"Recovery"*

I'm stuck, once again, in the weird limbo of pseudo recovery.

I'll eat something tasty and "off plan" because I want it and the recovery mindset suggests I can and probably should, but that will create the insatiable urge to devour more decadent treats, triggering a binge. Whether or not I binge on those specific craving items or just whatever I have and can get my hands on is hardly relevant, but the unfortunate fact is I find myself chowing down beyond the little allowable treat.

So with this in mind, I have 2 possible solutions:

1) I just stay on track, don't indulge in off-plan foods, and eat the same small handful of allowable foods for the rest of eternity.

Or,

2) I just eat nothing but enjoyable, non-nutritive, indulgent, fattening craving foods until the craving dies, triggering binge after binge in the hopes that my binges are simply fuelled by the mental restriction ("I can't have X") and not some other unknown factor.

The question really becomes: which of these, if any, is actually recovery focussed? And beyond that point, is recovery really what I want? 

Am I the weird one for eating based on logic, thought, fore-planning and macro counting, or is the rest of the population just woefully ignorant and misinformed with their emotional decision making around food choices?

Do either of these dichotomised options - eat to a plan vs eat like a chid - actually make sense? Do we look to evolutionary theory for answers? If so, surely our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten what they could get their hands on, regardless of if they were "feeling something sweet". Would this translate to "eat what you should" in our modern era?

Furthermore, where do each of my solutions lead? In deciding to eat predetermined meals, I'm essentially locking myself into a lifetime of making conscious, frontal brain decisions on food, with the alternative suggesting a more intuitive eating, follow your feeling approach.

Truthfully, and it should come as no surprise, I find there to be nothing intuitive about eating. Sure, eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full makes sense on paper, but where do we learn what hunger feels like and what does a person do if those hunger/fullness cues don't work or aren't understood? I also find it recklessly naive to assume that our bodies will crave and ask for what is best for them when we have choices like cheeseburgers and chocolates available. Let us not forget that food is a for-profit industry. Major corporations spend millions on research and development to ensure their offerings are not only moreish, but so moreish you go with their shiny object and not their competitor's.

That's certainly something our ancestors didn't have to worry about when the meals on offer were the chicken you can't catch or the bull that is fast asleep.

With food production as it is, we've found ourselves in the gleeful predicament of choice beyond our wildest dreams. Could you imagine a meek villager or lone nomad suggesting he didn't feel like the ox that was leftover from the hunt? Imagine a tribe chieftain going to the effort of providing a bounty, and someone decides they don't want to try innards. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going full Liver King and suggesting anything for the ancestral lifestyle, but there is something to be said for our selfishness and greed, we take a lot for granted in this fashion.

There is, undeniably, a part of me that fears losing my current physique and the opportunity to improve it. I'm not even where I want to be right now, what would it do to my mental health should I go further from a place where I'm comfortable in my meat suit? What is my identity if not a person who eats with utility in mind? But also, how bad could it really be if I do happen to get "fat"? Sure, I'd be settling for mediocrity and be part of the majority population, what's wrong with that?

That being said, let's not forget that food has a real and sincere impact on the way our body functions. I know that after a binge I'm left feeling hungover and lethargic, with awful consequences on my gut, further throwing my appetite out of whack and perpetuating cravings for similar junk foods. Do I want to live like that? Do I want to struggle in the gym from the after effects of a sudden influx of a specially curated and propriety cocktail of sugars and chemicals?

All this is to suggest that there is a right way to eat. Some blanket way that all humans should sustain their existence. Almost sounds a little... black and white, wouldn't you say? Almost like the cognitive tools I'm using to tackle the question of recovery are, in and of themselves, part of the disorder I'm suggesting to be in recovery from. 

I must remind myself that this flesh bag, my meat suit, this suit of armour for my living bits- that's all it is. People don't care what it looks like. If they do? Fuck 'em. My body has changed a million times already. I didn't complain about growing 300% in the first 3 years of life, why would I complain about growing 2% now? Deciding on how to eat isn't actually a permanent thing. I can eat like a child tomorrow and return to veganism (heaven forbid) the next. Hell, maybe there'll come a time where I do carnivore for a month again. With such a robust and varied history of different ways of eating, surely I recognise by now that it's really not about making a final choice and never changing ever again.

Anyway. This is what "recovery"* looks like.