If you're hungry, eat.

Against Perfectionism. Come Along Friend.

I don’t eat well.

I don’t mean what I eat (although for the sake of everything good and holy I should probably eat a vegetable or fruit, cut back on carbs and sugar, and overall balance my meals better. But who has time for that?), I mean how I eat.

Or, rather, how I don’t eat.

I have this bad habit of not eating until I have to. I tend to be hungry, not find anything appealing, then kind of forget about being hungry until my blood sugar drops and I have to eat right now! Then, I end up binging on quick foods (ranging from candy—yes it’s a food—to chips and cookies, anything to raise my blood sugar), microwaving something, devouring it in record time, and then, when the frenzy is over, physically feeling like absolute shit.

This happens about once a day. You’d think I would learn by now to notice my body’s signals that my hunger is growing and I should eat before I get to the food crisis mode. But this is my pattern, my rhythm, my habit.

It’s not healthy, but it’s what I do.

I don’t listen to my body well. When I’m dying for a glass of water, I grab another cup of coffee. When I have a coughing fit, I catch my breath and go have a cigarette. When I’m hungry, I eat quick calories that neither sustain nor truly provide nourishment to my body. That’s not how I would treat a friend. A friend, I would bring some water too. A friend, I would cook a meal for. A friend I would go for a walk with. But no, not me. I am not my own friend, at least not in action.

If I was my own friend, I would check in on myself, ask myself if I’ve drunk water, had a meal, moved my body a bit. If I was my own friend, I wouldn’t try and shame myself into better habits, saying I should be better. If I was my own friend…

There I go. Shaming myself again. See, whenever I start saying, “I should do this” or “If I really…” then I know that I’m simply telling myself to hoist my ass up by my own bootstraps and get it in gear. I’m telling myself to try harder, to do better, to get up and do something, whether or not it hurts or is hard. Know pain, know gain.

But that’s not how we treat our friends. At least I hope not. We don’t shame the people we love into doing things that help them. We come alongside them, pick them up if we need to, dust them off, and tell them that we are there to help them do the hard thing.