I’m not an eater.
Some people are great at eating. I, alas, am not gifted in
the art of mass consumption. Food and I have a healthy and respectable give-and-take matrimony. There is nothing I love more than a good plate of swoon-worthy
vegetables, succulent kisses of fruit, balanced with occasional rounds of
lactose and gluten. But I also take good care of my body—meaning it also takes
good care of me. No more and no less. Excepting the few times when the mirror
disagrees, I manage to make it out of the house from day to day without any
major qualms about my physical existence.
“But you’re a model,” you might say. “Models always have
perfect bodies.”
Models, truly, have a physic that photographs well and by
media manipulation are presented in a perfect image. My legs don’t go on for
days, I’m sub-average in height, my cheeks are full, and sometimes I take
really bad pictures. Yet what glamour and an airbrush can’t fix lies much
deeper. I won’t own a scale because quite frankly the scale doesn’t own me. If I feel good then I look good...
BUT, Today I ate a lot of junk.
A healthy lifestyle, after all, affords occasional saturated meals.
But today I ate simply because it was junk. It was a fanciful smorgasbord of
sensual chaos. There was homemade jam, and biscuits with melted cheddar, pizza,
cookies, soda, ice cream etc. There was no fruit and there was no vegetable excepting the
tomato sauce hiding in my three slices of pizza.
Suddenly I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t feel good. Who was this girl and why was
she so hungry? I thought of myself as reckless, careless, and (as most humans do
in times of binged glutton)… I felt guilty.
“Hey Mami, ” a guy called lustfully to me as I was walking
home/burning calories/planning to start a detox cleanse tomorrow.
“You don’t want her,” his androgynous friend said. “She
ain’t got no meat on her bones!”
There I am again. I am the chicken-legged vegetarian who is
fit, happy, and healthy. I was not a weak person for eating junk food; because
at the end of the day, I knew my body would always take care of me so long as I loved it in the process. A diet is not perfect if it does not consist of love. Feeling good is a choice that happens at any
size or over any meal, but it is first and foremost a choice. A healthy life starts with loving yourself, feeling good about your choices, and looking good while doing it. So, eat some love today.
