A Food Origin Story
This blog discusses my food origin story which talks about how my relationship with food developed to where it is today.
Changing how I eat has been the hardest shift I’ve had to make in this journey to become a swole paladin, devotee of the god of muscle.
I thought I’d take the time to share my reasons for why it was so hard for me. I want you to realize that you aren’t alone in your struggle to either get your weight under control or to make changes to the way you eat. I wanted to do this by sharing my food backstory with you.
A food back story is the origins of your relationship with food and how it got to where it is today. It’s a good exercise to improve your ownership of what you consume and a great meditation on why you eat the way you do. I highly recommend you try making your own food backstory as a precursor to any food based lifestyle change.
So without further ado:
A Portrait of an Adventurous Eater
A Portrait of an Adventurous Eater
Why I eat the way I do, and how I enjoyed getting there.
It all began when I was a small child, newly arrived from the jungles of the Philippines onto the pristine shores of California.
I had immigrated here with my mother through the hard work of my father, whose first act when we arrived was to take us out to a Thai restaurant. Upon stepping into the restaurant, my four year old self ran back out the door, dry heaving. The scents and odors (so foreign to my young nose) were….repulsive. For the first four years of my life, I was fed typical Filipino food, usually consisting of rice, some sort of processed meat, and maybe a vegetable. This…smell of tumeric, tamarind, and fish sauce was not one that was associated with delicious food. After some coaxing forcing, I acquiesced and tried what would become one of my favorite dishes: pad thai. I instantly fell in love. The dish was savory, sweet, sour, and salty all at once…and while it took a bit for my nose to adjust to the unique scents, that first bite changed everything. There was a whole world of food out there waiting for me to try.
There is so much great food out there to try. (Art by Midjourney AI)
While many kids my age were getting fed pizza and hot dogs, I was blessed with a father who was an adventurous eater. I didn’t quite appreciate it then, but my food palette developed the way it did because of the wide variety of cuisine I got to eat when I was younger. My dad would take me to try all sorts of foods: Thai, Chinese, Mexican, Spanish, French, Peruvian, Italian, Persian, Cajun, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino—every week he would take me somewhere new. I was quite lucky to grow up near the melting pot that is Los Angeles, where finding these restaurants is much easier.
The side effect of all this love of food, however, was weight gain.
I was never the fattest kid in class, but I was definitely chubby for most of my life. Food was an experience to be enjoyed rather than simple fuel for the body. Food brought happiness into my life in a way that few things can. Some of the best moments in my life were spent with friends and family sharing a great meal together. Now, when something makes you feel the way that food did for me…it’s only natural that you would chase more of these experiences.
Learning to cook exotic foods is something I want to build expertise in.
As the years passed, this curiosity and love of food turned to obsession. I wanted to learn how to make it. I read books on it. I wanted to find the best versions of it. I wrote about it. I would seek out the best restaurants and dishes in the world, and basically plan my trips around eating it. And honestly that is something I do not regret. I love food, and I always will. However, too much of a good thing can lead to some negative consequences.
The weight gain continued to pile on, and I developed things like sleep apnea which caused me to have a much lower quality of life due to it affecting my sleep. This affected school because I couldn’t stay up in class. It affected my weight even more because I didn’t have energy to exercise or to move…it even affected my relationships with people because I just couldn’t be the best person I could be due to this conflux of problems created by overeating. It created a cycle that would lead to my demise if I didn’t change it.
I tried multiple diets to varying levels of success, but while the weight would come off for a bit, it would come back (with a vengeance) once the diet waned. And the diet would always wane. Why? I was making drastic changes like cutting nearly all my carbs because that is what would give me results FAST. It didn’t address one thing that would eventually lead to the failure each and every diet: I was denying myself something that I truly loved. I was stopping myself from enjoying food because I would label it “bad” or “dirty” which was in sharp contrast to the amazing experiences I had eating that same food growing up.
Luckily, my doctoral program in physical therapy got me back on a healthier path. It made me learn the consequences of letting things slip too far. Having to clean the adipose off a 300 pound cadaver can make you rethink certain choices. I learned the mechanisms of metabolism and began to understand why it seemed like every time I had a diet cycle, I ended up heavier than before. Spoilers: It’s because this is exactly what tends to happen when you yo-yo diet. Dieting, if you look at the numbers, does NOT work. Increased activity and exercise along with lifestyle change was what I needed to achieve to get things under control. Still, knowing and doing are two different things.
Just as it seemed like I was making headway…the great plague of Covid struck and I was quarantined to my small apartment for a long…long time. The downside was activity level dropped, and overeating increased as Doordashed meals became the norm. The plus side is that I had more time to read and learn.
I stumbled upon the teachings of intuitive eating, as well as the channel of Abbey Sharp, a registered dietician who had a much more reasonable view on what it means to eat healthy. Rather than demonize certain foods, she emphasized health relationships with food. There was no reason to cut out things you love, but you just had to do it in a way where you were truly listening to your body and feeding it things that brought it energy, health…and mostly joy. This is what I wanted—a better relationship with food.
Trying to get swole (Art by Midjourney AI)
So I set off to develop one…and eventually I found one! I’ll be sharing more on that in another post, but suffice it to say I found a way of eating that would allow me to continue to enjoy foods that I love but at the same time maintain MY definition of a healthy and aesthetic body. Let me be clear with this point…health and aesthetics are different. If you’re eating intuitively and appropriately, getting enough exercise and feeling energetic…you are healthy no matter what you look like. Aesthetics, on the other hand, is wanting your body proportions/features to look a certain way. Now this is a personal choice made for different reasons.
My reasons for choosing aesthetics:
I want a heroic body…one whose rippling muscles represent a warrior ready to slay an ogre or take down a dragon.
I need a body that reflects the ideas, strategies, and advice that I give to my patients and my readers every single day.
Honest question: would you take nutrition advice from a fat guy? Now I know that is a question that may set off multiple triggers, but let’s be honest. Even if he had the best, evidence based research and was a PhD in nutrition science…would you listen to him if he was fat?
This is not to say that this type of thinking is okay. It isn’t. But the reality of the situation is that if I appear visually to be a paragon of the ideals that I share…then that message I share goes down a little better. Mark my words, the more I show success with my own body…the faster the followers will flow. Now…if I can do all that without losing my ethics or morals by taking shortcuts…that’s something to aspire to.
That is what I want to do: Build that body without succumbing to the use of steroids and without perpetuating the toxicity of diet culture that creates disordered eating which causes a different but still very serious negative effect on health.
Summary
So that’s it. That is how my relationship with food got started. In later posts, I’ll be talking about how I will be honoring this relationship as well as my health by devising a plan that will help me have my cake (and eat it too). Creating this story about my journey with food has been therapeutic and enlightening, and I encourage you to try and make a food backstory of your own. Be honest and descriptive about how food makes you feel. I’d love to hear it!