
Lumi’s second conclusion:
For those of you who didn’t catch all that or fell asleep – food doesn’t have to be the enemy – we can detangle the emotions and the hurt and the everything from food and enjoy it while dealing with the world and it’s issues. Wicked and I would like to see a day were eating disorders of all kinds are not the most common girl experience…We would like to see a day where it’s not socially accepted and expected for girls to get the tremors about eating…This blog and those planned to come after it are the first of tiny contributions we hope to make in ending women’s war with food.
Lumi’s third conclusion: We hope this blog reaches people…we have pained much to choose what to include and what to leave out and how to say it all…this issue makes up at least half of our two sizes too big hearts. In taking out and putting in we ended up with about three articles – we decided to break them up and will be presenting them to you in the coming months. The meaning of food in media and culture as well as some simple guidelines will be on their way – but we felt this first bit on food needed to be very personal…in hopes that our absolute confessional might spurn others to openly discuss and confess their own wars with food.
As always but especially this month…We want to hear from you especially about this topic because it is so very very close to our hearts.
a_illumination@hotmail.com
tell us your story – fight with us about our eating whining – correct us – ask us anything – we spend almost all of our time online anyway so u may get a very quick response indeed!
* frustrated woman picture at title snagged from ifood
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