Eating

I don’t eat well.  Mostly because the depression’s stillness and odd thinking makes cooking into a monster task that doesn’t get done regularly.

So I resort to frozen meals and sandwiches most of the time.  And I’m not even getting a variety of those.  I eat the same frozen meals over and over and over…

I eat the same 2 sandwiches as well.

None of these items is particularly healthy.

All it would take for me to eat in a healthy way would be for me to prepare food.   I dream about doing a big meal prep once a week and just having that be my go to all week.   And every once in awhile I do that.  But it’s a rare event.

I follow a subreddit called Meal Prep Sunday  and I honestly think that my brain feels like it’s accomplished the goal by subscribing and seeing other people’s meal preps.

I bought a slow cooker in the mistaken belief that this easy no fuss method of cooking would make me cook and I would come home from work to hot food.  I’m pretty sure my brain thinks buying the slowcooker accomplished the goal.  I have only used it once in 3 years.

I think about making excellent tasting food to make me want to eat better.  I watch a TON of cooking videos on youtube.  I have only tried to make one thing from one of those videos.  My brain is capable of deciding that watching someone cook that meal is the same as me cooking the meal.

I know that it sounds like I’m being funny, but your brain does it too.  The human brain is kind of broken in how it evolved us into thinking creatures.  One of the things that broke is that the brain can imagine doing something and it marks the experience as a real.  MRI imaging shows the act of picking up a cup and imagining picking up a cup look EXACTLY the same in our brains.  I think it’s why so many people, myself included, have a hard time accomplishing their goals and dreams.

And I fell off subject again.  Sorry.

So, the problem, as I see it, is to overcome my brains natural tendency to assign something as accomplished when it didn’t happen.  I think depression makes that extra slippery because obviously my conscious brain can see the issue but depression makes me forget about the things that should be accomplished.  It takes that feeling of the task being accomplished and uses it to misdirect my brain away from the doing.   ie – it’s part of depression’s stillness strategy.

This is why I’m a big fan of lists and alarms.  But the same problem often happens with the lists – the stillness will make me ignore / forget / or defer the list.   Or and this is one of the shittiest things – I will get a flood of thoughts about all the various things I should do.  And all of them come with some corresponding reason that they should be the priority.   This creates a barrage that guarantees a stillness in me.  I won’t leave the bed wen the barrage starts.

Again – lists are helpful – but they aren’t as good at setting up the priority thing.  Should I vacuum or cook?  Should I take a walk or draw?  Should I do laundry or shop?  Should I call a friend for socializing or should I go to a park a sketch? Except it’s never even a dichotomy it’s always a bunch of options.  So now I need to prioritize the list.

And more than that, I need to prioritize the reasons for each one, otherwise how do I really know how to prioritize the actions.  Ie – what’s the long term goal?  Is socializing more important than eating well?  Is exercise more important than a clean apartment?  Is being creative more important than socializing?   I DON’T KNOW?!

So I freeze up and don’t make a list of priorities.  And so here we are.  Me eating a shitty frozen meal for breakfast and wishing I would eat well.

I hate knowing what is wrong, how to fix it and yet still being somehow and RIDICULOUSLY defeated by this damn depression.

So – by New Years I will have a set of priorities in place and I will have a plan for the 2019.   I’ve got work to do on this mess of a life I’m leading.