PDA fae

Tag: eating

  • Demand avoidance and food

    Something my demand avoidance really affects is my relationship to food and eating. There’s also sensory issues involved, I’m very sensitive to taste and texture.

    Mostly though, my issues with eating stem from demand avoidance, particularly around preparing food. I swing between eating a lot of low effort junk food, and eating out too much for lunch, and then periods of eating very little of anything.

    The latter causes weight loss which always gains me praise, which makes it very appealing to repeat. The former causes weight gain, with the opposite societal effect – disapproval. Particularly from doctors, especially if I dare seek help for my chronic pain (which I tend to avoid and self-medicate for as minimally as possible).

    I find deciding what I’ll want to eat for the week ahead very difficult, and demanding. Even more than that, preparing a proper meal is too many demands for me, so I often eat take out or microwave meals.

    I’ve recently discovered, via tiktok, the idea of a “snackboard” which sometimes makes lunchtime a little easier – it provides variety in a meal and can get me eating fruit and pickled vegetables. Sometimes though, even preparing on of those feels too demanding.

    I really would prefer if, much like sleep, if food just wasn’t needed.

  • Update: struggling a little

    Recently I’ve been very lonely. I don’t see my friends in person very often, nor do I have that many. Where I live is only a small town. All the activities are attended by women in their 50s and 60s.

    My care coordinator said it best when he said ‘there’s nothing to do in X for 30 year olds, unless you like drink or drugs’. Suffice to say, I don’t intend to take up substance abuse to gain social connections!

    I struggled making friends at university in Cardiff. So it feels like if I couldn’t manage whilst surrounded by 30k students my own age, how do I expect to make friends in home counties small town? It leaves me feeling like the problem is me – that there’s something wrong with me.

    This loneliness and low mood has been making food a particular struggle at the moment. It’s feeling far too demanding to decide what meets my sensory needs, shop for it, store it appropriately, prepare it, cook it, eat it and clean up afterwards. I’m tempted to survive of Huel and toast for a while – low spoons food. Nut butter for protein, toast for carbs, Huel for vitamins and minerals. Not the best diet, but better to be consuming something at least, and it would be easiest with my spoon level and sensory needs at present.

    Hopefully things will get easier soon. I am very glad to be spending a Christmas with family, in the community, doing all the usual Christmas things. I missed out in a big way last year, and I have a lot to be thankful for that I’m well (not psychotic) this time around.

  • “Just prepping”

    I made a small instagram post about this – the hack of telling myself that I’m not “Doing The Thing”, I’m just “preparing”. It’s something I’ve used a lot throughout life, usually to get myself to study. It started in high school, I would set up my pens, my books, my computer at the kitchen table, often taking quite a lot of time over an exact layout. I’d tend to feel unable to start until things were laid out “just so”, but also that that was all I was going to do – just lay things out.

    Somehow, starting by “getting things set up” reduces the demand anxiety to get the rest of the task done. I think I’ve used this with tidying as well, with setting up llama life, or a pomodoro stream. I wonder if it could be used to effect with cooking, laying out the ingredients and the materials needed, like the dish, frying pan, or chopping board and knife. I imagine that might actually work pretty well.

    It’s strange to me how this is a little hack I came up with years before even having heard of PDA. I guess I have been living my life having to find some ways around the feeling of demand anxiety – a lot of that involved dissociation, which I think I’ve mentioned before I do a lot less now I have acknowledged my demand anxiety.

    It’s good to live a life working with my brain, not against it.

  • Food..

    .. is hard. Demands, sensory aspects, executive function, these combine to make food a complete nightmare for me.

    So it definitely doesn’t help when I start losing my appetite again. Might be to do with reducing my risperidone. Might also be to do with staff nagging me too much about how I’m going to lose weight – I do not need extra demands around food or exercise because then neither will happen.

    For now I’m aiming for low spoons nutrition. Smoothies, cereal, microwaved baked beans, protein from the freezer, lots of potato, meals that just need putting in the microwave or oven (and nothing else), and multi-vit water. The highest spoons food I have is apples, which I need to cut up to eat because biting into them makes my gums unhappy.

    Hopefully I can settle into a good rhythm, eating like this, that can sustain me. Smoothies are definitely a low demand, low effort way to get a little more fruit and veg than I was previously.. and the more fruit, veg, carbs and protein I eat, the less processed food I should need to snack on to feel full.