FOOD: FRIEND OR FOE?

I’ve always had a complicated love/hate relationship with food. I know it may be a bit surprising to hear as many people know I love to cook, I love to eat, and I even had my own catering company and a pop-up restaurant in Brooklyn for a few years. But my relationship with food has been a long road with lots of bumps and bruises, twists and turns. Like any relationship, it has required a lot of self-work, personal growth and it is still something I consciously work at daily.

Food has been a huge part of my life from the very beginning - both inside and outside of my home. I grew up in Hawai'i where food is everything. People in Hawai'i LOVE food. I mean they LOOOOOVE food. It is at the center of everything from our culture to our conversations. I also grew up in a home where food was also important. My mother was an amazing cook and was passionate about the food she made. She took much pride in her skills and her standards were high - everything had to be presented with such elegance and everything was made from scratch. I distinctly remember helping my mom as a young child, hosting elaborate 10-course dinner parties for visiting professors and foreign diplomats my father would bring home to entertain. As a child, food was always fresh and abundant even when the finances were less so.

From the outside, one would think this is quite the childhood. And it was. Sort of. To put it politely, my private world was chaotic. Outside the Gatsby-style dinner parties, life with my parents was toxic and volatile. My relationship with my mom was turbulent. I struggled to be my own person under the ruling of a strict old-school Vietnamese mother where obedience and compliance were expected of me at all times. I was to be seen and not heard. My father was emotionally unavailable so I often felt lost and frustrated. Being so young and not having a lot of personal space or freedom to express myself, I turned to food as a way of controlling my life. My way of rebelling. A way to get back at my mom since food was so important to her.  Food made me feel like no matter what was happening around me and to me, as long as I was in full control of what I consumed, then I was ok. Life was ok. I was somehow in control of a world I couldn’t control.

But that defiant mindset quickly turned into compulsive behavior. I was counting calories, dividing the food on my plate, only eating one small section, chewing 50 times before I swallowed. I was hiding food in napkins to throw away when I left the table. I would aerobicize excessively to burn off any calorie I consumed. I was constantly thinking of how to avoid eating a meal with others which was particularly tricky at dinner when my mother would serve us heaps of food as if we would never eat again and then stand over me and watch me like a hawk with her massive wooden spoon ensuring I ate EVERYTHING on my plate. Mind you, this is the woman who would constantly tell me I would get pimples if I left a grain of rice in my bowl. In thinking I was in control I was actually losing control...of myself. Of my sanity. My obsession with food was controlling me.

At one point my secret obsession became visibly noticeable. My parents caught me getting into the shower and freaked out. I weighed around 78 pounds at that point and I was pushing 13 years old. My parents and doctor threatened to have me hospitalized if I didn't gain weight.

I avoided being sent to a hospital and after a lot of individual and group therapy, I was able to regain and loosely maintain my weight. For the most part, everyone felt I overcame my "issue" with food. So did I, to be honest. And to a certain point, I had.

But in truth, my obsession with food just changed shape. My relationship with food was still toxic and unhealthy. Instead of starving myself, I became an emotional eater. Stress and self-doubt being the biggest triggers.

During my teens as a model, I got into various trendy fashionable model ways to control my weight and food intake - I binged and purged, I popped chocolate Ex-Lax like candy, I drank black coffee like water, and smoked way too many cigarettes - all a feeble attempt to stop myself from going on self-destructive food-binging cycles.

I literally fed any negative narrative I had about myself with food, just to numb things in my heart. To tune out the noise in my head. But I could never silence the shame that would quickly follow after I ate something and I could never resist the urge, the need, to rid myself of the food, of the guilt. 

So again, food was my weapon of choice to suppress feelings, avoid painful issues, skirt insecurity, and perversely believe I was somehow in control of things and of myself. In truth, I was a hot mess.

It wasn’t until I got pregnant with my first child that I finally came face-to-face with the real issues behind my dysfunctional relationship with food. Spoiler alert - my issues had nothing to do with food. Food was simply a scapegoat. I was creating life, and I was going to have to let go of certain habits in order to nourish the child inside of me. Starvation nor binging and purging was a reasonable option for a pregnant woman. Something had to give. I had to let go of my obsession of wanting to be model-thin. I had to learn how to love myself regardless of my growing size. Perfection wasn't only if I was a size 2. Perfection was the life growing inside of me. I had to stop looking at eating or not eating as a one-woman protest. I had to stop viewing food as the poison I was taking with hopes it would make others suffer for their wrongdoing towards me. I had to learn to let that shit go. I had to learn to forgive others and myself for mistakes made. I had to honor my feelings, feel my feelings and stop weaponizing food to punish myself for feeling those feelings.

Giving my child and myself everything we needed emotionally, nutritionally, and physically to both grow and develop became my new focus. It was possible to eat healthily and be healthy. I had the power to do that. For myself. By myself. I focused less on what was and chose not to stress about what I thought things should be. I instead got excited seeing the possibilities of what could be. This experience was something bigger than myself and I didn't want my past to negatively affect my future. 

It is at this moment when I learned the difference between control and empowerment. All this time, I tried to control things using food because I felt disempowered in my own life. But making wise food decisions for myself and for my unborn child was empowering. Food was just one small slice of the big pie of life. "Being in control" was no longer the goal for me. I was always in control. Of me. Of my choices. Of my actions and reactions.

With new eyes, a newly opened mind, and an expanding belly, I took steps towards making true peace with all of the people and events that troubled me in my past. I looked at my growing belly, not as something to fear but something to celebrate and be proud of. I gave myself permission to control what I could control and let things beyond my control simply be. I do have to admit, this was actually easy because as a pregnant woman, at some point you simply can't do anything but just let shit be because you are so uncomfortable that you don't care and/or you are too pregnant to physically do anything about it. 

But the bottom line for me was that I was finally able to acknowledge and articulate and separate out my emotional issues and keep them on a separate plate from my food. Honoring, feeling, and moving through my thoughts and emotions allowed me the space and freedom I craved since I was a child. And food was no longer the kiss of death, but instead a taste of the good life.