#And they'll learn how to navigate their relationship with food idk

[sastielsfandom]

I wish people realized that eating disorders are more than, "I don't like the way I look so I don't eat." That can be a reason someone has one, but me personally, I can't perceive how I look most of the time. Meaning, most of the time I literally can't care what I look like because I don't know what I look like. And yet, I have a very complicated relationship with food.

I like cooking and sharing food with others, and sometimes I like feeding myself, but it's only possible within a set of rules I've set for myself. Not intentionally, just I've realized this over the years.

I don't know all of them, and this is just a few:

If I'm not at home, I'm visiting someone or something and they tell me to grab whatever, I can't. Doesn't matter who they are, I can be at my brothers house and buy the food myself, still can't eat it. If I do I sit with guilt despite not needing to.

Even at home, if the kitchen is too clean, I can't disrupt it and eat. I have to wait for it to not be clean. And afterwards I have to make it cleaner than when I went in there.

Also, I have to earn it. If I didn't do anything, usually clean, or help in some impactful way, I won't eat. Unless I'm served, because then that's rude and wasteful. But even that isn't enough sometimes.

Also, I can never grab the last of something. Because what if someone wanted it more? Who am I to take the last one of something that someone might be looking forward to?

These are stackable rules as well, and even if I catch myself doing these things I can't necessarily stop it. If I have someone to eat with that sometimes helps but that's not guaranteed to work.

And it's so funny to me that like I know now that I have a huge problem with eating and convincing myself to eat but because eating disorders are typically talked about with weight and wanting to be skinnier, things like that, I didn't realize I had one.

There's multiple things that feed into this disorder for me as well, I'm sure like OCD, and sometimes Autism play into it. Which makes it harder to stop it sometimes.

It's awful when things are contaminated even though they're not. Like, drinks are a struggle if they aren't bottled and even that is iffy. Because when it's left alone too long then a bunch of what ifs play through and I can't touch it. But the same can play out for food.

And when there's no safe foods and I'm already struggling to eat, I got no chance.

It especially sucks when I'll be doing good, eating three meals a day, but as soon as it feels like we're running out of food, I cannot eat. Because I'm taking away from others and I cannot replace it so I cannot eat.

It's a frustrating battle because I can acknowledge that I'm helping no one by starving myself and still lie there thinking about how much I don't deserve it. Everyone deserves food, but I'm not a part of that collective.

I think it's worse knowing none of this correct, that I don't need these rules and I didn't even intend to set them for myself but they've been there for so long and just because they're nonsensical, it doesn't mean I won't follow them.

Because knowing what's wrong with me doesn't magically give me the tools to fix them, and even with the right tools, sometimes tools break.

That being said though, it did help to a degree understanding that I had an eating disorder, I can give myself some level of grace and sometimes use spite as a means of eating.

It's great when I also can rig the rules sometimes, like I can't eat because blah blah, hey, you're hungry, I'm cooking for us. That sort of thing works.

But I couldn't figure out any of that until I knew what the problem was. And that's kind of why I wish eating disorders are talked about showing more sides of its this problem. They don't all stem from what we look like but they absolutely can be from that.