Do I want to eat? Or don't I?
I've had issues with food for as long as I can remember. I've tried to figure out where it stemmed from because I know when I was younger I wasn't concerned about what I looked like or how much I weighed. I've come to the conclusion that it started when I was in primary school and found it hard to eat around the other kids that were eating too. I guess I was somewhat of a fussy eater as a child so if someone was eating something I didn't like the smell of it would make me lose my appetite.
But from there it went on to secondary school where I would have just enough time in the morning to get dressed, brush my teeth and leave. I could never be bothered to pack myself a lunch the night before or get up earlier to be able to do it in the morning, so I didn't. I remember making a game out of it. Sitting in class and seeing how far I could push the table in to my stomach so that it would stop making noise. I'd make it through those 6 hours at school and then come home and binge on whatever I could find.
For the two years that followed me leaving school it went away. Or maybe it went in the opposite direction - because all I would do is eat. I would have breakfast in the morning before leaving for work. Walk the forty-five minute walk to work (as I was 16 and didn't have a car) stopping off on the way to buy my lunch. Normally that would be some kind of ready meal and as many sugary treats as I could carry. Spend all day eating, walk home and have a snack then have dinner and do it all again the next day.
Then came my current job, which I love but have never felt like it's an "OK" environment to eat in (it's a hospital). Between the variety of aromas I'm around on a daily basis and never really feeling like my hands are clean I just stopped eating on shift all together. It didn't help that I had started smoking and used that and coffee to get me through my day.
Earlier this year I had somewhat created another kind of game where I would see how long I could go without eating. This meant that I was eating my first meal of the day at 10pm. Then that became not eating for a whole day and having a meal the next.
Looking back over it all I can see that my worst point was going three days without food. I was at work on the third day and had just about finished my 8 hour shift and ran down stairs to get a set of patient notes before I left and came over all light headed. I just put it down to the fact that I hadn't drunk enough water and carried on even though I could see black spots everywhere. I had gone up a ladder to find said set of notes and at the top my eye sight went almost completely. I came down from the ladder just in time to black out and woke up about 15 minutes later laying on the floor. I got the notes, took them upstairs and left without saying anything to the nurses that I work with (normally I bombard them with anything remotely medical I have going on). I also decided that it would be a good idea to drive home. From then I made a conscious effort to at least fit food in around my shifts.
I still to this day don't know what brings on the feeling of not wanting to eat but I'm better at fighting it when it does rear its ugly head.
Natasha
