Do you ever have those supermarket shops where everything you pick up seems to be oddly, unintentionally ED-orientated? I just had one of those shops. I met Tina for a late-night coffee (I hadn't seen her in weeks, due to overlapping vacations and lack of time) - it was lovely, and we caught up on everything. Decided to go for a swan around Tesco's - casual trippy 10pm supermarket times, as you do. We walked around all the aisles, plucking things off the shelves as we went. It was more of an excuse to hang out in the warm, more than anything. I barely concentrated on what I picked up, until checkout, when I realised everything I'd selected was either low-calorie, fat-free, or just plain eating disordered. I had picked up those mini cans of tuna, the ones with 54cals per tin (granted, I've been craving those for ages, but I didn't get the normal tins, I got the ones I get when I'm restricting). Also on my grocery list: fat-free strawberry yogurt, bran cereal, rice cakes, hot sauce (the Ocal kind), sugarfree jelly, salted cashews, Thai noodle cup-a-soup (also 54cals), and diet coke.
The thing that concerns me is that I didn't even pay attention to what I was taking off the shelves. It's like I was on autopilot or something. HOW ON EARTH am I going to manage at university, if my sub-conscious default is to select these kinds of foods? I mean, I don't even think I have to compare calories on packaging anymore. I know nutritional labels so well, it's almost an unconscious reflex to pick up the lowest-calorie, lowest-fat products without even having to think about it. This scares me a little bit, because it actually takes more effort and thought to select 'normal' foods that a 'normal' person would eat from a supermarket, than to come out with the most disordered grocery shop I could muster.
Another note on this: I think I'm becoming a food hoarder. Like, not even joking: I buy cans of soup for our cupboard even though there's already like, 8 untouched tins in there. I've got cream of tomato, leek and potato, mushroom, Chinese broth, tinned chopped tomatoes (basically soup), baked beans (in a soup-like can), now these Thai cup-a-soups, on top of my extensive collection of Light Choices vegetable cup-a-soups (which contain enough sodium to kill a small dog). Do I need more soup? -No. Am I on a special soup diet? -No. Am I preparing rations for hibernation? -Hardly. So my compulsive soup-buying behaviour disturbs me. I'm also the same with portioned packets of diet hot chocolate, sweetener sachets from Starbucks, and, recently, yogurt.
Little worried here.
Haven't checked my weight in two days. Probably a good thing, but feels fucking terrifying.
No comments:
Post a Comment