Since I started this blog yesterday,  I have been thinking about what I will write about.  The usual chatter started in my mind.  No one will read it.  Why not continue writing to yourself?  You don’t have a college degree and people will see how you always forget to put an R at the end of your because you get so excited when you are writing and don’t care to proof read.  I also thought, what do I have to say in this world of so many amazing people?

It’s hard to believe the chatter when I put it on this blank page but it comes and I almost let it and then I say, NO!  I am one of the amazing people.  I could almost cry seeing those words and finally believing them.  I have had a year of tears so I feel tears are not what I need right now.  Right now,  I need to shine light on my thoughts and share them.  It feels brave and it feels like I am doing something.

I wanted to tell a little bit about myself in this post.  What better way to convey who I am than with food because we truly are what we eat.

I will begin when I was just a baby or more technically speaking, a toddler.  I know that when I first had teeth to chew meat I would never want to swallow it.  I know that as a little girl I never wanted to eat an animal.  This was the start of my eating disorder.  Some of my first memories around food were waiting until my mom would walk out of the room so I could spit the meat in a napkin.

Skip ahead to about the age of 10.  My aunt told me about vegetarians.  I thought, this makes sense, I am a vegetarian.  I felt I found some truth as to who I was.  I felt like I was seen.  As a mother I understand that making a separate meal for your child is not a good idea really at all because it isn’t very realistic, so when I asked my mom if she was alright with me not eating meat her response now makes sense but at the time I felt like a betrayal and for many years I have felt this way.  My mother simply said, “you will have to fin for yourself then.”  I remember it like it was yesterday.  After this, I swear everything changed.

I remember trying so hard to be healthy.  I remember our refrigerator filled with meat, cheese, and skim milk.  There were chips here and there but there was barely any fruit or veggies.  I turned to chips and still have a love hate relationship with them today.  We moved across town and I don’t remember eating as a family really ever again except for holidays.

Fast forward to a few years later.  I am a teenager.  My family is changing and I am watching it happen.  It is really sad and I want to have a connection still so I start drinking coffee with milk and white sugar with my mom in the morning before school.  This becomes a thing we do together but it leaves me feeling crazy every day and not able to eat all day long.  Still, I think, my mom and I have a connection still and this is all that I want really even if I couldn’t see it then, I see it now.

I also started smoking at this age.  Another thing that my mother did that I thought was so cool.  My first cigarette left me so sick but I was determined to get addicted and because I am a powerful manifestor, smoking became my life.   This may sound like I blame my mother for all my struggles but I promise that I have no regrets.  I truly don’t and I see that she was doing the best that she could.  Smoking, however, with caffeine only made me feel less hungry (I will delve deeper into cigarettes later).

One day, maybe at about 14,  I noticed that I was getting bigger thighs.  I confided in my mother and told her that I had dimples on my legs and my thighs were growing.  The way she handled it really was terrible.  She laughed and said, that it was all downhill from there.  Alright, I know I am sounding like a victim here but now being a mother to an almost teen, I see the scars and it feels good to illuminate them.  She was a great mother in so many ways but truthfully this is when I started to become bulimic.

I don’t blame anyone.  It is part of the society that we live in.  I watched a show on a girl who would throw up and hide it and I was sold.  I felt every time I purged I was letting out all my pain.  Every time I went to the porcilain god I could let it all go.  Every injustice was flushed away.  My mother caught me and was so angry.  So I got better at hiding.  This is when anorexia came in.

I remember asking my friend one night, “how can I be alive when I haven’t eaten in a week?”  I would do this all of the time.  It felt like I had power over something.  I felt like the anger that I had could be taken out on my “big” thighs that were going to take me downhill in life.  This is when I started to become disgusted with myself and seek approval through my appearance and my voice started to fade into the dark.

I would wonder what bulimia was doing to me but I didn’t care.  All that I cared about was feeding this beast inside of me that felt nothing was right about life.

This is some heavy shit!  Wow….I think about this stuff all of the time but sharing it, wow.  Do I want this to be part of my present story?  Do I want people who know me to know this about me?  Am I bringing my past to the future.  Yes, I am and it feels bad and good.  Still, it feels like a healthy purging so I will continue.

At this age, so many things started happening.  Boys for instance.  I felt if I got their approval than that was the best way to know my worth (this seriously is for another post as well).  I was confused that guys liked my thick thighs and curves.  I felt safe with guys because they loved me for who I was.  It felt really nice.  My hair and makeup became my most important tool in life.  I would wake up sometimes two hours before school to get ready.

