For as long as I can remember I’ve been overweight, as has the rest of my family. Until fairly recently I just assumed it was due to a mixture of childhood trauma and mental health issues that led me to comfort eat, an general bad habits learnt from my parents, however this week (thanks to a good old dose of continuing therapy) I came to realise just how complicated my situation really is.

As my page name suggests, I am an incredibly picky eater. I didn’t know i was picky until about 10 years ago when I moved in with my fiancé (we were totally just friends, even if everyone else said otherwise!). He very quickly picked up on how many times i would outright refuse foods and often react with disgust at anything that i wasn’t used to. You’re probably wondering how i got into my 20’s without realising how picky i was, and i think the answer is lack of exposure.

From my early teens my family fell into a routine of the same few recipes cycling round for dinner, typically things like Bolognese, Sausage & Mash, Roast dinners (although id only really eat it if it was chicken, and veg was a fight) and similar ingredients presented in slightly different ways. On the days where that wasn’t happening it was either the typical Friday night Fish & Chips (I’d rarely eat fish, opting for a battered sausage or chicken nuggets), or it was what my mum called a “do it yourself” night. I don’t want to sit here and blame my mum for everything (I’m sure she had her own battles going on at the time), however i can now see how problematic those nights were. On these nights my brother and i knew to just dig something out of the freezer and chuck it in the oven, often with no guidance in regards to portion control and nutrition – if it fit on the tray in the oven, it was a portion. As i got older i was also allowed to cook properly, but generally the only things id learnt to cook were either incredibly unhealthy, or were fairly healthy meals but completely the wrong portion size (any healthy meal can become unhealthy if you’re eating enough to feed 2-3 people).

Now if that wasn’t enough to set me up for a challenging relationship with food, I now realise that I’ve got a healthy dose of comfort eating thrown in due to childhood sexual abuse that resulted in Complex PTSD. I spent a long time in a place where I wasn’t safe, so I subconsciously started doing a lot of behaviours to try and protect myself. My food was safe as long as I stuck to the things I knew and didn’t take food from people I felt weren’t safe. Pre-packaged food was safe as long as no one had opened it. I also strongly suspect I’m on the autism spectrum, I found it incredibly interesting that my brother came to the same conclusion about himself separately. My running theory is that actually my whole family is, and as a result we never noticed anything that didn’t seem “normal” because for us, it was.

There are so many foods that I just don’t eat and for a long time its just been a fact that doesn’t change, but this week I finally asked myself, why? The answer truly surprised me because for probably around 80% of the foods, it’s that I don’t know what they taste like! so it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s that I don’t know if I like them or not. So I’ve started a mission to actively try new foods and ignoring my preconceptions of what they might be like, and for foods I think I know I don’t like, I’m going to try them again anyway! I’m hoping to end up with more healthier options for food so I stop relying on the same old things that have led me to this point.