Nuki News #5 - Food? Food.

You can probably guess I was hungry when I wrote this. You’d be right, too! As an artist that draws pleasantly plump characters, food is something that comes up often in conversation. It’s not uncommon for food to be in the fat-fur dialogue. 

I’m a bit different; it’s usually rare I do a picture with food involved. I do like round/fat or chubby characters, but it’s not how they gained the weight that matters to me, but what they do with their weight that’s my interest. I’ve certainly boasted before about how much weight I’ve gained since I moved out of my parent’s place, so I do get the appeal of it. 

Food is great, and I’m often not one to skimp on spending on food(compared to others I probably spend far too much, aha). But, I’ve found over the years where my relationship with food has changed, and in some ways, unhealthily. I’m not here to judge of course! Eat what you want, when you want, whenever it works for you! Though I write this to get thoughts on something that I don’t feel is discussed much.

Growing up, food went from being a necessity, to a celebration, to a craving, and at its worst point, a crutch or addiction. As a kid, food was usually the high processed quick cheap stuff - my mom was a single mother working a night shift nursing job and college, and had 4 kids to feed. At this point I can never eat hot dogs because of eating them all the time back then. In my teens, food started to become a lot more home cooked, eating together with family at the table.  There were a lot of different foods during that time, some I didn’t like, some I did. I was typically underweight n skinny growing up. 

But then as I went into college, things shifted - my parents didn’t get to cook as much, and I’d gone to microwave meals and simple freezer bagged food. But every other week we’d eat out at a nice restaurant. I’d make sandwiches for myself, but outside of cereal and that, I ate only what I needed- it was a kind of guilt for staying with my parents and costing them money! 

When I finally got a job and moved out though, I ended up eating quite a lot, now that I had the freedom to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, on my own dime, guilt-free. I gained 50% of my then-current weight over the course of a year, going from 120lbs to 180. I actually like my body a lot more now than before, I look healthy and more alive, in my opinion. I did go as far as 212lbs, but I found that was getting to become uncomfortable! Contributing to that was a bad habit that formed at my day job, where I realized I would end up stress-eating, especially when I just get to work, and occasionally during the later part of the shift after the lunch break. 

I went to a doctor last year and she told me my cholesterol levels were actually pretty hecking high, too. So I changed my diet, and started having those meal-replacement drinks to have before heading to work so the temptation to graze went down dramatically, and now I’m hovering between 186 to 193, which I feel is ideal for me. However, I noticed at home, I never usually feel nearly hungry. Especially when I’m working on art. Hours can go by and I’ll feel fine and energized, and if I order out food, it will last me the whole day. 

Obviously, there’s more stress that goes on in the work that I do for my dayjob, so there’s something at the source I need to tackle and work through, that way I can make sure it never happens when I do art for a living. It’d be awful to trap myself in a stressful commitment that I can’t ‘escape’ from- when I’m back at home, and then waste money on food as a sort of coping mechanism. My hunch is it may be  stress generated from trying to please unhappy people on the other end of an email, or catching up with metrics on nearly an hourly basis. So I should avoid setting myself up to fail when going full-time-artist by keeping my day-to-day less rigid, making it flexible and to do things to not have to find myself the cause or recipient of unhappy emails, hah!