Oh yes, this is about food.  At school, my mom would give me $5 dollars for lunch.  This was enough for my BF to buy me a pack of cigarettes, a zebra cake, and cool ranch Doritos.  I am not kidding this is what I would eat every single day.  I wasn’t the only one doing this at this age either.  All of my friends were doing the same.  No one said a thing.

This is getting long so I will fast forward to right before I got pregnant.  I was about 23.  My eating disorder was getting kind of bad at times of high stress.  I would exercise and eat kind of healthy by this age but still purge at times and always starve myself.  I truly believed that if I didn’t look a certain way than my life would be over.  I would gain weight and that would be when I was at my lowest.  I seriously thought if I had any fat on my body than I was a terrible person and the world would reject me.

The day that I bought a pregnancy test I went into my bathroom with a cigarette lit in hand and knew it would be my last one (I started smoking again when my son was about 6 months).  At first being pregnant was terrible for me because I had to eat food.  It was truly hard for me but this is when the mother that I always wanted to have kicked in and I started to take care of myself and my tiny little baby.  I felt him kick and I knew I could be a good mother.  I knew I could take care of my body.  I ended up gaining so much weight while pregnant because I was so underweight before that.  Truthfully, I never felt so good.

I threw up one time while I was pregnant.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  I remember kneeling on the floor staring into the thrown that I had hugged for so long, thinking, I am a terrible mother.  It wasn’t truth and it didn’t feel right so I made a promise.  I thought if I was given this gift inside of me that I already made me feel so loved, than I could do anything.  I promised God and myself that I would never do it again.

Since I have been a mother, I have purged only a few times just to give it a try.  It left me with so much guilt.  Still, I never made a promise to stop starving myself, so that has been one of my drugs of choice over the years.  Never taking it too far but still feeding the beast.  I love to feel empty or that is what I have thought.

Today, I still have a hard time with food.  Being a mom really did help me be a mother to myself but this last year I felt a strong urge to starve myself again.  I could go on and on about my reasons why but I will save that for later as well.  I got in a bad habit of not eating all day.  My husband never really said anything because he too likes to eat and keep going like me.  Well, that is what we have thought.  We have thought to keep up with our fast paced lives that we could skip meals.  We thought eating together at dinner was enough.

If you are still with me….thank you and please know I am almost done.

Last month we went to Mexico.  We arrived in the afternoon.  We went to dinner.  I don’t travel much so I was just taking it all in and to be honest had a pretty high level of anxiety about the food.  However, the owner of the place we went helped me settle in.  He came by and made us feel an experience at his restaurant that helped shape our entire trip.  He served us in such a manner that deeply made me feel loved.  He made me feel the way my mom would make us feel at dinner before I gave up meat or tried my best to.  Okay tears of joy are falling.

I have realized that when my stomach gets full I feel guilt.  I feel guilt for so many reasons.  I feel bad about eating animals but I also feel bad about the people who have no food.  I feel bad about the chemicals.  I feel bad about colon cancer in my family.  I feel bad about getting overweight and people not loving me anymore.  I feel bad about my family growing apart when I was little.  I feel bad for hurting my body.  My full stomach is a foreign feeling to me.

I am learning to teach my gut to feel good when it is full.  I am  learning to take care of myself.  I am learning that I am taking care of myself not for others approval but because I care about me.  I am teaching my son what at the time my mom struggled to do with me.  She was trying to work, cook, clean, and do everything for us mostly alone.  She did a freaking great job in so many ways.  I am teaching my son that food is the biggest part of his success.  I can feel when he is hungry and I make sure he is always fed but yet at times I give and don’t give to myself.

I am working on it.  Mexico slowed me down.  Sure maybe every meal isn’t going to be a huge ordeal and a peaceful experience but I’m willing to put my energy there.  I’m willing to feed myself as well because that is what adults do and starving my brain and my body of nutrients really makes my life harder.  It truly does.

I am Melissa Adams Maness and this week I have had breakfast every single day except I did skip yesterday but today I am eating a banana.  I will not change over night but any habit that you start and decide to make will in time grow.  Any habit!!

I read this quote at about 20 years old that really helped me for a while.

Eat to live, not live to eat.

It helped me so many times to eat a snack really fast.  It made me think that eating is a thing that you rush through to keep on living but I have learned that eating is living.  Most of our money and energy on this planet is to make food.  I love french fies, candy, and chips.  I have learned to really crave unhealthy things but again the habit of putting healthy things in my life becomes a habit when I decide it is and practice.  I truly would rather be a little curvy and feel good than what I have done in the past.  I am learning and I am growing.  This post was fun to write.  I like this blog thing.  It feels good so far.

Bee Grateful

Melissa