Kate at Shapely Prose and Good with Cheese both have interesting posts today about “accomplice eating,” or the inability to eat food just because you want it unless somebody else eats it with you. It’s a normalizing behavior. You can justify feeding yourself what you crave but only so long as somebody else (and preferably somebody thinner) will eat with you. Because if you eat it by yourself, it feels like cheating or sneaking or lying to your boss about an illness so you can sit at home locked in your room doing drugs all day. But if you eat with a friend, that’s like cutting class to smoke a cigarette or having sex in a department store fitting room. Together, eating becomes illicit and exciting, while alone it’s just pitiful and slovenly and sad.
Or at least that’s how it worked for me.
And being on Weight Watchers made it even worse. I was already so limited in what and when and how much I could eat that when my husband, who is thin and very much a free spirit when it comes to eating actual meals, would remark that he wasn’t particularly hungry for dinner, or just wanted some soup from a can, I would nearly have a nervous breakdown. I would want to shake him and yell, “Don’t you know that I haven’t eaten anything since lunch? How can you not eat when I need you to eat so I can eat!” And it wasn’t a long leap from “How can you not eat when I need you to eat so I can eat” to “You clearly don’t love me or else you would let me have dinner!” He would offer to cook for me, or to order anything I wanted, or go to the store to buy whatever I might feel like eating but what he didn’t understand was that I didn’t need food. We had food. What I needed was for somebody else to eat dinner because eating alone was just not okay. Eating alone meant that I was eating when I shouldn’t be eating. I had become so removed from what my body actually wanted, so dependent on points and food journals that I couldn’t trust myself to eat without a guide.
Taking my husband’s appetite personally? That’s just oozing with crazy. It’s still a challenge, but it’s getting easier.
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September 14, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Meowser
Hehe…I can dig it. My BF is one of those naturally-small-appetite skinny guys (yeah, they exist!) who, like your DH, can be all, “Oh, I had a big lunch, all I want for dinner is some fries (or soup, or a PBJ — only one of those, mind you, not all three together),” and then I’ll wind up feeling like some hog at a trough because I want an actual meal.
And then I’ll find out that he baked chocolate chip cookies that afternoon and ate about five of them with a big glass of hazelnut milk, or had a big bowl of ice cream an hour ago, and then I’ll go, “Oh, okay, that’s why you’re not all that hungry.” He’s certainly not a restrained eater in the sense that he makes himself eat less than he wants, and he’s not anorexic by any means, but he also doesn’t feel the need to “chow down” just because it’s an expected mealtime if he’s not feeling it, and he probably does need less to be satisfied than the average person, fat or thin.
OTOH, if we have plans to go out to eat, he’ll probably save his appetite so he can really enjoy it. And he never, ever criticizes the way I eat. But yeah, not taking anyone else’s eating habits personally — tough one. He seems to have it mastered, and we just started cohabiting, so maybe it’ll rub off on me.