Pain-Free Pass

--What’s a day that you wish you could have used a pain-free pass (either in the future or the past)? How would being pain or worry-free impact that day?

This is going to be another quick post, as I'm about to get on a plane.

I'm just going to say it, having given very little attention to this issue for almost the entire month of health advocacy posts.

Anyone who's talked to me since I got back from Israel will have heard about how beautiful, fresh, delicious the food was; what a contrast the catered meal at the end of the mourning week was from what an American catered meal would have been like...on an outing to a small village, we went to a falafel joint and I was expecting just to eat my packed snacks, but no, they had made a special point to have gluten free falafel.

So I had to eat falafel.

And therein lies the pain. I don't mind so much about the falafel day, but the evening on the last day of the Shiva, honoring my grandmother who honored everyone she came into contact with through her beautiful food preparations, I would have liked a pain-free pass from the constant agony, misery, concern and preoccupation around food.

These recent days I've been denying I even have an eating disorder anymore. I've got 'em persuaded my weight is where they want it to be, I'm feeling fairly okay with how I am physically most days, I'm eating three meals a day and sometimes snacks; I'm motivated not to be completely dead of starvation while I have so many things I want to show up for. But underneath it all, there is so much agony. Physical too, more often than I'd like.

These ten days between Israel and the plane that's boarding right now, I had a good rhythm and was feeling much more balance around the food thing. But I was alone almost every meal, in control of my environment. What about the next three weeks?

OK, I have to get on the plane.