Week five and I cried at the open fridge

Determined to keep the joy in food, it says under my name, and I wrote that in a temper in month two for exactly this reason.

What worked for me was going smaller rather than trying to want a whole dinner. One good tomato with salt. Three olives. A slice of the ham from the proper deli rather than the packet. My appetite would not come to a plate of chicken and peppers but it would come to something intense and tiny.

It is not the same as before. It is genuinely nice though. I would not have believed that in week five.

Cooking for four when I want none of it is my entire circle contribution, so: the kitchen bit is the hardest bit and it is separate from the appetite bit.

I stopped trying to cook from want. I cook from the list now, like a job I am reasonably good at, and I eat a small amount of it and that is fine. Some weeks I plate mine up and eat it an hour later when the smell has gone out of the room. Sounds mad, works.

Nonna cooks in my house. Week five I sat at the table with a bowl of her pasta and could not, and she watched me not eat it and said nothing, which from her is a very loud silence.

We got past it. Now I take a small bowl, I eat what I eat, and she puts the rest in a container for me and I take it. She needed a job in it. That was the fix, and it was not about food at all.

Beekeeper, very interested in eating enough, and my honest experience is that the crying stage lasted about a fortnight and then I was just somebody who ate differently.

Practical thing: I got a proper plan for protein and fluid because I could not trust my own signals to tell me anything, and having a dull external target took the whole decision out of the kitchen. The little tool here is what I use. Not exciting. Removed a lot of standing-in-front-of-the-fridge.

Recovering perfectionist. The thing your husband said was right and you could not hear it — I do that too, and what I have learned is that I cannot hear a solution while I am still in the feeling. He was not wrong and you were not being difficult. The two things just needed to happen in the other order.

Thank you. All of it, but especially the person who said it was a loss, because that is the word I could not find and once I had it I stopped feeling ridiculous.

I have a bag of nice tomatoes and a small job for my husband, which is that he does the Saturday shop with me and I do not have to want anything.