Eating in Lockdown

Ok, I’m not really in “lockdown,” but we are under a “stay at home” order and I haven’t been out in days. And eating is hard. Or…too easy.

For most of my adult life I have not fed myself. I eat a lot of takeout, restaurant food, fast food, prepared foods…you get the idea. So now that I am stuck at home it is a big change for me. For the first time in years we have tons of food in our fridge and freezer and pantry. We have been cooking–not all the time, but every day or two. This would all seem like a positive change, and I hope it will be.

The issue is that I am eating too much. I know a lot of people who are saying that they are having trouble keeping out of the kitchen, that they are grazing all day, and are “going to get fat.” I don’t actually have that problem. In fact, left to my own devices, I apparently tend to ignore my bodily needs for hours on end.

Yesterday evening I ate dinner around 6pm. It was a large meal–hot dogs, cheese and crackers, ice cream sundae, poptarts–and I wasn’t hungry again before bed. At 1 am I woke up ravenous. This is a pattern I have. I eat a large early dinner and don’t eat in the evening. I wake up hungry in the middle of the night. And then I don’t get up and eat. I go back to sleep, even if it takes a lot of work to do so. When I wake up in the morning, I am rarely super hungry–it takes my stomach about an hour to “wake up.” So it ended up being 9:30 today before I ate again. 15 1/2 hour fast. I know, I know, it’s all trendy to do 16 hour fasts every day–but at least for me, this is not healthy. Because the result is another huge meal–this time a large-ish frozen quiche and a large slice of leftover birthday cake. And then digestive unhappiness, wasted time, and discomfort.

How to break this cycle? I’m supposed to be keeping food by my bed so that I can eat when I wake up hungry. I even have a mini portable fridge/cooler to use for this purpose. I just don’t want to use it. It’s a holdover from diet culture. Only losers eat at night. Evening eating and–gasp!–night eating are the marks of the devil. It is a sign of good “willpower” to make it until morning to eat. When you’re done for the day you’re done. I need to get over this but for whatever reason it is more firmly stuck in my brain than most diet culture adages. And I need to work on self-compassion on the subject–but self-compassion is one thing and my body’s physical distress reaction is something else.