Food.

At first its easy. You eat what your parents tell you to eat, maybe you secretly snack on some candy here and there, but basically your diet is controlled by your parents and your parents only. But then you grow up. You may develop hobbies or certain interests – it was kpop and kdramas for me – and suddenly food becomes your enemy. Why am I not as skinny as them? How come even though I am in a calorie deficit I still can’t seem to lose weight? Just why is it so easy for them but seems so unbearable for me? And then you start to count. Numbers take over your life and there is not one meal you can pass without counting, that is if you even eat at that point. ‘Mom I already have eaten at school’, ‘oh, seems like I forgot my lunchbox at home, how silly of me’, ‘mom I have a stomachache, I won’t be able to eat anything’, ‘oh no, I’m allergic, I can’t eat that’, ‘sorry, but I’m vegetarian, maybe next time’, ‘oh I forgot my money, no bubble tea for me then’, and so you become a world-class liar. You lie to starve, you feel great to see others eat and get bigger, while you starve, starve, starve to slim down. To become tiny, so that your clothe don’t fit, so that you can feel your bones sticking out, so that you get complimented for sliming down. It may seem silly, stupid, pitiful even to some individuals, but back then I decided to be a vegetarian solely for the reason of having a decent explanation just why I – the biggest nugget lover on this planet – suddenly rejected everything meat like for the sake of cutting calories.Water became my best friend, my only friend. Driven by the determination to reach the figure of a kpop idol I even started to do sports, workouts, set myself a 10,000 steps per day goal. I do remember one summer break, maybe 3 years ago in the pandemic, when I woke up at 6 to walk my first 5,000 steps, to afterwards take the bus to the city I lived nearby just to take another 2-3 hour walk there. At the end of the day my watch showed me a result varying from around 30,000 – 35,000 steps. Did I do that because it was fun? Because I wanted to be healthier? Because I genuinely enjoyed walking for two hours straight every day over and over again? No, no and no. Now I certainly do enjoy walking quite a bit, I learnt to enjoy it, just as I had learnt to choose potatoes over rice, to fill my stomach with water for the feeling of being full, to eat out of bowls because they were certainly smaller than plates, ergo didn’t fit as much food in it, to chew gum as a way of burning calories even when studying or reading, to chew ice cubes even in winter, to hope that I by chance would upset my stomach, so I had the possibility to puke, to enjoy, to even congratulate me for hunger, for starving myself.Though you certainly won’t find pictures of me where I look starved, like I had an actual ed. You won’t find them, because they don’t exist, because for every calorie I had rejected I devoured the double amount of junk food. I began my period of not only a liar, but also a thief. Chips, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, instant ramen and everything in-between, I would steal it and eat it. Without the tiniest bit of self-control, and I hated myself for it. (I just wanna clarify that I stole from my fam and not actually from supermarkets et cetera.) I won’t say that I am healed, that everyday I can eat without counting, that I fought and overcame all the habits my ed created. But it has gotten better. I think.