Member-only story
My relationship with food changed eating enchiladas at 4 am
No, I wasn’t up drinking all night.
After ten years in the restaurant business, I found myself in a food service job, cooking and packing 10,000 lunches at 3 in the morning.
On one of those days at 4 am an enchilada saved my emotional life as it relates to food. It was like I was breaking all the food rules I had learned as a kid, all at once. An inappropriate food at an inappropriate time, and it was delicious fresh out of the oven.
That day, something finally clicked inside of me, that there didn’t have to be all of these rules, that the way I thought about food for my whole life might be wrong. That there was a better way to think about eating. I learned that day that I could change my perception of food.
I can just eat what tastes good when I am hungry.
The back story.
I grew up with lots of rules around food.
There were many labels, good foods and bad foods, breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods.
When I visit my mother, I am reminded about this all the time. She sits down for three meals a day at a particular time, and at each of those meals, she eats certain things, or it’s almost like they didn’t happen. Having the whole family…
