My relationship with junk food – an unhealthy way I try (and fail) to make myself feel better

What do you turn to when the Universe deals you a crappy hand? Maybe you crack open a bottle of wine. Perhaps you repeatedly pick fights with your partner. Maybe you go shopping and do your credit card some serious damage. For me, when the chips are down, I turn to… chips.

Also other junk food, but mostly snacks of the salty and savoury variety than chocolate or sugary morsels. Right now, my life is a giant puddle of dementor vomit, and I’ve noticed that I’m turning to a familiar vice with alarming regularity.

At first glance, this doesn’t present as a serious problem. The quantity I’m eating is not huge, and I’m eating well 85 per cent of the time. And of course there’s nothing wrong with me treating myself. But what I’m talking about here is not just an occasional treat, it’s a daily ritual of me using food as an emotional crutch. To rephrase an old New Zealand health campaign around alcohol dependency: it’s not what I’m eating, it’s how I’m eating. This is not an addiction but it is a dependency, which means there’s an underlying issue that I need to address.

Whenever I try to understand an unhealthy behaviour, I look at when it first began. As with most people, I suspect, my emotional attachment to food stems from childhood. My well-meaning mother gave us a plate of chips, biscuits and lollies for afternoon tea each day after school, so I grew up seeing these foods as a staple rather than a treat, and it’s probably no great stretch to say that when I reach for junk food now, at a time when my life is in turmoil, I’m looking for the feelings of comfort and safety that I associate with my childhood. I want to make it clear here that I’m not blaming my mother for my poor choices in adulthood – the responsibility for how I treat my body falls on me alone. Neither can I blame society for conditioning me to regard the act of something unhealthy – rather than taking an evening walk, painting my nails, Skyping a cherished friend or sinking into a sumptuous book – as the most satisfying way to treat myself. The best way for me to get to the bottom of why I consistently make poor food choices is to understand what my body is really crying out for in challenging times, and how I can meet its needs in a healthy way. Which could best be summed up like this: I feel crap about myself and my life, and I delude myself that this will make me feel better (because I don’t have any more appealing solutions right now).

Here’s the situation I’m in right now. I have no work, and haven’t for almost a month. My industry is struggling, and demand for my services is falling away. I have been self-employed for seven years, but never before have I struggled for work to this extent. Occasionally there have been a few days I’ve been unable to fill with projects, but generally it’s been fairly consistent. But to go this long without income is crippling to my lifestyle and my ideas about who I am. On top of that hit to my primary source of income, my secondary business has failed to fire and that’s resulted in bills I am unable to pay. I spend my days scouring job sites, watching British game shows and sending photos of dead cockroaches to my housemate (we had the house fumigated; every dead-insect discovery is a cause for celebration).

So while I cope with the upheaval of starting again and process the associated feelings of failure and inadequacy (there are few experiences more soul-destroying than being a grown-up who is unable to provide for yourself at a material level), you can bet I’m looking for something to make me feel better. And you can bet that those choices will not best serve my needs. Because even though I know that after I scoff a bag of S&V (that’s salt and vinegar, BTW), I will not feel any happier, I do it anyway.

At the heart of the problem is the struggle to make myself feel better. I don’t know how to comfort myself and make myself feel like a valuable human being who is contributing to the world. I still don’t know how to reassure myself on a soul level that I matter and are worthy of respect. And although I do know that gorging on fatty foods is not going to alleviate this pain, the temporary mood lift is a welcome reprieve from my despondency.

I don’t know the answer to this problem (and it IS a problem, because it’s giving me yet another reason to feel like a failure) but I have made a resolution to quit admonishing myself for my unhealthy food choices, and to instead try to extend myself some self-compassion. Right now, everything is not alright. But it will be, eventually (everything always is). I know my desire to seek comfort in confectionery will be something I can overcome, but right now I’m got too much on my plate (pun intended) to do much more than simply be kind to myself. Maybe one day that kindness will result in good food choices but right now it’s more about not beating myself up for trying to cope with trying situations in whatever way I can. For now, that will have to be enough. 

Don’t judge me for eating meat. Or sugar. Or carbs

I accidentally became embroiled in a fight on social media over the weekend. Normally I don’t engage with people who are clearly trying to start an argument, as this woman was, but this comment, posted on a Facebook spiritual group page, enraged me:

“We’re all vegans here, right?”

Look, I know I shouldn’t have taken the bait, but these sort of sanctimonious statements really give me the shits (to borrow an Aussie colloquialism). I have no beef (sorry, couldn't resist that pun) with vegans or vegetarians – in fact, I admire them for the courage of their convictions – but I do have an issue with people who pass judgement on anyone whose beliefs don’t align with their own. I shot back:

“Would it be a problem for you if we weren’t?”

She replied with an attacking comment that was poorly worded and poorly punctuated (if you’re going to go shoving your opinions down people’s throats you might at least learn how to express them clearly and correctly!), basically saying that meat is murder. I wrote back:

“I know you mean well but it’s only fair that you respect me, and others, for my decision not to be vegan just as much as I respect your decision TO be vegan.”

Her reply called into question the extent that I could rightly call myself spiritual if I do not shun animal products. Oh boy. I wanted to reply that being spiritual is not a competition, and that if she needed to take down other people she had probably missed the point of spirituality entirely. I wanted to tell her that there is no merit in professing kindness towards animals if she is going to dish out contempt to humans who don’t meet her standards of kindness.

Instead I gently reminded her that what other people believe, or eat, is none of her business, and no one has the right to judge others for their choices. Several vegans and vegetarians weighed into this debate and complained that this woman was giving them a bad name. Which is very unfair, as the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians I've met are secure enough in themselves that they don’t need to preach or convert other people to their cause.

The thing this exchange highlighted for me is the way some people are assessing the worth of people based on what they eat.

I’m seeing this food judgement a lot lately. Look at your Instagram feed and you’ll see what I mean: there are people shunning sugar, carbs and cooked foods who think their nutrition choices make them morally superior. People who are using what they put on their plate – or, more to the point, what they don’t – to make some sort of religious statement. And they think this means they are doing life better than you are.

This deeply concerns me. Not only because the last thing we need is another reason to judge each other, but because it fosters a climate where orthorexia is more difficult to detect and, more worryingly, celebrated.

Orthorexia*, if you haven’t heard of it, is an emerging eating disorder where sufferers become obsessed with eating only pure foods. This psychological condition is very serious. Not only because eliminating anything – never mind a whole litany of things – from your diet is going to make you unhealthy and nutritionally deficient, but because orthorexia is a gateway to anorexia, which can be fatal. 

Orthorexics think about food every single minute of every day. They experience anxiety if they can’t eat foods that conform to their rigid standards. They punish themselves if they break their own rules. The only experiences that matter in their lives are tied to the integrity of what they are eating. This is the tipping point where very healthy becomes very unhealthy, and it’s an extremely destructive way to live – emotionally, mentally and physically.

Obviously, orthorexia isn’t the same as choosing to live a vegan, paleo or sugar-free lifestyle, but when nutrition choices lead people to judge others who don’t share their vision, there’s a danger that they may be taking their food philosophy too seriously. And if a commitment to a restrictive diet becomes extreme, that’s a problem.

I’d like to see us all become more accepting of what other people choose to eat. I actually can’t believe I just wrote that – like, I can’t believe I needed to write that. I don’t care whether you chow down on a dirty street pie or you reach for an organic, cold-pressed smoothie. Just don’t judge me for going with the pie. Your smoothie doesn’t make you better than me.

This shows a feature I wrote about orthorexia, published in NEXT magazine (New Zealand), October 2014