E-town, it's me again!: Moving On

TW: eating disorders, depression

Time for some real talk.

When I started this food blog 6 years ago, it was to help me cope with an eating disorder. It was a good way for me to mend my relationship with food by making sure I was eating regularly and making memories of positive food experiences. It's been an interesting and at times treacherous journey, but I've gone from unnecessarily starving myself to being able to appreciate a lot of different things about food. While indulging my inner foodie, I've learned about many different cultures and cuisines, I've learned more about where my food comes from and I've learned about the tremendous satisfaction you get from making things from scratch.

It's important to understand that eating disorders are like other chronic mental health conditions - they stick with you for the long run. It's not something you can "cure", but you can acquire coping mechanisms to help you manage it. This blog used to be that coping mechanism for me, but it isn't quite as effective as it used to be. It's very common to have multiple mental health issues going on at the same time and my anorexia happens to pair well with depression. As a result, I can't always find the motivation to write a blog post and end up saving photos from a food adventure to write about at a later time that might never come. I assume that I can find inspiration to write by traveling and having new food experiences, which does happen sometimes, but it isn't always the case. I've placed a lot of pressure on myself to update this blog and the reality is that I don't quite have that capacity, but that's okay.

I truly commend the avid bloggers in our city like Only Here for the Food, Baconhound, and Lindork for their constant upkeep. A lot of thought goes into each post and a lot of energy goes into continually updating content. I'm very appreciative of our foodie community in Edmonton. It's nice to be able to know when and where food-related things are happening in the city and being able to follow along. A pretty important thing to have as a regular blogger is the passion and drive to keep doing it.

At least for now, I'm going to take a break from posting in this blog. However, I'm not disappearing from the foodie world. I love interacting with people on social media about food and drooling over food photos. I'm going to try to replace posting on the blog with more frequent activity on Instagram. I learned a bit about Instagram when I worked with YRAP on their Cook-It-Yourself program last summer. Instagram is a great platform for sharing something right away while not necessarily saying a lot, but just enough.

To my readers who have stuck with me from my beginnings in 2012 and to my readers who have hopped on this weird bandwagon at some point between then and now, thank you. It's been fun bonding with you over delicious things. I hope that some of you will continue to follow along on my food adventures on social media.

After all, I'm still a born and raised Edmontonian, documenting my musings in all things food.