Donuts, Video Games and Ease

When I was a kid, one of my best friends lived across the street. Her name was Jennie.

A few days a week, Jennie’s mom Betty would babysit me. This basically meant getting to play with Jennie for hours on end. It also meant going wherever Betty needed to go. 

Back then, playing in a bowling league was a popular pastime for many of our parents and once a week we would go to the bowling alley with Betty. 

While she threw strikes and picked up spares, Jennie and I would have a blast running around the cigarette smoke-filled alley, yelling over the loud music and crashing pins while spending all our allowance on video games in the arcade. 

To keep us fueled up and out of her hair while she bowled, Betty would buy us both a cake donut. I loved eating those donuts, especially the ones with chocolate frosting, just as much as I loved gobbling up all those Pac-Man dots.

A Sense of Ease
Besides my joyful memories of freely roaming the bowling alley with my best friend, what I also cherish about that time is the sense of ease I had with eating.

I didn’t yet have a diet mentality and a bunch of food rules dictating what I should or shouldn’t eat. 

I hadn’t been taught yet to count calories, to fear fat grams, to worry about carbs or to question if I deserved to eat something. 

I hadn’t yet learned to not trust my body and to feel bad, guilty and ashamed about my eating. I just knew what tasted and felt satisfying. 

Before diet culture tainted my relationship with food (and because I never faced food insecurity), I had an easy, relaxed relationship with it. It didn’t dominate my time, energy and headspace.

Like best friends and video games, food was just one of many sources of pleasure in my life.

After years spent riding the dieting/restriction roller coaster with all its rigid food rules, it’s this sense of ease that I longed to reconnect with. 

Reclaimed My Ability to Just Eat
By reclaiming my ability to eat intuitively, which included ditching my diet mentality and food rules, challenging my anti-fat bias, and giving myself unconditional permission to eat with attunement to my body’s needs, I was once again able to simply eat a donut and move on. 

This reclamation wasn’t fast or easy, however, the food freedom, peace and ease I reconnected with on the other side made it so worth it.

When was the last time you experienced a sense of ease with your eating? 

What was different about that time? 

How would your life change if you felt a sense of ease with your eating again, or perhaps for the first time?