It's been over a year since my last post on this blog, and there's been an awful lot that has happened. The general idea of this blog was always to muse on my more psychological musings on food and our relationship to it, and there is a lot I can reflect on now. Overall, I can say that I find myself feeling most comfortable and at ease with where food is in my life at the moment, but simultaneously most frustrated too.

The huge turning point for me has been my introduction and continually exploration of mindfullness. This started with going to a mindfulness based counsellor back in January, after yet another Christmas period feeling ashamed, depressed and ultimately suicidal. Looking back on it now I can see much more clearly just how unwell I really was, and that taking the step to find a therapeutic way forward was absolutely critical. The basis for my healing was not being afraid to feel what I was already feeling, but allowing the sensations of being alive to be there, and ultimately welcoming them. This connection to the nuts and bolts experiences of life has been immeasurably transformative for me.

A few months along the therapy road I also started meditating, something which I had dabbled in briefly before. This time however, the work going on with my therapist allowed me to have much greater awareness of what I could 'get' from meditation, giving it a realistic chance fo yielding positive benefits for my general mental state. In a strange way, you have to be slightly self-indulgent to keep meditating, as at first (for me at least) it didn't seem sensible to just sit in a chair for 10-20 minutes a day doing 'nothing'. My analytical mind was telling me that action was the way to achieve things and experience happiness. The more I embraced the meditative process the more I could realise that feelings of happiness and contentment are ever available, and really come from within, as much as that sounds like a cliche.

Right up until 3 months ago, I was still struggling with behavioural cycles to do with body image, control and overeating. By meditating and practicing mindfulness, these cycles became less and less relevant, and it's possible for me to say that I barely recognise my day to day approach to food from how things used to be. I honestly couldn't tell you exactly why or how this has happened. I definitely still have moments or even days where I overeat, but it just doesn't feel the same anymore. I am able to keep a much more balanced and nonjudgemental perspective on my eating, both when it's 'healthy' and 'unhealthy'. When I am eating well it's no longer to obtain some idealised appearence to impress others, and when I binge or overeat it's not as powerfully wrapped up in thoughts of catastrophe and failure.

Perhaps the single clearest difference that meditating every morning has done is allowing me both mentally and physically to take a deep breath (well many many deep breaths) before I start my day and feel more centred. All the well known terms that float around meditation ("centred" for one) do actually describe the reality quite well at times. Even when I am not doing much at all, mornings are often a very rushed time for my mind, trying to write a play by play plan for daily success. The sensation of just going into the body through meditation helps to reveal that its possible to feel 'success' before you have done anything, and that being alive on it's own is such a fantastic gift that really anything that happens after that is a bonus. This foundational level of comfort is actually always there, and the negative feelings and thoughts associated with depression and anxiety are layers on top of the basis, but ones that definitely don't need to be there, however real they can seem. The more familiar and connected you feel to the basic, easy experience of your breath, the less convincing all the negative thoughts are able to be.

So I am leaving for Valencia in the morning, and I couldn'tn be more nervous/depressed/flatlining. I feel full of resentment for both the world around me and myself. My belly now hangs over my belt line, I feel as though I have about 10 pounds of cement in my stomach and I can't concentrate on one thing for more than about 30 seconds. I don't think I need much more evidence that it is time for a new challenge.

I have a day or so to get settled into where I will be staying before starting my teaching course on Monday. The house I will be occupying a room in is owned by an English speaker so there won't be quite so much urgency about learning Spanish. I am very much going to miss home and my family. My feelings towards 'Home', same as everyone, are rather complicated. It's not so much a longing for home itself as it stands that preoccupies me, but the fictitious idea of my ideal home. In my head I could be the happiest person alive if I just had the right conditions in place. The fantasy always centres around being back where I grew up, but isn't really reflective of what I have experienced. One day I hope that I will find away to carve out a nice lifestyle for myself and a family, enjoying a couple of trips away to the continent, pottering around at the weekends and also enjoying a decent social life with friends. But for now I know that in order to have any chance at this I must first go away, and for some time.

I am not expecting to step off the plane tomorrow and suddenly feel completely at ease with myself and the challenges that face me. But forward movement is essential, I have been treading water for too long now. The depression I have felt this week is just the doubting part of me trying to convince every other part that I will ultimately fail. The only way to silence this is to try. All we can really do is try.

The time is now, or soon, hopefully...

My second post is written partly as a form of procrastination from what I really should be doing right now; preparing for my imminent (very imminent) move to Valencia in Spain. I have indulged the fantasy of moving abroad to a country I know little about for a long while, and when presented with a straightforward opportunity to make this a reality, I decided to take the plunge. To say there is a doubt in my mind that this is the wisest thing to do right now would be somewhat of an understatement. This is probably the most nervous I have been before undertaking a new exploit in my life for a good long while. In times gone by when I had to make a new start somewhere I always knew someone within striking distance of where I was going. When I went to China at the age of 19 I was on a well structured volunteering programme, on which was also one of my best friends. When I went to university, I was going with four of my good childhood friends. When I moved to London I was lucky enough to have an entire host of friends from childhood and other times of life, not to mention being within 1 hour of home too.

