i mean, if you want to have a certain amount of vegetables, for instance, and you don’t like cucumbers, there’s enough other vegetables which exist that you should be able to eat something else
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do cucumbers count as a vegetable for health purposes
for protein what if i only want to eat soy products and dairy and processed meats
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ime there are (at least) two kinds of wanting to eat something and they can be easy to confuse if you spend a lot of time dissociating from your body
one kind is a bodily craving which is actually pointing towards stuff your body is deficient in, and can change frequently
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the other kind is more about like habit or emotional soothing, usually reflects food preferences i had as a kid, and is like... not sure how to describe this but the experience of both the wanting and the eating is "more constructed," less bodily
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there are a bunch of things i have cached as like "these are foods i like" but actually when i pay attention to my bodily experience while eating them i increasingly don't like the least healthy ones. the experience of eating them is oddly symbolic
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the emotional soothing eating ramps up when i'm under more stress generally and calms down the more processing i've done recently
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interesting :o i'll see if i can detect a difference in these for myself
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an exercise you can try is to pair
1) "asking your body" what it wants to eat; i sort of do this by visualizing a food although actually looking at it in the store works better, and noticing e.g. if i start salivating or feeling "wanty"
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2) "mindful eating" where you just pay a lot of attention to how your mouth feels as you first bite into the food and then to how your stomach feels as the food digests. you don't really need to do anything with this information, things should sort of update automatically
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o boy i worry if i were mindful i wouldnt be able to eat a lot of things but maybe that's okay
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i actually don't do the mindful eating thing so often; when i do the sensory experience of most food in my mouth is actually extremely overwhelming D:
all those old stories of monks saying that, actually, the gruel is very flavorful.
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everything tasted surprisingly intense when i was at the monastery. the first time we had sauteed mushrooms i was like h o l y s h i t
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when i went on a meditation retreat last december after 3 days of quiet i had a peanut butter sandwich on gluten free bread and for all i knew the rest of all existence was chewing
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i also had a grilled cheese sandwich that when i bit into it the entire left side of my head felt like was being crushed just from the sound
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