For the very first time in my entire life I have decided to address food from a healthy mindset. I feel like many in my age group spent most of our childhoods watching our mothers and grandmothers try every diet under the sun, our teen years wondering how far we could push our eating habits (or lack of) to become as small as the models we saw in magazines, and our adult lives fearing we would end up alone if we couldn't have the hips of a Kardashian and the stomach of a miniature greyhound.
I took the small yet calculated steps of that ladder until my pants were sliding down, my hair was falling out, and my relationship with food was completely falling apart. But the thing we weren't told about the daunting chute of disordered eating, is that once you let your hands loosen from the top of that inclosed slide, the ride never really ends. Every day is met with an obsession over what you put in your mouth. An excitement of the things you don't. And constant fear of if all of it combined will help just one more person say "wow, don't you look great!"
My goal this year is to slowly start chipping away at that power. To educate myself on the food I am putting in my body vs the outcome it will have of the number on a scale. By no means are the things I do medically backed, but I hope that in slowly learning how to use whole foods and create exciting things I can begin to erase the old ways my mind thinks.
I started with something simple like homemade Tomatillo Salsa because it represents my past. during college I used to make a half a cup of rice for dinner each night after eating air all day, and to help choke it down (or maybe to make it feel like more food) I would smother it in so much Walmart salsa the rice became unrecognizable. Today I'm making a new salsa and planning to use it on a nutrient rich taco, or two or maybe even three, with as many made from scratch components as possible.
The point is, I hope in slowly shifting my mindset on food and beginning to focus on how to be healthy vs skinny, I can begin to live a more complete life and free up space from past habits.