I just had my last Medical Family Therapy lecture. It was on eating disorders. My professor, Deanna Linville, is a specialist. One of the questions she recommended asking clients dealing with eating disorders was “What’s a good food day for you?” Also, “What’s a bad food day?”

I think those are good questions for anyone. Here are my answers:

A good food day is when I eat plenty and take the time to really enjoy the food. It usually means I’ve eaten real meals, not just snacked through the day. It means I wait long enough to feel hungry and then eat enough to feel full. It means I haven’t fixated on any food to the point where I ate it until I didn’t feel good.

A bad food day usually means I didn’t eat enough, or enough variety, usually because I let myself get too busy. It’s easy to eat nuts and raisins instead of a meal, or sometimes just forget to eat a meal, and I always regret it. I get weak, irritable, and stupid. If I eat too much on a bad food day, it’s most often because I fixated on a food (usually sugar, sometimes bread and/or cheese, occasionally meat at a BBQ or something) and ate it until I was uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s because I didn’t space my meals out enough and piled new food on top of old. Sometimes it’s a bad food combination, at a potluck or something, that gets me feeling uncomfortable. A random, moldy raisin made yesterday a bad food day.

How about you?

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, March 14, 2010.]