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".