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How I Finally Learnt to Listen to my Body and Eat Well
My good god it took a while
I’ve never appreciated food before, not really. It was an inconvenience ever since I was about eleven.
I ate when I absolutely needed to and skipped meals like they were optional. There are plenty of foods I liked, but not really enough to bother making them. Or eating them.
It wasn’t an eating disorder in the sense that it was to do with how I viewed my size but it was disordered eating in the sense that I used not eating to deal with anything. Stressed? Not going to eat. Happy? Don’t need to eat.
It’s just the way I learned to live.
I never saw food for what it was — fuel.
Extreme endurance
When I left the UK to sail 20,000 miles on a little yacht, food became at least important to me. Sailing offshore is fairly physically exhausting. Even when you’re sat down your muscles are continually tensing to cope with the motion.
And I lived this way for three years. When I was seasick and eating in survival mode on ocean passages, I would daydream about all…
