Discovering a Relationship with Food: A Retrospective on Adolescence with Ana
Part 1
My first independent, adult experience with food was dieting. As a child, one of my guardians worked late into the day as a manager at McDonald’s, and the other had an avoidance of cooking. You can assume where that led. A lot of free fast food. Every single night.
For most children, the disregard and ignorance towards nutrition is basically a given. I was none-the-wiser, like most of my peers at that age. So my association with food became an unconscious excitement and dependence on burgers, fries, and cookies.
I quickly went from a tiny child, to a noticeably, eh, pudgier child, I’ll say… if only to extend my past self some modesty in description. One of my grade school friends had bluntly recounted their awareness of how over the span of one summer, I visually became a different person. Left for summer break a very small individual, and returned almost unrecognizable (okay, maybe that’s an embellishment).
Cue the dieting intrigue. Growing up in the diet-fanatic, skinny-celebrity-obsessed, low-rise-jeans-wearing and midriff-exposing 2000s did not help the matter.
To reiterate, I had no knowledge of nutrition. I remember thinking that blue Gatorade was a weight loss supplement, and chugging it down by the pound because of this misguided idea. All I could think to do, beyond drinking blue Gatorade, was to repeat P.E. class exercises in my living room. That was the extent of my childish understanding of “healthy living”.
After a couple years had passed, near age 11 or 12, I started to understand what the numbers on the scale meant. I started watching MTV, with shows like Fat Camp. I started asking to buy Seventeen magazine at the grocery store, which always conveniently contained a weight loss and exercise section.
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