On Starvation

I was a teetotaling bartender.
But with food.

I starved myself for years but became obsessed with making food.
I would cook elaborate meals for my family, that I couldn’t eat.
I flew to Beijing once to see how they prepared duck at Li Qun Roast Duck.
I forced my wife to enjoy offal at St John’s in London.

I dragged my kids out into the boondocks of Chianti to watch Dario Cecchini recite Dante while he carved up Spanish beef.

I’m much happier now, practicing moderation. Even if it’s a work in progress, forever.

Don’t think it’s lost on me, not one bit of it.

9+ million people starve to death every year. The idea of inflicting this intentionally on self seems absurd. For all of human history, mankind has battled famine A LOT.
But we arrive today in a landscape of caloric opulence, in some parts of the world.
When I was a kid, I didn’t see so many fat people, I felt very much alone in my fatness. Today, it seems to be everywhere in America. There can be a multitude of nuanced reasons for this, some of it has been shown, through science, to be socially contagious. And so, like with so much else, self inflicted starvation may fall into this arena.

I did not find that self inflicted starvation was a useful tool, because I used it to punish myself, not to make myself stronger. Not to confront my damaging habits and compulsions, but rather to harm myself in penance and swap out one bad habit for another.
I’ve found that my path to healing has a lot more to do with ideas that make me well, make me valuable, make me important, and nothing to do with shame and punishment of self.
It also feels quite embarrassing to me that in a time when people are starving against their will, that I could intentionally participate in this act with some idea that it was possibly bettering my health.

I’ve found, that the only path that lead anywhere useful was slow and hard and filled with acts towards self done out of kindness.