Let’s Talk About Hunger…
“Hunger is our body’s expression of need, appetite is our body’s expression of want and desire. Hunger is physiological, mechanical; and appetite expresses our story, our desire for connection to ourselves and others, our connection to our senses through pleasure exploration.
It is a homecoming.
It makes sense we’ve been socialized to believe these natural bodily phenomenons are problematic and dangerous in a culture that denies and or pathologizes basic needs for so many, and promotes disembodiment, or operating solely from the brain and disregarding the body.”
It’s okay to need and want. It’s okay to be dependent, we all are, and we deserve to have our needs met. When we have the access and privilege to look beyond the basics of meeting energy and nutrient needs we may be able to begin to explore pleasure. to seek pleasure (defined by us not by things outside of us) is a reclamation, a coming home. Consent is inherent. Explore the senses you have access to- What looks, feels, smells, tastes, sounds good to you.
At a moment when I wasn’t ready to recover, or to even name I had a problem, my partner at the time looked at me, with earnest curiosity in the grocery store, and asked if I ever chose anything based on taste alone. I felt seen, and scared, and so I leaned on the morality of my eating disorder to justify my choices. It’s easy to hide behind healthism, because of how the dominant culture applauds the pursuit of a narrowly defined idea of “health”.
In the absence of how my eating disorder narrowed my choices and access to pleasure, much more of all of me is here. With that came the pain of knowing and seeing, alongside the liberation of rejecting the outdated mold I was told was necessary for me to exist in, perpetuating the delusion that is what I needed to do, to perform, to be good, worthy, and have access to a static state of happiness . I am good and worthy because I exist (you are too), and a static state of happiness is a lie, insulting to the expansiveness of our humanity.