I Will Eat My Veggies How I Want To Eat Them, So There

Hi everyone,

*Just a trigger warning before we begin, in this post I talk about when I was suffering badly from my eating disorder and the relationship I had with food during this time. So if that sound a little icky to you, you might be best to sit this one out.*

So, I know I am way behind the ball with this, but hear me out.

I had never tasted a Sumo Salad until a few weeks ago.

I know, I know - it's not exactly new but I don't eat out and on the run much and if I do, it's almost never a salad. Why would I get a salad when I could get a delicious burger and/or chips! Anybody that knows me will know of my love for hot chips and because of such, why would I pass up the opportunity to have chips for something like a salad! I can have salads at home.

Anyway, the point is that I have had one (and many others since) and I loved it.

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After having this lovely salad, I did think that honestly, I probably could make something like this at home - thereby saving me money and giving me the option to customise my salads as I wished (and have them more often). Which also sounded like great idea because while I like salads, I never know how to make them more substantial than the basics (lettuce, tomato, cucumber and stuff). So I jumped onto the internet to see what I could find.

To be honest - I was quite surprised at what I found. First off, there were no recipes for 'My Take On X Salad by Sumo Salad' (which definitely was surprisingly), but more to the point, I was surprised about what else I found. I came across so many blog posts on how bad Sumo Salad was and how everyone thinks they are eating healthy by choosing that option but really it's a terrible choice and everyone should be much more conscientious and discerning when it comes to food choices and never eat fast food of any kind.

Posts like that really annoy me. There was a time in which I would have been their biggest advocate but thankfully, those times are behind me and now they just make me really angry. First and foremost, I feel they come across very judgy and patronising to those who choose to eat these foods. I get the feeling that the authors of these articles believe that people only eat food like this because they don't know all the facts and how bad they really are. I don't like that. I don't they give the general public enough credit in food knowledge. No, the average person probably does not know the optimum grams of fat, carbohydrates, sugars and protein they should be eating everyday and no, they probably don't know how much of those are in an average Sumo Salad, or burger, or medium fries from MacDonalds. But also, who cares? It's just a salad. Or a burger. Or icecream.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree that we probably should be thinking a little about where our food is coming from and how long it's been sitting there, and making sure we are getting the proper nutrients, but again, it's just a salad. It's probably not something we have everyday and it's delicious.

I feel like that word right there is pretty important. Delicious. Tasty. Yummy. We eat this food because we want to. This is food that calls to us as we walk by it. This is food that we might buy on a whim, just because we're a bit peckish. This is food we might plan to buy for lunch, either by ourselves or with a friend. It's nice food. And it nourishes us. It gives us energy, happiness and joy.

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When we start obsessing over numbers and micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients, we lose sight of some of the most important aspects of food. We lose sight of the joy of eating. We lose the companionship of having a meal with friends or family. We lose the excitement of trying a completely new food for the first time, or an old favourite reinvented. We forget how lovely a good fry-up is, late in the morning, saturated with grease, and the table filled with sleepy friends and family. We forget how hungry we get a Christmas after seeing all the food, the table laden down with with the fruits of the day's labour. We lose memory of the taste of dozens of mulberries, picked straight off the tree, still warm from the sun, staining our mouths and fingers a brilliant, bruising purple.

In losing the joy of food, we lose a bit of ourselves as well. We become distanced from people, unable to join in and communicate because we can't relax around food, we can't sit. We are anxious, jittery, scared of straying to close to food in case it infects us, or tempts us. Eyes wide, mouths closed, we can't let the food fall in by mistake. In our minds the endless stream of 'can I, I can't' runs in circles. Numbers, percentages, calories, kilojoules, better options, healthier servings, calculations, self hate and self loathing runs in the background of our minds. it never stops, it never falters. It's then to tear us apart when we slip up, it's there to hold us back when we think about straying. Food, and it's absence becomes the soundtrack of our lives.

That was me.

Two years ago, that was me. I was so focused on what was in the food, I missed out on the food itself. My eating habits got crazy weird and restrictive. Thankfully, I am no longer that person, but, as I mentioned in this post, when you have a chronic condition, like an eating disorder, you end up with little bits of evidence of it scattered throughout your life.

For example, my relationship with vegetables.

For me, veggies are a bit of a issue. Well, maybe not so much an issue as a touchy subject. Fruits as well actually, but less so. When I restricting throughout the term of my eating disorder, I ate a ton of fruits and vegetables. Every meal had to have vegetables in it. Breakfast I was slightly lenient with, but that was because I pumped it full of fruits. Lunch and dinner were both full of as many vegetables as I could and that my anorexia would allow. I mean, vegetables were all well and good, but calories were calories and I couldn't be having too many of those now, could I?

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Then when I went into recovery, I swung the opposite way. Vegetables and fruits were scary, scary things and had to be avoided at all costs. This at least, made sense. Vegetables and fruits are not very calorie dense and I was was suffering from a severe calorie deficit and a shrunken stomach. The last thing I needed was 50 calories of lettuce taking up 50% of my tiny stomach. So I only ate vegetables when I really had to (aka when Mum made them as part of dinner and I couldn't get out of eating them) and I stopped eating fruit. And yes, I know that there is more to food than just their calorie count but the way I looked at it was that I had a massive calorie deficit that was going to kill me if I didn't fill it and if the price for that was slightly lowered levels of Vitamins A and C then it was worth it. It was worth it a hundred times over. I was also quite repulsed by the thought of eating fruits and vegetables. Again, that was also understandable. I was also repulsed by the idea of eating natural yoghurt, All-Bran, wholewheat bread and corn thins, all of which I ate a lot of during restriction.

So, for the most part, I kept eating my way back to health and ignored the things I didn't want to eat.

But then I ran into another problem.

Eating vegetables and fruit started to worry me.Not hugely, but enough for me to take notice of it. I noticed that I would out of my way to avid eating vegetables. I would become quite anxious if we were going to have a light, vegetable based dinner (like a stirfry). I still avoided fruit like the plague. To an extent, this was understandable - I was still making up my calorie deficit and I needed calorie dense foods. But also, this was partly a mental block. I was scared of vegetables. I was scared of fruit. I was scared of what they symbolised in my mind. They had connotations of restriction, hunger, anxiety, depression, the sight of bony wrists, the press of sharp hipbones and jutting collarbones. And those were really scary things.

Overtime, I got over that fear, and of others. I decided that I did actually like corn thins (provided they were smothered in butter and peanut butter - really delicious, try it) but that natural yoghurt is kind of gross. But fruits and vegetables were the last fear to go. Up until about September of last year, I was still kind of scared of them. But eventually I conquered that fear as well.

But the habit still lingered.

I no longer had fruit for breakfast or as a snack and I generally avoided having extra/optional vegetables. Because it was a habit. It was now habit for me to replace fruits and vegetables with other things.

And that was (is) a hard habit to break. I know I need to be eating my 2&5 each day (or at least, I should be) but I'm not yet. Part is habit, part is a lingering feat that eating my fruits and veggies is going to send me off the deep end again and I don't know what the last part is.

I'm working on it.

And this is where my Sumo Salad comes in. No, it might not be the healthiest thing you could eat and no, it will never replace a salad that you could make yourself at home. But... it has vegetables. A lot of vegetables. And for someone who needs to be getting their vegetable intake up into the acceptable range while still having filling meals and not focusing on the nutritional content but at the same time being aware of it? It's a pretty good option.

So don't make snap judgements about other people's lives and their health and don't be condescending about other people's food choices and you know what? Just relax a little. Live a little. And who knows? Maybe you'll find yourself wanting to eat a Sumo Salad.