So until last year I had a very bad relationship with food. I was definitely a comfort eater and habitually ate certain foods to help cope with stress and anxiety leading to significant weight gain over the year. I big part of this was that I was always thinking. I'm going to start a diet tomorrow or next week so I best get in all my favourite "bad foods" now because I won't be allowed to eat them later.
After a lot of reading about disordered eating, journaling and so on I decided to stop dieting or trying to and to just try and develop a better relationship with food. I started cooking more, making my own bread, and yogurts, and cakes. I stopped cutting things out but added things in, healthier options and focused on nourishing myself and over time that has led to slow and steady weight loss. I still have treats, I ate a magnum at the weekend and really enjoyed it. If I'm making a veggie burger for my dinner at the weekend I have a cola with it but I no longer over eat crap like packets of ramen and chocolate bars. I think more about what I eat now, how to balance it and I know that eating high sugar snacks regularly only makes me crave more and more even when it isn't really satisfying me. I am trying to be healthy without attaching any sense of morality, virtue or guilt to food. The main thing was that I went from having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and being prediabetic to being in the ideal ranges in all of them in just 6 months.
I suppose because of my issues around food and body image I would look at my friends and other women and think that they were all doing well and were really healthy about food because they were a normal, healthy weight. I'm more aware now though that lots of women seem to have issues around food either restricting, bingeing, feeling guilty because they ate something or virtuous because they restrained themselves. I met a friend a couple of weeks ago, she has always been really slender apparently effortlessly we got some takeaway cake and coffee and sat in the park. we were eating our cakes and my friend who was smoking asked me if I wanted the rest of her cake, I said no and was about to say just take it home and eat the rest tomorrow but she'd already stubbed out her cigarette in her cake. I asked her why she did that and her answer was that if she hadn't she would just have eaten it all. Looking back I can remember her doing similar things at university.
Another friend only never eats breakfast and only has a banana or apple for lunch and then dinner before eating a packet of biscuits in front of the TV at night. She always says her mum would tell her as a teen that only fat women eat lunch.
My sister in law swings between periods of eating freely and extreme restriction. When I think of women's I worked with conversations were often about slimming world and various diets even if they were not overweight. My own mum ate quite a restricted diet when I was growing up everything was highly processed but low fat options and often her lunch would be a cup a soup and a low fat cereal bar. She was always slim so felt she was winning and being healthy but now she is in her 60's and has sarcopenia and osteoporosis from malnutrition as does my friends mum who told her lunch is for fatties.
I am not posting any of this to judge anyone. I get that it is really hard for many women to maintain their weight in a healthy way. I still have a way to go and I find it hard to try and maintain a healthy attitude to food while working towards weight loss and I had to accept a really slow rate of loss and my goal weight is now a good bit higher than I would have found acceptable in the past. If I get to that then I will see.
I am not advocating for fat acceptance or overeating but I am just surprised to notice now how prevalent disordered eating and ideas about eating are amongst women. As a fatter women I mainly saw myself and other overweight people as having issues which is true and I would assume that if a person was slim they were really healthy and must be fine around food but it seems that often that isn't the case at all. I just think its a pity food has become so loaded an issue for so many.