Confession

I don’t like today’s @thegfw prompt: #confession. I don’t like it at all.

To confess to something is to own up to some guilt, some wrongdoing, something hidden. And, when it comes to food, I try very hard to disassociate food from guilt, from value judgements, from what is “right”and what is “wrong.”

Like so many women (and men), I have a troubled relationship with my body and my weight. All the same, if I have a cookie, I refuse to think of myself as guilty, as doing something “bad,” just as I refuse to think of myself as righteous, as doing something “good,” if I have a celery stick instead. And it’s hard. It’s hard to divorce feelings of value from food, because (for many of us) it’s hard to divorce feelings of self-worth from weight and outwards appearance.

Foods needn’t be seen as “guilty pleasures,” and squirreled away likes and dislikes shouldn’t need to be “confessed.” You enjoy eating chocolates in bed? Good on you: that’s neither a guilty pleasure nor something to fess up to. It just IS.

My confession to you today is that I weigh more than I want to and it is sometimes very hard for me to look into the mirror. But I am working on being healthy rather than thin, and being happy rather than feeling guilty for occasionally having a cookie from the cookie jar.