My Problem With Food, Part One

I do not eat like a normal human. Never have. It goes back before I have conscious memories. I am not difficult or picky but downright bizarre. It's something I've lived with...all my life, really. Lately I've been thinking a lot about getting help for this problem. But, then, what exactly is my problem?

I eat an extremely limited number of foods. It's far easier to list the foods I do eat than those I do not: peanut butter, bread, milk, apple and grape jelly, raspberry jam, most cheeses, french fries, juice, pasta (with cheese or alfredo sauce), pizza with tomato sauce, french toast, pancakes, some types of fruit smoothies, oranges, clementines, most cookies, chips, chocolate, and most candies. The only meat I eat, and only rarely, is bacon, and even more rarely pepperoni. No vegetables. That's it. And it has ever been thus.

My mother tells me that I had colic constantly as a baby. I would spit up everything that they tried to feed me. I don't remember this. And so my diet developed according to what little I could keep down.

All my life I've known that I had weird eating habits. In fact, I would just tell people "I'm not difficult, I'm weird". At some point, I changed that to "I have weird eating habits", in an effort to salvage some self-esteem from the sad situation. Obviously, since eating is such a social activity, my relationship with food has been a stigma and a burden all my life.

I became stubborn and stuck in my ways, not just food-wise, but I'm guessing that that's where it started. It leeched itself into other aspects of my life and became a character trait. I have been working on that as well.

I always figured that since my food habits started when I was extremely young, and that no one that young with any sort of survival instinct would willingly choose to be that way, that the root cause of it all must have been a very negative event or events. I imagined some sort of abuse getting linked to food in my brain, short-circuiting my capacity to eat normally. And since I cope pretty well in other aspects of my life, did I really want to dig through my consciousness to find out what this trauma was? Easier just to let sleeping dogs lie.

Recently my wife was watching a tv show about people with a weird obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes them gather stuff to an extreme extent. I was reading on the couch, not really watching but nonetheless aware of the show. One woman had so much crap in her house that it was piled 3 feet deep on the floor, everywhere, and she had to walk on this to navigate through her house. She even slept on a pile of this stuff since her bed was no longer visible underneath the tons of crap. I shook my head while watching, and remarked to my wife, "This woman has adapted to her illness to the extent that she no longer sees that this stops her from leading a normal life".

And then, bingo...I saw myself in her. Just like that, I realized that I too had become so used to my weird food habits that I did not even recognize how much they affect and limit me on a daily basis. Big epiphany. One of the "wow" moments, just not entirely in a good way.

So I have decided to try to fix myself. My first step was to recognize that I have some form of mental illness. Then I asked a bunch of close friends if they thought it would be beneficial to me if I sought treatment from a specialist, and to a person they all agreed. So here I am at 45 years old, trying to fix myself. I don't know if I have the mental toughness to do this. All I know is that there will be a long road ahead.