Notes From Prague

So on my very first night in Prague, I'm wandering around the old town in a total jet-lag haze, just trying to make it until 9 p.m. so I can go to sleep without further messing with my circadian rhythm. I find an Indian restaurant (because what's a trip to Prague without...Indian food?) and sit down. The two women next to me are speaking English, and are talking about none other than treating eating disorders. When they got up to leave, I introduced myself, just thinking--you know, what are the chances of that happening? Certainly I don't go around introducing myself to everyone I overhear talking about EDs, but I'd been hoping to find an English-language support group while here and thought maybe they could help.

One of the women is German but lives here in Prague, doing a study about online parental support groups. Unfortunately, there are no English-language support groups here, but she not only pointed me in the direction of a therapist in case I need one (I don't think I will); she also took me under her wing, and we've been hanging out. And really, that's what I need--to not feel isolated; to share food joyously; to feel connected to someone here in my environment.

All that is a lead-in to saying that I am doing well here. Not perfect, but well. The first week was a little rough--I felt lonely and disoriented, self-conscious and overwhelmed. I found myself doing a lot of wandering around the town, then getting hungry and not knowing where to find food, and in the process of figuring it out, passing my normal-hunger threshold and entering a bad zone of thinking that maybe I should just "wait it out" until the next mealtime. I finally sat down and made a food strategy for myself--my kitchen is stocked, I always have snacks with me, I have directions to 3-4 appealing-sounding restaurants in every neighborhood. And the plan has worked.

So that's good. What's interesting to me is the areas in which I'm thriving, foodwise. There's a freedom that comes along with having no attachment to the bulk of the food I'm surrounded by; better yet, I can't read labels (metric? kilojoules? whaaaa?), so I can't stand there in the grocery aisles comparing labels. I'm eating yogurt without knowing if it's full- or low-fat and am fine with it; I'll order the goulash if it sounds good, not thinking of it as a "bad" food. My newly discovered favorite snack, it turns out, is primarily for toddlers. So am I going for comfort food, even without realizing it? Yes. But I'm not overeating it, nor am I attaching anything but pure deliciousness to it.

In fact, I couldn't do the former without the latter. Rather, I can to a degree, but there are certain foods that are still "fear foods" for me. I've had ice cream a couple of times in a healthy manner since starting treatment, but overall I avoid it, because I just know that it's too big of a challenge for me right now. The times I've had it have sort of sprung up on me--a course on the house at a restaurant. Now that I'm thinking about ice cream in particular: A few days ago I was walking around here and saw a gelato stand, and they had my favorite flavor. And without thinking about it, I got a small cone, and enjoyed it, and that was that.

You know what's remarkable about that? It's not that I had it and enjoyed it and let it end there. It's that I didn't even count that as a victory because it felt so totally normal. Dobrý pro mě!

Normalized Eating and Travel

I spent six weeks in Vietnam last year in a fit of post-layoff malaise. And while I was there: I ate totally normally and didn't think about it.

I thought about my intake, of course; I made a point of walking everywhere to burn calories; I noticed that I was losing weight and was pleased. But as far as what I was actually eating: I ate with pleasure and gusto when the occasion called for it, and treated food as tasty sustenance when that was appropriate. I didn't overeat; I didn't restrict. I wasn't forcing myself to stay in line--it just happened, which, even at the healthy place I'm at right now, seems sort of miraculous.

Part of it was the lack of boredom, and the general lack of stress--I do fine in immediately stressful situations that travel calls for and am not a freaker-outer; the stress that triggers symptoms in me tends to be more of the chronic kind. Part of it was not wanting to miss out on the delicious foods surrounding me; to only stick with the familiar (which would have been impossible anyway) would have robbed me of an essential part of the adventure; part of it was the need to keep my energy up so that I could see all I wanted to see.

But what really made it felt so natural to eat normally in Vietnam was that I was culturally displaced. All of a sudden, food was how the rest of the world saw it, not how I've spent decades seeing it. Food was not comfort, food was not love, food was not a salve for anger or irritation or boredom or self-loathing, or an enemy to be conquered in order to feel like I had a right to exist. Instead, food was a way of connecting with my surroundings; a way for me to garner energy; a way to get to know people; a way for me to utterly enjoy myself; a way to be surprised. Half the time I had no idea what I was eating, and instead of being panicked by it, I went with the flow (even when it turned out I was eating half-hatched duck eggs). If I wanted to have rice crepes with barbecue sausage at 9 p.m., I had them--there was no cultural cue telling me that it was "wrong" or that I would need to somehow compensate for it later. Other people were doing it, it was available, I was hungry, so: I'd eat.

The Vietnamese do eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner of sorts, but there are also foods that are eaten at different times of the day (and different times of the day only--some vendors would sell their goods only from 3-5, for example), and besides, my idea of what a meal was became irrelevant. All of a sudden I was beginning my day with a steaming bowl of beef soup--I couldn't cling to my rigid patterns or treat every variation as an "extra" or "indulgence."

If I was to feed myself at all properly, I had to simultaneously A) look at the people around me and deduce from their food what was appropriate at any given time, whether that meant eating pho for breakfast or ordering multiple milky che drinks because one just wasn't enough, and B) let my body guide me to what it wanted. Rather, let my body guide me to when I wanted, because what I wanted was also irrelevant, as I never exactly got the hang of how to find exactly what I wanted to eat. But that also normalized my eating: If I was craving glass noodles and could only find buckwheat noodles, well, that's just how it is, and isn't it good anyway?

I'm going to be spending a couple of months in the Czech Republic soon, and I'm nervous about what this will mean for my meal plan. I've sort of gotten my meals down pat--still allowing for variety and flexibility, but I pretty much know what I'm going to be eating every day. I'll be thrown into a country with completely different food, with a lot of fear foods to boot--potatoes, breads, dumplings, etc. I'm trying to remember what Vietnam did for me--and that was unintentional, and before I had the tools that Renfrew gave me. But European culture is closer to American culture than Asia was--I will still be in a new place, but will have neither the continual awe I had in Vietnam, nor the sense of total displacement that forced me to go with my gut in an eat-or-die sort of way.