(TW: weight loss, eating disorders)
This essay was inspired, in part, by Alicia Kennedy’s and Apoorva Sripathi’s meditative essays on oatmeal, breakfast, and routine. If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read them.
Over the last few months, I’ve become an oatmeal person. And I don’t just mean a person who eats oatmeal; I mean someone downright evangelical about it. If we’ve hung out in person recently, you can attest to this new religious fervor. You know that video on Tiktok of the woman discovering apples and cinnamon for the first time and asking if anyone’s ever tried it? That’s me but with the most basic overnight oats recipe.
This has happened in spite of myself. The idea of having oatmeal for breakfast was never something that appealed to me. On the rare occasion I had it as a kid, I remember regarding it as this stodgy, homogenous gloop. Even when thinned out with milk and sweetened with white sugar, it just felt joyless. When I got older, I dismissed it as white people food and never gave it a second thought.
On top of that, for the last three years and until a few months ago, I’d been on a semi-strict intermittent fasting schedule. Every day, I’d have my first meal at noon and my last one before 8 pm. Though when I first started doing IF, I’d fast for 18 hours every day and do one 24-hour fast every week. It made me miserable and extremely temperamental. After a few months of white-knuckling it, I relented and cut my fast to 16 hours, and my mood softened significantly. Eventually, I got used to it, and fasting became second nature.
The idea that I’d one day voluntarily skip breakfast would probably annoy my twelve-year-old self. I’ve always loved breakfast, even as a kid. It was a reason to get out of bed. Whenever we’d go on family trips, my brother and I would always get excited about the prospect of a hotel breakfast buffet. For the first half of my life, a typical breakfast consisted of an egg, usually fried with crispy, lacey edges, some kind of canned meat (corned beef and Vienna sausages were my faves), and a bowl of hot garlic rice.
In my late teens, I replaced the rice with toast, multi-grain to be exact, because that’s what—and I realize I’m aging myself here—the South Beach Diet recommended. It was the first diet I remember actually following, though certainly not my first dance with diet culture. (That would come at the age of 12, a story for another time.) Back then, breakfast was usually eaten in front of the TV while watching reruns of Law and Order before heading off to school.
When I stopped eating meat in 2017, one of the hardest things to give up was canned meat. Although mostly the idea of it rather than the actual eating. By then, it hardly figured into my meals, and I’d only have it when I was sleeping at my parents’ house. Though that didn’t stop me from dreaming up ways of recreating its (spam’s, specifically) texture and flavor with vegetarian ingredients.
Most days, breakfast was an egg and some bread, and all the delicious variations on that theme. When I wanted no-fuss, it was a soft-boiled egg and toast. When I had more time, it was a simple omelet, and when I really wanted to treat myself, it was a thick layer of egg salad—made with kewpie and good mustard—piled high on a slab of toast.
Then, about a year into the pandemic, I started fasting. This was roughly around the same time my mental health started to take a turn for the worse. It wasn’t out of some desire to “hack” my body, sleep better, improve my mental clarity, or any of the purported benefits that intermittent fasting provides. I did it to lose weight and, in hindsight, regain some control at a time when I felt I was spinning out. Eventually, especially in those dark early days, this gave way to an increasingly restrictive and disordered way of thinking about food.
I remember the gnawing hunger, how everything felt jagged until the first meal of the day helped smooth out my edges. I drank my coffee strong and black to keep the hunger at bay. With nothing in my stomach, it felt like pouring battery acid into the tank and hoping for the best. When the numbers on the scale went down, a wave of relief would wash over me. Though I was eventually able to recognize this behavior as harmful and rein it in, that didn’t make it go away. My priorities just shifted, and it stayed in the background.
Then, sometime last year, I started getting terrible bouts of brain fog every afternoon that I thought might be caused by caffeine sensitivity. It occurred to me that maybe drinking coffee on an empty stomach every day wasn’t so great for me. So, for the first time in years, around last November, I started eating breakfast again.
Since my boyfriend had already nailed down his own oatmeal routine, I piggybacked onto that and joined him in making overnight oats. It was better than I recalled, far from the slop I remembered from my childhood. In fact, the texture was probably what I liked the most. Soaking the oats in just enough liquid meant that they retained their structure without being underdone. It was simple, comforting, and easy. Everything that had been lacking in my relationship with my body and consequently with food.
These days, after I feed our dog, I make time to soak some oats in hot water before I leave for my morning walk. When I get back, around thirty minutes later, the water’s been absorbed and the oats have softened. I add a pat of butter that melts slowly from the residual heat. As I stir it in, the oats become rich and velvety. I then add a bit of almond milk, a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of local honey, and a couple dashes of cinnamon. I eat the oatmeal at my desk, in a bowl gifted by two of my favorite people, while reading emails, watching YouTube, or writing drafts of this newsletter. It’s nourishing in a way that almost feels sacred.
I’m not going to say that it’s fixed me. I’ve spent most of my life feeling bad about the way my body looks; a bowl of oatmeal isn’t going to undo that. It’s an ongoing process, one that will take years to unpack and repair. But for now, it feels good to take care of myself in this way, especially after years of denying it this simple pleasure.
I also know that this breakfast routine, as vital as it feels to my current state of mind, will change eventually. Maybe I’ll go back to eggs on toast. Maybe I’ll discover some internationally beloved breakfast item already embedded in the culture and pretend no one’s ever heard of it before. For now, I’m going to enjoy my oats. I’m going to thank my body for the work it does, and I’m going to continue feeding it.
Thank you for reading. 💗
I still get excited for breakfast buffets!
I relate to this so hard. The IF, the body image shit. The disordered eating. EXCEPT hard difference in that I’m never hungry early, and hotel breakfast end SO early and so I’m angry that they’re always wasted on me. Goddam I’m making oats with butter now. Yum.