From what I can tell, everyone seems to be passionate about food on some level. Countless friends of mine can talk for hours about their favourite meals and snacks. It's always a good go-to topic of conversation! It takes a lot for someone to stand out as a hardcore lover of food; they usually have to be a 'foodie' (not just love the taste of it, but know a lot about it and be into more 'exotic' foods) and a magnet for free food.
I am that person. For as long as I can remember and especially since my later secondary school years, I was the 'food bin' for my friends. Don't like your sandwich? I'll eat it. No questions. My absolute biggest pet hate, alongside repetitive noises, is seeing food go to waste. I can't STAND it. It means I always try as hard as I can to finish every scrap, down to the very last grain of rice, of what is put in front of me or what I have ordered (unless Sam's around to help me out - he has a bottomless pit). My friends are wonderful but it really grates on me that some of them are happy to buy food just to let it sit in the fridge and get forgotten. The amount of takeaway that gets thrown away in my current house is nearly unforgivable: pizza slices, whole chunks of fried chicken, kebab scraps, boxes of chips (well, I say thrown away...). Supermarkets DAILY throw away masses of perfectly edible food that could go to hungry homes. I know the whole 'starving African kids' line doesn't work on people any more, but if you actually think about it, there are people starving in the world. Think about the amount of money that goes to waste on food! Maybe I should start a campaign challenging people to make a weekly donation to charity that equates to the amount of money they've wasted on food they didn't eat that week. Either they'd actually eat what they buy, buy less, or help to save world hunger.
Anyway, back to the fact that I am a 'food bin'. One of my tip-top most favourite things in the whole entire world is visiting food markets. Places where I can sample all SORTS of food, often for free, and not even have to think about counting the calories. Little bits of food don't count, right?! I just love food markets. I love the atmosphere, the smells, the new taste experiences, and what I can learn. I dart around like an excitable little child! I've also recently been trialling different recipe boxes. I'm currently on Simply Cook, and it's possibly my favourite. Cooking is fun for me and I'm happy to spend a good chunk of the evening doing it (unless I'm very hungry!) and relishing the results. My dad used to be a pastry chef and still likes to cook Proper meals every day. I've subconsciously learnt a lot about food and flavour combinations from the meals I ate at home as well as the ridiculous amount of cooking programmes we would watch! My mum also used to bake scones and flapjacks quite regularly when I was younger and I remember getting involved. I should have done more when I was a teenager, but I think I'm catching up now!
The only problem with eating every last morsel on my plate or everyone else's discarded pizza crusts (that is genuinely the lengths I go to in order to stop food being thrown away - I accept it's a problem and perhaps a small step too far!) is that I can very easily pile on the pounds, given the wrong environment paired with my lack of self-control. I may have valid moral reasons for not wasting food, but when it negatively affects my own health to be eating food that would otherwise go to waste, it's probably not worth it. It's something I find really hard and I'm going to have to work on finding a better solution. Perhaps getting more involved in campaigning against food waste really is the answer!
Very recently I've had to face the fact that I've become a bit insecure about my weight and shape. For nearly all of my teenage years I was a slim 8st 7-ish, perhaps creeping up to around 9st every now and then, at which point I would healthily (and somehow easily?!) bring myself back down. I would sometimes get bummed about the fact that I wasn't very fit or toned and as a typical teenage girl I'd often check I didn't have belly rolls when I sat down, but I knew I wasn't fat and in general I was happy with my shape and it didn't affect me that much. So much so, I was sure that I was impervious to ever feeling insecure about my body, no matter what changes happened. This was only helped further when I decided to stop wearing make-up; I was secure, I was confident, I was different to most other teenage girls, and that was good.
I probably took too much pride in that, because it turns out that now I'm not within my ideal weight range (I'm still pretty much the same height I was as a teen, so the weight range is the same), I've become less secure. Not having the opportunity to walk as often as I used to last year + being around lots of takeaway food = my body sneakily reaching 10st. I've never been that in my life until now! I knew I'd put on weight but that came as a surprise. I know BMIs are unreliable because they don't factor in muscle mass, but the one on the NHS Choices website also takes into account age and gender so I find it a useful guide, and 10st at my height is borderline overweight. Now I know this is still technically fine, but I also know my body well enough to know that it suits me best to be somewhere between 8st 7 and 9st. It's not just that I feel more comfortable with that emotionally, but physically, too. I feel less bloated (which is enough of a problem for me as it is) and just physically better at that weight. I know that's what's healthy for me, so it's not a bad thing for me to want to get back to that again. It also means I can fit back into some of my lovely clothes that I don't want to throw away!
What is bad, though, is that I've ignored the increasing (emotional) feelings of negativity towards my body. I'm still not dangerously overweight, so I should just be able to go, 'right I'm 10st, let's healthily work my way back down, you've got plenty of time before the wedding so there's no need to feel bad, it's just something you need to work on, it's not the end of the world'. Whilst it is a genuine, real struggle to avoid temptation with food - despite loving to cook and try more 'exotic' foods, I still get tempted by a fried chicken takeaway meal almost daily - it's really not all that bad. But sometimes it feels it. Sometimes I do get insecure. I'm a human and I'm here to say I feel it, too. Even though I'm happy to go bare-faced on my big day, I get insecure.
Right now, I'm working on it.
