Today I have eaten a peanut butter Clif Bar, hot chips, leftover risotto that was borderline food safe, a one dollar lolly bag, four mandarins and fresh Vietnamese spring rolls from the Ponsonby Food Court. I feel great. This is a pretty average day when I’m going between work and university. Maybe I should be eating more vegetables and protein, but the reason I feel so great is that I simply don’t care. Food has become a nice feature of life that resides in the back of my mind. I eat when I’m hungry. I don’t go to great lengths to eat a certain type of food, I’m at peace with it. I have put in a great deal of effort to achieve this level of apathy.

For me and many young women I know, a healthy relationship with food didn’t come from cracking the dietary code. It came when whatever underlying issues causing us to feel we needed to take on unattainable dieting were made peace with. We knew diets should not be the most important part of our life, that we were privileged girls living in a first world country and were not lacking anything nutritionally (Warner, 2018). We knew social media was a wasteland of diarrhea inducing fit teas and thinspiration. But knowing it is not the same as feeling it. For me, the heart of the problem will always be how people feel about themselves. I think eating and what we choose to eat is a response to how we view ourselves and the world around us and this is what will determine our relationship with food.

Source: Warner, A. (2018, August 25). Heart of the Problem. Retrieved from https://angry-chef.com/blog/heart-of-the-problem