**Trigger warnings: eating disorder**
A lot of you here know that I absolutely love to cook and bake, and it is one such thing that brings me immense joy. But as of late, I have barely been eating (shush, don’t tell my mom).
Food has become a mere requirement of sustenance for me, and I have realised that I have started taking my emotions out on my food. As a diabetic, I was put on a strict diet back during my first diagnosis as a Type 2 diabetic, and somewhere that conditioned pleasure in control has not completely gone away. My doctors now insist that I eat whatever I want, and encourage this sort of food control to slowly ebb away, and I know this is rare. My doctor made me rethink how I defined my condition the last time I saw him. He said, “if you were a factory that needed a certain raw material you couldn’t produce, you would outsource it. Same way, since your body does not produce insulin and pancreatic enzymes, you are outsourcing it.”
The thing is, I understand that. I love this explanation, but I cannot ignore the conditioned response I have towards food. Since I have not been eating well, my appetite has shrunk even further than before. If you know how less I ate before (in comparison to my peers), you’ll be wondering if eat at all. That’s the thing, I barely do. And I want to change that, but controlling my food has become an involuntary and unconscious activity at this point. I have started skipping meals, and it doesn’t bother me like it used to before. I used to have a strict routine of eating at specific times, and eating well. Now all that has changed, and maybe it was brought on by moving to a new country, and having to cook every meal for myself, or maybe it is related to me dealing with a depressive spiral.
I wish it is just the new country blues and not really anything of major concern, as it has seriously begun to affect my overall health and functioning. My energy levels have reduced, I can barely concentrate, and my sugars get dysregulated each time I eat. Plus, with me being stubborn as they come, I refuse to stop going to the gym, and replacing some parts of my appetite with my protein shake.
Food affects mood, and mood affects appetite; in my case all three are in a frenzy. Somewhere in the back of my head, if I solve one of these, I’ll be in a much better place. But I genuinely am at a loss at what to do. I try to eat, and make sure I eat least two proper meals (as much as my appetite allows), and work my way up to build myself back up again.
But until then, it is just another salient side-effect of juvenile diabetes. :)
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