A treatise on the dangers of eating

Many of you may find this post amusing. I am world renown for eating far more than should be physically possible considering my size. Since coming away I have regularly out eaten every single person I’ve come across, regardless of their size. Not because we’re competing, but because I just eat that much. I frequently end up with leftover food funnelling down the dinner table towards my seat. I believe this penchant for overconsumption seems to come from a number of places. One is that people who haven’t yet eaten with me often scoff at my assertions of over nourishment and tell me that they’ll fatten me up. They generally admit defeat if I ever do eat with them, but I think this had left me with a desire to overcompensate and prove I don’t have an eating disorder. Another is that Tony (my little brother) and I would egg each other on at the dinner table to finish everything on our plates with cries of “Never give in to the enemy!!!!!” It’s possible you had to be there to understand this strange custom, but that left another ingrained desire to avoid wastage and force every last bit down. Another is that I hate wastage, especially when people leave that last spoonful of rice scattered unevenly across their plate because they’re too lazy to scrape it up, usually forcing somebody else to remove the plate from the stack, take it to the bin, and expend additional time and effort scraping the culprit’s plate free of debris before putting it in the dish washer. Yet another (and certainly not least) is that I REALLY LOVE FOOD! I love going through the flavours of things and trying to identify what gives it that extra little kick or why it’s so full and rich. I love to go out to dinner alone so nobody is around to distract me while I close my eyes and savour super tasty meals. And of course we’re just conditioned in the west to eat enormous meals and not to leave food on the plate. So I’m in the habit of never leaving anything to be thrown out. Surprisingly to me I’m completely out of touch with my body in this regard. I force every last bit down regardless of whether I need it or not. Since coming to Thailand I’ve become even worse, it’s so easy to over consume here when everything is so cheap and I can eat 5 completely different (and extremely tasty) dishes for only one dollar.

On Tuesday 30^th of March at approximately 9am I climbed into the back of a sawngthaew (literally “2 seats”, these take the place of buses in Chiang Mai and much of S.E. Asia. They are basically utes with a canopy over the back and a long bench seat on either side of the tray). Around an hour later, after visiting a local market for fresh produce, we arrived at the cooking school where we were to learn to cook amazing Thai food. Around 4pm I arrived back at my hotel, having eating 8 meals in about 5 hours, 6 of which had been right on the upper edge of my not inconsiderable chilli tolerance. I believe I posted that night about feeling rather unwell, but hoping to feel better before going to see some jazz. Well, I saw the jazz, and it was good. But the next day I awoke with serious problems. To cut quite a long story short, I stretched my guts so badly and aggravated them so much with chilli that they swelled up. I had periodic intense stomach pain (~10min mean, with a range of [3, 60) minutes for the engineers out there), and minor flu like symptoms like weakness, headaches, and overly sensitive skin. I can hear you all cluck and say I just caught a stomach bug, but I don’t think so, and neither does the doctor I saw over here, or my doctor back home. They both think it’s likely I have a stomach ulcer due to an overproduction of stomach acid. Which kind of sucks at this juncture, but I have wondered that before only to be told at the time that it was fairly unlikely. So I think I might go and get that checked out or it’s going to sit on my mind until I do. So anyway, that’s getting slightly off topic. So I stopped eating like I had because eating got my stomach acid going and caused me a lot of pain. I just ate fruit for a few days, and then eased back into watery soups and the like (NO chilli), and I’m going to avoid meat, chilli, beer, oil, cigarettes, and coffee for the immediate future as they all contribute to stomach acid issues. In fact I really wasn’t eating a lot there for a few days because starving myself meant my swollen stomach was empty and feeling much better than when I ate anything. And once I’d got over feeling like I’d been kicked in the guts by a rugby team, I started noticing how much more energy I had for the rest of my body when it wasn’t all going into digesting and moving a metric arse load (excuse the pun) of food through my body. However I’m now faced with a new dilemma. Given my new awareness of the fact that I feel much better if I only eat when I’m actually hungry, and then only what my body feels comfortable with rather than everything on my plate and anybody else’s within a 3 chair radius. Given that, I’ve got to try and undo a lifetime of habitual overconsumption. And I have to practice tuning in to the sense of fullness from my stomach when I am eating so I stop when I should. AND I need to tune into my body’s hunger so that I eat when I need or consciously want to, not just when I can. I sat there in front of a massive bowl of soup the other day with a good few hundred mls of liquid and vegetables left in the bottom, and tried not to eat it. It was amazingly hard; you’ve no idea how hard. I never leave anything on my plate so long as it tastes good. I kept sipping at it and eventually had to place the bowl precariously on top of a stack of dishes on the other side of the table to stop myself. Then 5 minutes later I was glad as my lagging sense of fullness informed me I’d still eaten too much and that I would now feel bloated for 15 minutes.

This is another case in my life of being aware of and differentiating between “I need”, “I want”, and “I can”. Generally I’ve been eating first because I can, because it’s available. Which blends into I want because it looks tasty. But the two are distinct and I have trouble with both. Least frequently I eat because I need, because I’m actually hungry and my body needs fuel. This occasionally happens when I program or study because I’m consuming so little energy and moving so infrequently that my body doesn’t inform me it’s hungry until something happens like somebody mentions food, or I smell something cooking. I’d like to drop the “I can” altogether. This is just “mastication of opportunity”: I’ll finish off x because John Doe can’t and I don’t want to see it wasted, or I’ll get some cake just because Jane Barrett is and it seems like I should (No that doesn’t happen, Jane Barrett has impeccable taste in cake, but you understand what I mean). “I want” is the hardest and really depends on my body at that point in time I suppose, but I’m not against indulging in culinary delights when the occasion arises. But I want to be more conscious of when I choose to eat for want, because that can easily bleed back into eating because I can. And of course if “I need” to eat then I should, but at that point I should really ask what my body feels like and put that into it. I can usually tell what it does or does not need. For instance the thought of chilli during the days where my stomach acid was burning through its lining made me feel ill. Likewise when I’m actually hungry I don’t usually feel like chocolate even though I may want it. Usually when I’m actually hungry my body would prefer me to eat a certain kind of food which contains things it needs. I find it hard to be aware of this in some situations. For instance at work when a meal is just something to get me to 5pm, or when faced with a lot of choices for things “I want” which can sometimes droll out my body’s “need” awareness. But my experience is that practicing something only takes about 2 weeks to start becoming natural, or habitual. And that’s at the core of this I suppose: habit, which to me is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. I think being aware of your habits and consciously designing them to aid your life or fulfil a purpose (even if it’s just to stop you locking your keys in the car, one of my first experiments with habit) can be extremely beneficial. And likewise, being blind and unaware of our habits (as we all are of some) can leave us slaves to our own minds in certain aspects of life without even realising or understanding why as this experience has clearly shown me.

In other related news: I continue to lose weight despite the extravagant levels of overconsumption I reached before my food related injury. I was 55Kg (121.25 pounds for any backwards Americans out there) according to the doctor’s scales, a year low as far as I can tell, and that was only the first day or so after getting ill. 2 of these 3 kilograms I lost before departing Oz. The most probably causes based on current symptoms and general wellbeing are apparently thyroid problems or diabetes, neither of which I believe. Intestinal parasites I also rule out. So I’m just going to see how I go after recovering from this latest setback, and maybe go to the hospital if I drop any more kilos. I’ve no idea where those 3Kgs came from as I can’t imagine I’ve ever had 3Kgs of body fat, and the thought of losing any more weight seems fairly dire to me. I don’t feel any skinnier though, I was doing yoga every morning and actually feeling quite fit before this week, so I don’t really understand.