Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

When I think of it some more, I realize that my problem with food is twofold, in a much contradictory way:

1) I like food too much.
2) I don’t care about food.

And this might be the very core of all this crap.

1) I like food too much: I don’t think I really self-medicate with food, but I DO place food at the center of quite an amount of my activities. Watching TV, for instance, or reading–although these past months, my biggest problem has indeed been TV. I like having something to graze on while reading, but I like it even more when it’s while watching an episode of a series I like (and I don’t watch TV out of boredom: I don’t have a TV, only a monitor and a DVD player, so whatever I watch, I watch it because I really want it).

On the other hand, since I often eat my meals alone, not having anything to read or watch actually makes me wolf them down so that I’m not bored and can go do something else again. I’m not such a great cook that every meal is a mini-orgasm all by itself, and there’s no point in taking one hour to eat if there’s no one to share my dishes with.

2) I don’t really care about food. Believe it or not, if I’m entrenched within an activity like designing a website, updating a blog, gaming, or whatever else that keeps my mind and hands busy, food is the last thing I’ll think of. It is very weird, because you’d think that with all my talk of being tired of thinking about food so often, skipping meals would never happen to me. Well, it does. It does to such an extent, depending on the moments, that I even almost fainted one morning when getting up, wondered why, then realized I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before because I had been playing a game all evening long and simply forgot to have dinner.

It’s not such a lovely thing, though: it leaves me starving, which means that I’ll be more likely to grab fast-food or pig out on something that will fill me quickly, such as fat-laden foods, bread with cheese or a pizza bought in less than five minutes at the nearest supermarket and popped in the oven. In the same way, even though I’ve started cooking more in the past two years, I cannot say I love cooking, therefore I am not exactly bent on preparing delicious home-made meals, and I still have a tendency to rely on ready-made frozen dinners.

Like I was saying in a comment on Jonathan’s blog, although I am often ‘afraid’ of being hungry, this fear probably stems more from another kind of fear: that of letting genuine hunger allow me to eat foods that aren’t so good for my health. I’m not afraid if I know that a healthy dinner, all ready to be eaten, will welcome me at home after an unexpectedly long day. Of course, this never happens, since I live alone, but you get my drift. It’s all the waiting time that can do me in when I’ve reached the point of being ravenous, if I don’t have anything to distract me.

Ah, well. I guess a lot of us have a somewhat weird relationship with food. At least, being aware of it, and of how exactly this relationship is expressed, might be another key to help us do what needs to be done, instead of doing what’s only ‘convenient’?