Neema Ejercito (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer
I can’t say I can relate to people with eating disorders, but I have certainly always been interested in learning about them. I just love to eat, so I couldn’t imagine depriving myself of this great joy. I watched media like To The Bone, The Crown and Everything Now, and hoped to understand how anorexics and bulimics developed their disorders and how they sought help for it. While I can’t say until now that I even have a grasp of an understanding, I definitely have empathy for those suffering from and who are tormented by it.
I was also not one to join diet fads, even when I was actively a Crossfitter back in its heyday. I studied up on keto, paleo and whatever other -o that my fellow enthusiasts were into, but I only took what worked for me, whether schedule or budget-wise, so I couldn’t really say I fully practiced either, not even for a period of time. You could say I dabbled in intermittent fasting, but that would be the closest to a diet I practiced.
I was a vegetarian for a year during my first corporate job, but it was cut short due to being assigned to Binondo, Manila’s famous Chinatown. Lately, I’ve been seeing more restaurants there being advertised on social media for vegetarian options, and back then, had I just had higher EQ, I probably could have stayed vegetarian longer. What wasn’t helping was my mom finding ways to include ground meat in whatever dish she prepared for me when I would eat at home.
I haven’t gone back to being a vegetarian, but I must have been posting about eating healthier since I moved to Vancouver in 2021, because when I finally met up with some friends on a trip back to the Philippines two years later, they gave me vegetarian food and snacks from a famous local vegetarian grocery store. I do find it is much easier eating healthier in Canada. I mean, on every trip back to the Philippines since then, my husband brings his usual staples here to cook there to make sure he keeps his blood sugar in check. It is too easy to go back to our unhealthy, albeit much-missed, yummy eating lifestyle from before.
Currently, due to perimenopause, I am finding it more and more challenging to keep my weight down. I even found the past two videos I took of myself at dance class very unflattering, hence unpostable, and they have made me wonder if I have to get used to my size now because it has been a while that I have had to remove pieces out of my closet to make way for larger sizes and different styles to hopefully flatter my new frame.
I am learning to reach for more savoury food than my usual go-to sweets. But I am also being careful of what my brain tells me when I see my reflection in the mirror and find a thousand things to criticize. I LOVE eating and sometimes I am done with my sweets intake for the day, but my husband will feel like having a treat with the rest of the family and I oblige. And although I may feel insecure about my weight gain from time to time, I have had no reason to feel that he views my body negatively in the way I do mine sometimes.
So when he asks where we’d like to get some dessert, I opt for sorbet or just order a cup of tea when I don’t want to get a pastry. Or I’ll get an oatmeal cookie or take home half of the new doughnut from the new place he wanted to try.
My relationship with food, I realize, is still changing, and I think that’s a healthier way of viewing it than how I used to. I view food now as more than simply about my physical intake. It’s also the food for thought of what my brain is telling me, and the act of replacing it with the gentleness and acceptance I give to myself when I realize I don’t fit in my longtime favourite skirt or the shorts I only wore a couple of times last summer. For as long as my body is changing, I work on accepting that my engagement with food grows as well.
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Before returning from her summer vacation in the Philippines with her partner and three offspring last year, Neema Ejercito did not realize that she still had so much to write about, such as the boredom she felt raising her eldest at her in-laws’ place when she and her husband hadn’t moved out yet. Or how surreal it was to watch her youngest learn to swim at the country club where she learned to do so as well. She currently wonders if she will ever write about being a mother to a bunch of plants, all of whom she adores and loves to watch grow as much as her kin.