Eat.Real.Food.

I am tempted. 

Tempted to slip myself a quick fix. 

A drug.

A diet. 

A means to feel like I’m doing something, anything, to not be this way. 

“I feel like starving myself...for like two months”, I said

“Like only water?”, she said 

“Na, like just tea”, I responded 

“I’m down if you are” she concluded. 

I remained silent. 

What will I say to someone who told me she wanted to consume nothing but tea for the next two months ? 

When I get over my sadness and horror at the prospect of such willing self-imposed, needless, suffering, I would tell her this:

Sister, don’t do it. 

It is not worth it. 

It will only break your already fragile self. 

The same one that has been battered and bruised and abused by years of the inability to love your self. 

It will also break your spirit. Who is struggling to bear the burden of your heavy baggage 

As you drink the tea, you drink from a well full of water that makes you more thirsty than before you took your first sip. 

It will weaken you - body, mind and soul

Because with each drop you drink you are saying - I am not worthy of anything more than this. 

This is what I deserve for letting myself expand in the wrong places. 

You say, I do not deserve the substance of food or the essential nutrients that it provides. 

You say it and believe it. 

And you starve. 

Not only your body

But your soul

Is starved of the necessary healing that needs to take place 

Healing from the harmful beliefs that there is one way and an ideal that is different from who you are now. 

Healing from the lies that you can’t trust your body, because it is faulty and far from the work of art and scientific precision with which it was created. 

Healing from those that benefit in billions from your despair

If you starve your body, you will starve all of you. 

I would say, please, don’t do it. 

Please don’t give up 

Please don’t do what you always do when what you have done backfires. 

You deserve to eat

Food

Real food 

You deserve to feel hunger 

You have a right to satisfy that hunger 

It does not matter if your clothes are tight 

Or that you had a cookie

Eating ice cream does not relieve you of your right to food. 

But please, I beg you, stop masking your pain with food. 

Stop stuffing your face so that you do not have to speak the truth. 

You need to see that there are other comforts than the comfort of eating. 

You must begin to love and ask:

Is this worthy of me ?

Do I trust where it comes from ?

Wear on yourself a sleeve of well-fitting pride 

Pride that you can self care

And self feed

And love self. 

Starvation will never be the answer

For it is like a curse

A call for lack

A cry out for poverty

A rejection of gratitude

For the bounty in front of you. 

Choose well

Choose fullness

Choose love. 

Eat real food. 

-O.F.P.