Obviously, I accept that my own relationship with food is complicated and emotional, but lately it seems that everyone around me has an individual use for food (in an emotional/ coping sense).
As a child, my black and white naive thinking led me to believe that one of my family members was super healthy. For the purpose of their privacy I will call them X.
X has a physically challenging job, which requires them to keep fit and strong. So, they’ve always had a good deal of muscle and always been slim. They understand the metabolism, the bodies systems , the way nutrition affects the physical build up of the body, and what new fad diets are trying to hide from the public. X has always seemed knowledgeable, and has always been slender- so they must be healthy, normal, balanced, right?
WRONG.
Sure, x definitely gets in all the vitamins and minerals we need, eats lots of protein, uses olive oil, and eats little sugar, but they are obsessional. They will get by on very little for a large part of the day, then eat a combination of healthy and less healthy food items in large quantities. Clearly, given their body fat and physical capability they are not malnourished, but it is all or nothing; a whole bag of sharing crisps, or none at all; a whole packet of grapes, or nothing but water.
Then on the other end of the scale , I have another family member who has been overweight in my entire living memory. I see them eating quite a lot of decent, nutritional, home cooked meals, but in large quantities, and I see them always thinking about and snacking on food.
The problem is, “snacking” is an entire sandwich, or 2 bags of crisps, or basically anything that could be a meal to most people. By midday today, id seen them get through 3 weetabix with oats, 2 cups of coffee, 2 pieces of thick toast and marmalade, soup, 4 crackers, some fruit, sliced chicken, and a cupcake.
There isn’t a perfect way when it comes to eating. Everyone seems to have some bad choices in their diet. What the hell am I supposed to be like then?!
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anadancer 
Yep. Most of the people I know use food as a comfort and diversion. It’s just a matter of degrees. There’s definitely a spectrum. Some people enjoy food more than others. Some rely on it more. I really respect people who use and view it as an art form of different tastes, textures, and experiences. It’s really just a matter of degrees. For me, someone has a problem if he/she gets to a point where food is an obsession and consumes the vast majority of thoughts.
I think your right. But as a perfectionist and ed sufferer, it’s hard to imagine that the normal individual still has some habits with food. Kind of don’t know what “recovered” is supposed to be like!
I think that a healthy person doesn’t even think about food that much. He just know he has to have breakfast, lunch and dinner, when he is hungry he eats something until it’s full, he eats every kind of food (as long as he likes it obviously) and if one day he wants to go out and have pizza with his friends he doesn’t worry at all about eating, he enjoys it. I think this is what recovery should be like, eating every kind of food until you’re full, don’t worry about food, don’t worry if you want to snack, what you should eat, if you should avoid a certain food, how many calories it will be, if you have to work out to remediate. It’s so so hard though.
Anyway I noticed this too, it seems like everyone has some kind of eating issues and this makes me go crazy actually. I’m kind of jealous of my ed so when other people who are supposed to be healthy skip dinner because they are sad or angry or things like that it really annoys me and I tell them they shouldn’t skip meals etc (so hypocritical)
I would say ‘yes’ to your question. In this digital media age, where images are presented to us persistently, very few people can be thoroughly comfortable with their eating habits. Food intake is one of the few things we do have control over.
if a person is trim and fit, they have more leeway to eat things that cause others to lose sleep. If a person isn’t trim, the pressure is on them to forgo sleep to exercise.
Food is more than nutrition, it has become a psychological event.
If only it hadn’t become so emotional. It’s such an essential part of health Abd life- it would be far better if we could all eat for nutrition.