I’ve had a complicated relationship with food my whole life. I’ve mentioned it in passing, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately so I thought I might as well write a whole post about it.
I don’t know why I internalized the idea that slim is better – and definitely prettier – since I don’t remember my mother being particularly obsessive about food or weight, but somehow I did. (Not much of a mystery, given our skinny-crazy culture) Maybe it went along with how self-conscious I was about everything as a teenager. I was too tall, my hair was too crazy, and I was definitely too fat. I went on my first diet at around age 17. I remember it very well. It was called the Bread Diet and it limited you to 1200 calories a day, but you had to eat two pieces of bread at every meal—without butter! I lost 10 pounds in a month, promptly quit the diet and then gained it all back. Of course, this was the pattern for many other diets to come.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned in some previous post that my mother’s mother was horrified by fat people. She would say scathing things about anyone who, in her mind, “couldn’t control themselves” and “let themselves go”. As much as I loved my Grandma, her attitude made me uncomfortable, though the way she expressed her opinion was so adamant I was too intimidated to argue with her. My mother, who generally always carried a bit of extra weight, must have picked up on her implied criticism, since Grandma had no qualms about saying these things in front of her. Anyway, somehow or other, whether from my family or our culture, I managed to digest the idea that I was fat. (excuse the pun!)
Being sick with pancreatic cancer means that eating has become more complicated still. I have to take enzymes to help me digest most things (except fruit and veg), and every once in awhile my appetite takes a nosedive because of the chemo. During the horrible period where I was taking Folfirinox I could barely get a few mouthfuls down at each meal, but I had to make every effort to ingest some calories, so the torture of trying to eat when I was pretty sure it would all come back up, or that I wouldn’t be able to swallow because my mouth was sore, was repeated at two-hour intervals. I won’t go on about the trials of Folfirinox, but believe me, they were plentiful!
As I mentioned in my last post, I lost 40 pounds between January and June, from 185 lbs. down to 145 lbs., which was horrifying to watch. I started with an extra twenty pounds over what a “healthy weight” is meant to be for me, so for the first little while I wasn’t too worried, but as time went on and I kept losing weight, I started to get nervous. In my adult life I’ve never weighed less than 155 lbs I don’t think. In fact, I was probably that weigh when I went on the Bread Diet. I would often say to Dave and Erica, when I was trying unsuccessfully to eat: “I’m wasting away!!” Or “I’m going to die of starvation!”. Of course, there was no danger of it, but it felt like a certainty at that moment. I tried counting up the pathetic mouthfuls I’d been able to eat during the day and I would despair. The hard part was having no control over it. Back when I was healthy, I thought I had no control over my weight, but this was REALLY having no control.
It was during the most desperate moments of my chemo that we started watching The Great British Bake-off. Dave and I would sit on the couch, in front of my iPad (we still do this pretty often, actually) and watch a few episodes every evening between dinner and bedtime (around 9 pm these days). It’s a way of distracting my mind from the pain and illness I’m experiencing. I’m really enjoying the show and it somehow makes up for the food I can’t always appreciate fully. It also inspires me to want to cook and bake. So far I’m not doing much of it, but it’s something I would like to do once I have a bit more energy. Dave has always been the primary cook of our family, so I’ve never bothered to master all the basic techniques. I wasn’t all that interested since Dave was a good cook, and he enjoyed it, so why should I take over a task he was more than willing to perform? In order to control my urge to snack on cookies etc, I made a rule at one point that if I wanted a cookie or a muffin I had to make it myself rather than buy it. That led me to do more baking than I would have otherwise and the kids started to explain to people, “Dad’s the cooker and Mom’s the baker”.
One the plus side, I’ve started to take the time to realize how wonderful certain foods still are (to me). For instance, I always enjoyed mangoes and watermelon, but now I’m really savouring them. Fresh lemonade is just the bomb. Taking the time to enjoy these things helps make up for not being able to enjoy certain other foods because they just taste weird to me due to the chemo. I went in for the second chemo of this cycle yesterday and I’m worried that the food-tasting-off phenomena will be even worse as time goes on. They say that the side effects from chemo get worse with each treatment. Boo!
In the last few years I’ve tried very hard to let go of my obsessive thoughts about eating and weight, but what really helped me stop worrying about it was when I started exercising regularly last September. Just knowing I was moving my body and getting stronger made me stop worrying about my weight. I’m glad I got to that point, but I wish it had happened sooner. It’s not the first time I ever exercised, by the way, but it’s the first time I made a decision I was committed to for the long haul. I knew it was no longer optional. I kept it up into December but after that my health and energy were really starting to ebb and my exercise regime petered out.
Getting back to my recent weight loss, if I had lost the weight deliberately, especially in my youth, I’d probably have felt accomplished, svelte and beautiful, but as it is, it’s hard to take any pleasure in the fact that I’m at a weight I would never have thought attainable (or even desirable, frankly) before getting sick. I think I’m still at an okay weight for my height, though probably on the lower end of the BMI (or has the BMI been debunked already? I can’t keep up). I’m so used to being a robust woman (how many ways can you avoid saying fat?) that I assume that anyone seeing me walk down the street must see that I’m a cancer patient, but I have to remind myself that I don’t assume that about every slim woman I see! Anyway, because I’m not completely in control of how much I can eat these days, it still worries me that I’m this thin. If I had been on a diet, I would now be worrying about gaining back all that weight, but instead I’m worried about losing more. How ironic!
As you can maybe read between the lines, I’m not completely over the angst about my body, but being sick puts these things in better perspective. Without even trying, my priorities have changed and my eyes have been opened about more than one aspect of my life. These insights have been among the few pluses of my situation.
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