When Food Becomes Math: Belonging with Boundaries
“Can you eat this?” becomes the question that defines my existence at every gathering, every restaurant, every moment when food transforms from fuel into social navigation.
Diabetes arrived quietly but left loudly, announcing itself through a vocabulary of restrictions that rewrote my relationship with every meal. Suddenly I’m the person reading ingredient lists like sacred texts, asking questions that make servers uncomfortable, carrying my own solutions to parties where I can no longer participate in the central ritual of shared indulgence.
Food-obsessed world, they call it, but only those with restrictions understand how obsessed we actually are. Every social gathering revolves around consumption—birthday cakes, office treats, celebration feasts that become minefields of good intentions and inadvertent exclusion.
“Just have a small piece,” well-meaning friends suggest, not understanding that “small” and “piece” aren’t the issue. The issue is insulin, blood sugar, the complex chemistry that others take for granted but I must calculate with pharmaceutical precision.
The loneliness isn’t about missing specific foods—it’s about missing spontaneity, the ability to accept invitations without dietary diplomacy, to focus on relationships instead of carbohydrate content.
At family gatherings, I watch others pile plates while I navigate around rice, avoid sweets, construct careful combinations that won’t sabotage my evening glucose levels. I become mathematician of meals while everyone else enjoys unconscious pleasure.
“You’re so disciplined,” they say, mistaking necessity for virtue. Discipline implies choice. This is survival wearing the costume of self-control.
But isolation teaches unexpected wisdom. Forced to pay attention to nutrition, I discover flavors others miss while eating mindlessly. Required to plan meals, I develop appreciation for food as fuel rather than entertainment.
The cruel irony: dietary restrictions force relationship with food that’s probably healthier than most people’s unconscious consumption, but social costs make this wisdom feel like punishment.
Maybe true inclusion isn’t accommodating restrictions but recognizing that we all have limitations—visible or invisible—that shape our experience of shared pleasure.