How has your relationship with food changed? 1/3/5

My husband had his band placed 18 months ago, and to date he’s lost 180 pounds (down from 600 pounds). One of the many changes that have happened has been the different way he now relates to food. When you eat half a stick of butter in one sitting, well, you’ve got problems…. He also tells me that he used to go to the drive through and order 2 or 3 full combo meals and scarf them all down before coming home for dinner.

Mike has now become a huge fan of cooking shows, especially Alton Brown. It’s pretty funny when he insists on giving me cooking tips. (One of the reasons my first husband left me was because I “was too good of a cook.”)

I don’t know what my current relationship to food is. I suppose I need to sit a while and ponder that before I have my band placed. I’m not a binger, I’m not a stuffer, I do use food as a reward, although I’m trying to change that to rewarding myself with other non-food treats. I do love really good food, and I love to feed my friends and family really good food too… and unfortunately, it shows. I’ve seen a couple of different therapists as part of diet and “non-diet” programs, and they were baffled because I don’t have any eating disorders, which seems to be unusual for someone with my BMI

I want to loose about 5 sizes, my goal is to be a size 12-14 and damn what the scales say! I worked with a personal trainer for a while (before I went back to school) and she was a 12-14. I learned the very hard way that the scales lie. When I was 19 I was an athlete and didn't know it. I weighed 190 pounds, but was a size 12. I was doing judo and tae kwon do 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, but I was still being told I was morbidly obese when I had a BMI of probably around 25%.

Mike and I now often split a restaurant dinner, since it is a very rare case where I eat the entire dinner. If I do eat the entire meal, it is usually because I will have done something really dumb like skip breakfast and lunch. Oh, and he really is my hero.

I like to say I was raised by wolves, but Mike tells me that isn't fair to wolves. My mother would come home from work and immediately get stoned on pot and pills. Every couple of months she would so us a favor and cook us dinner, but it had to be a "big" occasion. I can't ever remember her going grocery shopping either. My dad would never buy groceries when I was a kid because we "were just going to eat all the food anyway." He would buy 30 pounds of cheese and a 25 pound box of bacon and call it groceries. We usually had milk, although when I was very small the kids only got to drink powdered non-fat milk mixed half strength while my mother would sit there and drink whole milk. We would have to eat chicken bones. If you pressure cook a chicken long enough the bones have a mushy consistency.

I have to admit that I am a food hoarder. I do not feel safe unless my pantry and freezer are over stocked.