I know what you’re thinking: Luna, you’re 26 years old, how the fuck do you not yet know how to cook? And to that I say: I do but not right.
Okay, let me explain. I do know how to cook, as in I know how to handle myself in the kitchen but I don’t enjoy it, so I don’t do it often and if I do, I make sure I use mostly pre-done ingredients so I don’t have to bother with prep stuff.
Now, I don’t think I have to tell you that that isn’t neccessarily healthy and every person ever that has ever looked into healthy nutrition will agree. Although I do agree that eating anything at all is better than not eating, you should pay at least some attention to what you eat, in order to make sure you get all the nutrients your body needs. And although I have already known this for quite a while, it took me quite a long time to also want to fix that.
Since I don’t know what your relationship with food in general is I will put a
trigger warning here just in case.
Although I never had an ED as such, as in I never deliberately did anything to mess up my food intake, I would say that my way of eating was very disordered at some points during my life. There would be days where I would be just so busy that I forgot to eat and some other days where getting something to eat seemed like the worst chore to do (Mental health issues, yeeey). And on some other days I would just be lazy and instead resorted to just have snacks or nothing at all. My stance was always: if there was a way of getting all the calories and nutrients that you need through some other way, while still allowing me to consume food normally, cause I do like food I just don’t like making it, then I would go for that in a heartbeat.
The result of all that: My body got used to it and with that my general feeling of hunger kind of “dissappeared” leading to me not feeling like I needed any food. One meal a day was often enough for me to not feel hungry at all.
Before you get out the bonk hammer at this point, (especially if you know me IRL): I know. I know the way that I was handling that wasn’t healthy and I know that this is absolutely nothing one should ever do. And I also know of the consequences this can have, have experienced them: lack of concentration, headaches, dizzy spells, fatique etc… That’s why I finally wanted to fix it.
Regularly working out and being fed up with being underweight (due to my extremely fast metabolism) and wanting to gain weight helped with that because of course you can’t really have healthy weight or muscle gain, if you don’t eat enough. So I really started paying attention to having three regular meals every single day. I didn’t pay much attention to what I ate, I just ate because getting my body used to 3-4 meals a day again was more important to me than watching out for what I ate.
After a while though, I started noticing that all that energy that I had in the beginning when I got my body used to eating regularly again started getting less again. That, and the fact that I was getting bored of my food showed me that I really need to fix my nutrition, before I would go back to my old habits and just not eat again and so I divised a plan on finally doing this right.
I decided to look for a bunch of resources that could help me with cooking food. Basically my requirements were that they are easy, vegetarian recepies that don’t take too long to make cause I still at this point didn’t really enjoy cooking so I wanted to make the step in as easy as possible. I sat down, did some research, copied some links, downloaded some apps and decided to make a meal plan for every week from now on, because I thought, if I already know what I will eat for the week, I will have an easier time going shopping and actually using the ingedients I have at home.
Since I am only cooking for myself I obviously don’t need to cook every single day because I have leftovers that I can eat and when I say meal plan I also don’t mean plan every single meal every single day but just the main meals that I need to cook because I’ll always have something different for breakfast and the third meal of the day.
After I had looked for all that, I realized that I was missing quite some staples that a normal kitchen should have so the next step was to go shopping. Let me tell you, it was really weird to go grocery shopping and buy all of these fresh ingredients, felt like a proper grown up doing that ^^
And then it came down to cook the first proper meal. It went…. oh, as if I could really build up some dramatic tension here… It went really well. Cooking with a recipe was as easy as anything and although I took longer to make it than I should have, simply due to my inexperience in the kitchen when it comes to cutting things right and organization, it didn’t take too long to make either. And… and this is the best thing about it, it tasted really good.
Since then, which was two weeks ago, I have been cooking regularly and the joy I get out of eating something that I really put some effort into and that is made with fresh ingredients really helps with me slowly taking a liking to cooking. However, I have also decided to not force myself to cook anything big, if I don’t feel like cooking anything at all. Pasta and Pesto for example are still a good option to eat when you don’t feel like cooking at all. Don’t worry, during those two weeks that has happened once, I am really trying hard to not let no-motivation-for-cooking-days become the norm again.
So, yeah, I am slowly but surely learning how to cook properly, getting organized in the kitchen and experimenting with different recipes from all over the place. (I am also slowly getting myself used to spicy food because I really cannot handle that well but that’s another story xD)
Maybe you’re someone who enjoys cooking a lot, maybe you have helped with cooking or even cooked yourself since you were young, but for those of you who are like me and really don’t like cooking, I hope this gave you some motivation to give it a shot. It can be fun and it is an extremely nice feeling to eat something that you yourself have made.
Either way, if you wanna share your experiences, feel free to leave a comment, I love reading those!
See you in the next one, til then, take care ❤
~Luna
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