Travis Eneix

My relationship with food was skewed from a very early age. Rather than eating for joy, or pleasure, or companionship, I ate to get away with something. To sneak in too much. To have what I wanted. To steal. I was a thief of food. I would sneak a mouthful of chocolate the first thing Easter morning, and when someone asked, “What do you have in your mouth?” I would sheepishly reply around the mouthful, “nuffin.”

Not so anymore. I have taken on a structure to how I eat, and wrote about this a bit in the This is my Temple post. My life used to be one long gorging. Now, I get to have three meals a day for the purpose of continuing my life, and I get to be free from food stealing in between. Food has gone from being an anesthetic for me to being a celebration.

The Sanskrit word prasada has come across my path again a few times recently, and it reminds me of the proper place for food in my life. Food is an offering. It is provided by Being (God, Spirit, Brahaman, whatever) for the purpose of my life continuing. Food is fuel. Food is also a celebration and affirmation of life, and should be enjoyed. It is a direct message that my life should continue for another day. When looked on this way the act of eating becomes an act of communion and is a moment to remember the grace which gives me existence.

If you believe that Being is a distinct entity handing out the stuff of the universe and sitting above it all, then food has been provided directly and being grateful for the food you eat is the least you can do.

If you believe that Being is the totality of all that exists, seen and unseen, and the space in which it exists, then food is a taking into the body of a portion of that creation. Food is a redistribution of the basic stuff of what is into the form of continuing life.

It is when I forget the importance of food that I get into trouble, shove in volume and binge looking for something to fill the place of Being in my life.

One of the tools I have learned for trying to make sense of my own life, and my reaction to it, is to trace reactions and impulses to the places in my life of crisis where they developed. I was thinking about body image today and remembered one of the incidents which contributed to my skewed image of my own body and my skewed image of the motivations of those who react to it positively.

I was at the hospital. I don’t remember what exactly for, but I was a fairly sickly child with multiple allergies, asthma, a persistent infection in my foot, and of course an obesity problem. I believe it was an evaluation for an exploratory surgery, but it might have been a follow up to having my tonsils removed. The doctor seeing me was a young, close-cropped hair type with the best of newly graduated intentions. He would not look straight at my mother, and barely at me, as he spoke about the concerns he had for my health and development since I carried “so much extra weight.” My mother has an obesity issue as well, and looking back I can understand why he might have been nervous about speaking with her about my weight issue without being at liberty to discuss hers. Adults do funny things at each other when kids are around. Anyways, the crux of this incident was when he reflected that I probably would be able to get a girlfriend despite my weight since, “there are some girls who are attracted to overweight men, called ‘chubby chasers’. Usually skinny girls who didn’t get much food as they were being brought up.”

Great! Thanks, Doc! I have a future of relationships with odd ball anorexic gals with fear of starvation. That’s really going to work out well as I pig out and they shiver with worry that I might eat all the available food and relegate them to starving again. Perfect!

Luckily for me if I ever met a girl with terrors of being underfed who was physically attracted to me I was too shy to notice. Thank God for looking out!

It’s a wonder how insensitive we can be sometimes with kids. But, what is more remarkable to me is how much of my evaluation of the relationships in my life have been informed by that one instance. Psychology is a weird, and very delicate thing. Looking back now I can have a conversation with that small, chubby boy who was me and try to set him straight. I can help him (and me) to realize that the Doctor’s words were well intended but truly ignorant. I don’t blame the Doctor for what he said, even though I do think at that moment he was kind of an idiot, but I can take responsibility now for how I continue to let his words affect me, and how much I can let them go.  We can’t change our past, bur we can re-frame our understanding of it and reform our reactions from it.

File this under cautionary tale: I was doing my morning blog crawl and read a piece over at diet-blog entitled The Top 10 Sources of Stigma. In it they list the top 10 sources of negative reaction to overweight people. They also included the title of the research paper that list was based on which I found and read. The most amusing factor is this - Of the various coping mechanisms utilized by overweight folks when dealing with negative reactions 25% responded that they had used Physical Violence to deal with such comments. That’s right folks, be careful whom you disparage - They may punch you in your skinny face with a beefy appendage. The laws of physics put the favor on the fatty. These thoughts keep me warm at night.

Breaking news today - Treatment To Prevent Migraines Boosts Work Productivity

The title alone gets a big - Well, yeah.

But the leading paragraph is pure “Ya think!” gold:

For workers with migraines, taking a daily medication to prevent headache attacks can reduce lost productive time on the job, reports a study in the March Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).

So, if I get this right, not having a migraine in the middle of the work day makes your total productivity for the day go up.  Wow!  Who would have thunk it?  Seriously, I understand how medical research scientists can feel pressured to justify their existence and income by producing studies, but is this really their best effort?