I cried at the gym today doing my last set of clamshells—an exercise I’m only doing to try to get better at running. I’m not sure if my knees will truly make it though, but that’s not the reason I cried. I cried because in a split second I realized my eating habits, or more specifically my overeating habits and the humongous portion sizes I once thought were normal, aren’t my fault.
It’s what I was taught by my parents to think was normal, which led to obesity. And of course I know that they didn’t mean to do this to me, but damn… I am at the gym five times a week just trying to maintain not becoming morbidly obese day by day. And I’ll have to fight for the rest of my life not to give in to eating triple the amount of food someone should eat within a day.
I say my eating habits were built by my dad. He owned a restaurant and would constantly bring me huge amounts of food while I colored on the freezer in the back. I mean, I really thought eating three one-pound rice balls for lunch was a normal amount of food. Or sometimes it would be a whole sub on one of those one-dollar Italian loaves you get from Walmart, smothered in mayo and filled to the brim with lunch meat.
Ugh, I miss the days when food didn’t come with a side of guilt. My parents may have given me my eating habits, but I gave myself an eating disorder all on my own—an eating disorder I’ve only been recovering from for about three years now. I’m much better now, but sometimes I can’t help but hate the fact that the thoughts in my head probably will never end.
It may die down and I may get better at not listening, but my relationship with food will never be normal. And today I cried because in some form or fashion I felt the need to mourn the person I could have been, or the body I could have had, if I had just had a normal relationship with food.
But it doesn’t matter because that person doesn’t exist. So I just have to live with the fact that I’ll have to fight to have whatever normalcy I can with food every day for the rest of my life.
So yeah… that’s why I cried at the gym today.