intro - part three

but it wasn't just a question of what i was supposed to eat, however. the more i sat and thought about and considered this issue, the more i realized how adversarial my relationship with food and my own body really was.

for example, i frequently forget to eat. i can go hours and hours and hours - all day - practically and forget to eat. part of it is that, for me, the process of creating anything lulls me into an Other Place, a place where mundane things like time and meals and laundry and dust bunnies don't exist. when writing something as long and as complex as my last trilogy, for example, or even the book i'm working on now, the temptation is always to go to that OtherPlace, and stay there. re-entry, as im sure anyone reading this who's an artist of any sort understands, can be tricky.

i realized that what usually happened was that i didn't eat all day - from perhaps six in the morning until about two or so in the afternoon. at that point, of course, i was ravenously hungry, completely exhausted and prone to put anything at all into my mouth, assuming it met the parameters of my picky palate. when i was running and working out, of course, i'd followed a carefully planned diet of meal shakes and salads and yogurts and minimeals. but left to my own devices, mistress of oceans of time, with access to practically any kind of food available on the planet at any given time, i frequently chose not to feed myself at all.

so what was THAT about, i wondered?