soundtrak: london elektricity: rewind
i think i was watching tv on night when a commercial for the local news came up. they were talking about picky eating adults. i think i must have seen this commercial for this particular story about a dozen times. everytime, there was this guy that always said, “it’s an eating disorder.” and i would keep on telling myself, “i didn’t think it was an eating disorder.”
unlike the people’s stories from the website, when i was growing up, i wasn’t a picky eater. my parents didn’t allow me to be. of course, there were things that i refused to eat (lima beans anyone?), but then i would always get the guilt trip about ‘the starving kids in africa’, but my parents would change it to ‘my cousins in kenya’, and lamenting how they wished they airmail my food over there. so i ended up eating whatever i was given, which i think very much contributed to my overweight problem. my mom refused to buy junk food ever and we didn’t do fast food well until timon was a kid. as a teenager, i think that’s when i started to ‘rebel’ against my parents. i remember i hated the way my mom cooked fish, usually in a stew and i hated eating it. “well, why don’t you become a vegetarian then?” she snapped one day and i yelled back, “i think i will!”
honestly, i didn’t miss meat as much as people usually do. to this day, i miss chicken sometimes. in college, my tendencies really started to come out, of course because one moves away from home and starts to experience freedom for the first time. for days on end, i would eat veggie burgers, no cheese with mustard. some days i wouldn’t eat a meal because i couldn’t decide what i wanted to eat. towards the final years, especially when i moved into the apartments and i didn’t have to have a meal plan, it really started to come out. there would be weeks i would eat nothing but fries, but then the next week i would refuse to eat them. always at the end of the semester, i had bags of food that i had to give away because i couldn’t eat them.
at work, AW and MD say i’m the pickest eater that they ever met. i turned vegan about a year ago, which i think only help to contribute to my picky eating problem. i do have a list, even though it changes:
- i hate soup: (it’s like wet food… *shudders*); unless i am in the mood to eat soup (usually when i’m sick), i refuse to eat it.
- no salad: i actually used to like salad alot, but now i don’t like the lettuce; iceburg ruined it for me
- mushroom fiend: i love mushrooms; i could eat them all day everyday and i put them in everything. i prefer them raw than cooked. i have also been told this is the only vegetable i will voluntarily eat. it’s not that i don’t like other vegetables, i just don’t eat them.
- tomato usage: i like tomatoes, but i don’t like them on my sandwich; when i got to subway, no tomatoes. however, i do like to eat them raw and in salads (when i feel like eating those)
- cereal 24/7: i love cereal; all day, everyday. raisin bran crunch, smart start, all bran. nothing else. but i will go a week or two without eating cereal at all.
- ice: also known as pica, eating ice is usually associated with low iron (which is true; i am anemic). but as long as i can remember, i have always been an ice eater. i love the fact that our fridge crushes ice because i just keep buckets upon buckets in the freezer to save to eat.
that’s just some of my ‘restrictions’ that i have. some of the problems i have with this disorder is that mostly people don’t understand. especially the ice thing; only a couple of people have actually seen me go at a bucket of ‘pre-chilled’ ice. i’m embarrassed by it. my parents are hassled because of the space that my ice buckets take. i do take my iron tablets, but then i miss that craving for ice (it’s weird, i know). sometimes when i go out to eat and i don’t see anything on the menu that i like, i won’t eat. period. people usually think i’m mad, but i think it’s because they’re uncomfortable to the fact that i’m the only one not eating. also, the amount of food that i buy that i never eat. it’s good to have a brother that will eat anything. i have popsicles and oatmeal from last season still in the kitchen. i could have the same box of cereal for two months. i know it’s a problem because i don’t have a reasonable reason to why i don’t eat certain things; i might not like the colors, the texture is all wrong, it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. usually it’s not what it tastes like.
i recently took a personality test (i need to look up the name) and it was very on point. i’m the type of person that likes to control my external environment because i can’t control my internal environment (i.e. when i get anxious); when i get stressed or anxious, i tend to work harder, longer hours, i will do strange things like clean the bathroom in the middle of the night. i see my picky eating now as a way that i’m trying to control my external environment. my counselor says that it’s good that i’m starting to recognize these things about myself; soon i will start to see that i cannot change ‘everything’ about the external (things just happen) and i have to enjoy my life.
i don’t know how i feel about being a picky eater. i know it’s a problem, but like some of the people in the stories that are posted, i feel that it’s something that makes me unique, who i am. i am aware of what i eat however and i try to keep it balanced as much as possible. i take multivitamins. i don’t know if how i eat will ever change.
do you have a particular food that you hate/love to eat?
peace.
