Why sane people are neurotic about food 

It’s 9 a.m. I am standing in front of my fridge in deep in thought. What should I eat for breakfast? I am thinking aloud and I tell my cook, "I think I will be good this morning and skip coffee. I will just have hot water with lemon as suggested in all the detox articles I read. But wait, I see that watermelon in the fridge, perhaps you can make me watermelon juice as it really is a good cleanser... On second thought, hmmm, I am a bit hungry so perhaps I will have multigrain toast with an egg-white omelet, as that is low in calories and I get some protein in as well. Oh no! I have a luncheon meeting in an Italian restaurant and if I eat a bruschetta or pasta, I will overload on carbs. I can’t have the toast for breakfast. Do we still have some cereal? But they are carbs, too, with hidden sugar. Oh no! What can I eat that will not make me fat? I don’t know anymore. Do you think I am normal?" Without waiting for her answer, I rattle on, "I think I am not normal because I am obsessing over food like this."

 My cook is shaking her head and I am sure she thinks I’m a nut case. But she is so used to my daily pre-breakfast neurosis having been with me for almost seven years. Finally she speaks out and says, "Why don’t I prepare you papaya and your C-Lium drink with lots of water? That will make you full till lunch!"

Perfect idea. My cook is so smart! She knows that when I can’t decide, I end up taking fruit and a fiber drink. That’s been SOP for me all these years, but I want to give her credit for remembering and for putting up with me.

I often obsess over what I am going to eat and I torture myself about what I have eaten. I am usually filled with remorse after I binge on three servings of desserts. Like Baby Yulo’s yummy turtle pie, chocolate decadent cake dripping with butterscotch sauce and lemon meringue pie. All three after a heavy lunch too! "Why was I born with such a sweet tooth?" I wail to my poor mom over the phone! Now I have to stay on the treadmill for two hours more!

 I can, however, boast that I have not done anything crazy, like tickle my throat and do a bulimic act (like some people I know), or throw a chocolate dessert down the garbage bin and fish it out later, (like Miranda did in Sex and the City), and neither have I poured Clorox over delicious leftovers so as not to be tempted to binge on them for a midnight snack. (I saw my flat mate in Paris doing this). So you see I am not alone in this obsession over food. I have been, for the most part, well behaved about food, notwithstanding my taking to the scale every day and my daily mantra of "diet, exercise, colonics, fat-melting pills, acupuncture to decrease appetite, zero- calorie drinks, diet protein bars." I am as vulnerable to this all-or-nothing approach to food as the next, intelligent, rational human being I know. The irony is that the most intelligent, rational person I know is popping a seconal (those magical pills that get rid of all the fat and oil one has ingested during the day) after eating a few slices of lechon kawali for dinner or breaking into a cold sweat and swearing off lunch just because he or she had a couple of chocolate chip cookies and a delicious Frappuccino at Starbucks at 10 a.m.

I realize that food neurosis and guilt-ridden approach to food is common. Jennifer Garth, a psychologist who specializes in treating women with food disorders, says that "It varies in different degrees. There will be one woman who is slightly conscious of what she is eating and another who is forever counting calories. In extreme cases, there are people eliminating whole food groups from their diets claiming that they are allergic or intolerant when it’s really about restricting food intake. It’s sad because they forget that food is sustenance."

I will never forget one dinner I attended. One lady friend brought her own organic cabbage soup for fear that there would be nothing on the dinner menu that she could eat. She claimed that she could only eat organic food. True enough, there was nothing organic at the buffet dinner, so she stuck to her organic cabbage soup. This is a bit on the extreme side.

English author Candida Crewe believes that her own life-long "normal-abnormal" relationship with food is the same for all women and wrote a memoir about it. In her book Eating Myself, she wrote, " I believe almost every woman in the (Western) world has a relationship with food and an issue with weight that is mildly insane. It does not, however, prevent us from carrying on with the rest of our lives…"

Of course, while this is clearly not the case with everyone, those of us who are overly conscious about food will be nodding our heads in agreement.

Why do many of us find it so difficult to have a sensible and healthy relationship with food? Our tendency is to embrace all kinds of fad diets even though we know that once we are off it, we gain back all the weight. Which is the case for most people who went on the South Beach Diet and spent megabucks ordering their meals from top restaurants.

Most of them lost weight and were content with their weight loss, not realizing that the diet does not stop after their last bite of their Le Souffle-catered dinner. There is a maintenance phase, which is the most important phase of the diet. This phase should in fact be their diet for life if they want to stay at a certain weight.

The problem is that we are not listening to that inner voice which tells us that the best and only way to maintain our healthiest weight is to exercise on a regular basis, eat mostly fresh and unprocessed food when we’re hungry, and to stop when we feel comfortable and not stuffed. We should also be able to accept without remorse or self-loathing that it is okay to over-eat occasionally, especially when we are out celebrating and it should not necessarily spell a binge to end all binges.