The scarcity mindset

It happened again when my husband was preparing dinner. I felt a pang of anxiety- he was putting a frozen pizza in the oven for me (half, because it’s my favorite and he doesn’t care for it) and an old fear cropped up: if I eat the pizza tonight, then I’ll only have half left. Meaning my precious pizza will be gone forever after I eat the other half tomorrow (I eat a lot of pizza now. Making up for the lack of it for so many years, k?).

My logical brain says my husband always buys me that pizza to have on hand. Even if he didn’t, we usually have another frozen pizza in the freezer that I like, and if not, Walmart. My logical brain knows I’ve never had to suffer for my food, never had to worry if there will be a meal on the table…and yet I have.

Trauma lives in the body like a memory lives in the brain. Throughout years of starvation, my brain still thinks I might not be able to provide it nourishment. It still thinks that even though I’ve had a good stretch of steady food intake, my track record says it might not see nutrients for a while if I eat that pizza now.

I spent years telling my body “if I eat this now, I won’t eat anything later” and “I ate (fill in the blank) so I can’t eat that”. I toiled over numbers, trying to calculate how I could cut out even more calories. No matter how many times I promised myself that this was the last time, no matter how many miles I ran, no matter how much weight I lost, it was never enough.

So for years, I told my body no. I told my stomach to “toughen up” and my head to “shut up”. Eventually, my mind and body realized that somehow as going on and began conserving energy and my brain began making new pathways. Pathways that said “this is what we do around food now, we freak out”. Brains are amazing things though. Given time and enough love and discipline, damage that was done can be healed.

For a long time, I thought I was the only one getting anxious about running out of food. Not like the grocery store shelves would be empty kind of running out…running out of the foods I allowed myself. My light yogurts, my baked Lays, my Diet Coke…and so I began to hoard because if I ran out, what would I eat?

I bought food items during rare times when I felt stable enough to be spending money on myself and food. Sale on my favorite soda? Buy one and stuff it in the corner (it will expire and I’ll throw it out a year later, when I could finally allow myself to throw out old food). New flavor of 100 Calorie Greek yogurt released? Buy 3 and eat 2, a similar scenario to the one above, except I didn’t keep the expired yogurt quite as long. I was terrified of eating the last of “my” food. I was also scared that once it was gone, I wouldn’t allow myself to buy more- a scenario that most memorably occurred years ago when I moved into an apartment. I was excited that I had my very own place, and I took one shopping trip in the month that I lived there. One shopping trip to buy foods that I squirreled away and barely touched. I remember this time as one of loneliness, anxiety, and of very low intake. I recall going to the apartment on my lunch break and dropping in and out of sleep uncontrollably. I remember calculating how long my food might last before I would be forced to buy more.

Eventually though, when I began eating again, I found that I had a little bit of a different mentality- stock up, stock up, stock up! It felt like it would be the end of the world if, god forbid, I ran out of my favorite granola bars. I still have a little bit of that fear of running out inside of me- but I’m not hiding from it anymore. Instead of getting anxious about running out, I buy in bulk and restock my favorite items as I run low. And guess what? I’m not the only one who does this. A post I read a few months ago actually suggested buying say, 3 boxes of the cereal you know you’re going to eat most mornings. When you open the first box and finish it off, go out and buy another one, even though you still have 2 at home (obviously, don’t be like me and let the food expire, use your best judgement here). This is a great way to show up for yourself by not only allowing this food into your home, and claiming it as yours (you can totally share, if you’re able. If not, don’t sweat it…some day you’ll be able to- I’ve been there!), you’re also proving to yourself that this food isn’t going to just disappear. You have plenty, and you have permission to eat it.

It’s kinda embarrassing to have so many weird issues with food. However, learning how to navigate your own idiosyncrasies is key in allowing more food back into your life. You have to learn to let yourself be judgement free in this area. It takes time, and lots of self-talk. In recovery, facing “weird” judgements you place upon yourself about what you do or don’t eat is difficult, because it requires asking yourself how much you can really handle. You have to be honest with yourself, about why you’re not fueling your body adequately. It’s tough. There were, and still are, foods I won’t touch. And I’m learning that that is perfectly fine for me. I had to eat a lot of things that made me really uncomfortable in my weight restoration phase, and I often didn’t do it for me, I did it because I was told to, or I did it to make the dietitian happy and the scale happy. Sometimes, you’ve just got to find what works for you, and do your best to stick to it.