Taste Awakening: My Year of Intuitive Eating
CW: this article discusses diets, restrictive behaviours and weight gain.
Taste Awakening
Bring me the meals of my year
and I will buy the next size up
instead of crying into too-small jeans.
I used to taste with a tongue spread with fear.
Now I use it to say “more please”,
to channel sweet, spicy ginger beer,
to mouth sticky sponge pudding glee.
Bring me the meals of my year
and let their smell wake up
some deep-seated memory that gleams -
a photograph in sweet and sour, a braised and honeyed souvenir
of days so far away they taste like dreams.
I hang a cherry in my mouth to keep your likeness near;
I eat to live again what has been.
When I sat down to write this, I was trying to write a traditional love poem. My head was filled with She Walks in Beauty and Bright Star and I was convinced that if I tried hard enough, I would scribble possessed longings into the morning hours and write something truly profound - only to be discovered and loved by generations of readers years after my tragic and untimely death.
So at first, I was disappointed when this poem was the outcome. But then I realised that this is a love poem: a love poem to food. And in creating it, I had started to gently unpick the knot that tied itself around my waist, mouth and mind during my teenage years. ‘Taste Awakening’ is about many things: making peace with weight gain, falling back in love with food and admiring its incredible capacity as a touchstone of our emotional memory.
But this poem is only half the story. It would simply cease to exist if I hadn’t given up dieting and discovered Intuitive Eating, which is a philosophy that pivots on honouring your hunger and eating what you want to. I used to think my hunger was the enemy: a devious scheming bastard whose calling card was an empty Penguin wrapper and a stomach full of guilt. But Intuitive Eating made me realise that my body isn’t trying to deceive or trick me into eating - rather, it’s because my body needs to be nourished. And there’s a kind of power in acknowledging that. Ruby Tandoh recognises this in Eat Up: ‘When you say ‘I am hungry,’ [...] what you’re really saying is that you’re alive, and that you want more, and that there’s no pleasing your soul until your body has been appeased.’ And as the saying goes, nobody can be wise on an empty stomach.
It’s not just physical hunger, either. Diets create a mental hunger - a hunger to be thin, to be fit, to be attractive - and it refuses to be satiated. When I stopped dieting and turned to Intuitive Eating, I realised just how much space diets had made for themselves in my mind: something that Alice and Cait acknowledge on their anti-diet podcast Since Sliced Bread. ‘Diets [permeate] into every single part of one’s life,’ says Cait. When she jokes about her limited knowledge of the Cold War, there is a much more serious undercurrent to her sentiments. ‘What have I been dedicating my time to in recent years?’ she wonders, then goes on to say: ‘‘I can tell you the calories in basically any food; I know how to structure a workout from start to finish; I know the mechanics of every popular diet out there.’ Which is why Intuitive Eating was so refreshing to me: my thoughts no longer orbited around what I’d eaten and what I was going to eat next. The frantic planning and obsession ebbed away. As Alice says, food becomes ‘one part of a very full life of other things’.
Food silently, lovingly fills the gaps in our existences. It borders the memorable and makes no exceptions for the mundane. If Intuitive Eating has taught me anything, it’s that food is normality. And now that has left us, it is more significant to search for it in big bags of salty pretzels, in hunks of tangy pineapple, and in the golden corners of our pasta bakes. It’s okay to mourn the loss of late-night shared chips, your Nan’s Victoria sponge or that heady first sip of beer-garden bliss. And by mourning them, we acknowledge them as part of our lives - which is more powerful than any diet in the world.
Useful resources:
10 Principles of Intuitive Eating
Eat Up by Ruby Tandoh
Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World that Wants to Shrink You by Sophie Hagen
Body Positive Power: How to Stop Dieting, Make Peace with Your Body and Live by Megan Jayne Crabbe
Written by Molly Cheek
Molly works in administration for her local town council. She has a degree in English Literature from Cardiff University, primarily studying 19th-century literature and women writers of the period. She writes poetry and songs, and enjoys walking around Bristol, Somerset and beyond.