So this is definitely stirring up feelings of trepidation and anxiety in me, manifesting in my usual routine of isolation, depression and general crotchetiness. But in terms of the potential benefits of this move, they far outweight my current worries. It's worth stating my extact fears, for the record and for therapeutic reasons; I may not be any good at what I am doing out there (English Teaching), I may not find a job easily, I may not meet anyone I get on with, I feel even more alone than I do now...But all of these fears are within my own abilities to alleviate and or provide solutions for. If I want to be good at English Teaching then I will have to work hard at it; If I want a job then I will have to both show that I deserve one and be proactive in finding one; if I want to find people I get on with I need to both be receptive to this and put effort into finding likeminded people. Ultimately all of our fears are either within our control to overcome, or completely fictitiuos and therefore irrelevant.

The benefits for spending time living and working in Spain are that I can learn a new language, I can enjoy a better quality of life and gain experience in the field of education. Juxtaposed with my unrealistic fears of loneliness and isolation are also corresponding goals that are equally fanastical. In my mind I am hoping that I will magically lose weight, find my ideal partner and finally feel as if I found my place in the world. These are possible, but they are also not very constructive things to hope for, because if they do not happen then I will see my move to Valencia as a failure. Focussing on the achievable aims of learning Spanish, learning and practising the skills of teaching and making some new friends from a different culture/ walk of life is a far more positive way of invisaging the results of my time in Spain. The thing about friendships is they just happen, and you can only do so much to force them. My experiences in the past is that quite often the best friends you make are in the most unlikely of places. The key is to afford yourself the time and space.


Whatever happens in my time in Spain, I will do my very best not to rely on food as my comfort. What I would most like is to find a release in doing physical exercise, especially with a group. Finding sports club to join would make a huge impact in many different ways.

The greatest question I seem to continually ask of myself is this: What exactly is adulthood? Although I can make no credible claim to being anything other than an adult male, I still find it almost impossible to provide even a sketch for myslef of what this entails. Part of the confusion arises from the realisation that everything I was told when I was younger about what my experience of being a adult would be has turned out to be false, or at best woefully simplistic.

The common thing to tell children about their grownup years is that most or all of the uncertainties and frustrations of being a young person will be alleviated. When one reaches adult years, one gains a sense of purpose, perspective and self-confidence. It's quite possible that many people do, but for me I can't quite report this scenario as I still find myself on regular occasions curled up in a ball praying that the world would just leave me alone.

The overaching neurosis that I do battle with on an almost daily basis is a fixation with food. This is something I have struggled with since I was a very young child, and apart from some periodic pauses, has consumed large amounts of my mental and emotional energy. Hence the title of this blog seems to make some sense; "Gastro" relating to the stomach, and "Praxia" meaning a drive or movement. My entire life has been lived with a heavy obsession with food and an awareness of how much I should be controlling my consumption of it.

The nature of my own experience with food is thus. I consider myself to be overweight, and have almost constantly been trying to lose weight. My body image is closely tied to my feeling of selfworth and confidence, and so by being even moderately overweight I consider myself a failure. This often means that I shy away from social contact with friends and seek solitude, and a general feeling of giving up comes along with that. The spiral oscilates between feeling low, overeating, isolating myself and then feeling even worse.

I have been lukcy enough to find help for this. Seeing a therapist in the past gave me huge understanding of exactly what is going on in my mind, and of experiences in my past which have influenced this. From a practical point of view, trying to stick to a mostly vegan diet has been a real positive as even when I overeat the effects on my mood are much less severe as if I had been consuming large amounts of cheese and dairy etc.

My relationship with exercise has been difficult at times. I love taking part in almost all team sports, and thrive in a group situation such as a sports team. However, if my participation in said team sport requires me to train on my own, this is perhaps when I get into my darkest periods. So for me, sport has provided me with my greatest periods of happiness, and also prehaps my lowest moments of sorrow.

This is far from a unique problem that I have; many millions of people in the UK alone struggle continually with the very same problem I face. The crippling affect that this can have on ones professional and social life is shared by a great many people in our society. The purpose of this blog is certainly not to portray myself as some special case, or even as someone especially disposed to give an account of how food can deal damage on an individual, but merely to try and add my own reflections on the phenomena.

My hope with occasionally putting on paper (albeit the virtual paper provided by a blog hosting website) is, in truth, partly selfish. By trying to write down some of the feelings that rear their heads, it is my aim to be able to externalise them, and reflect more proactively on what has caused them. I hope that writing this blog will become part of a more healthy and positive cycle of behaviour for me, one where I am able to keep food at arms length where it belongs, allowing myself to become more intimate with  other aspects of the human experience. The ultimate goal is to reach a state of maturity in some way reminiscent of the simplicity and functionality I used to associate with a state of "adulthood".