What's Eating You?

Meal Times Have Caused Muireann Carey-Campbell Stress And Anxiety For As Long As She Can Remember. She Reveals How She’s Finally Beating Her Food Phobia

- Muireann Carey-Campbell

Croissants. Cookies. Crisps. These aren’t the kind of foods you would expect to find in the kitchen cupboard of a fitness editor and exercise fanatic. Until recently, I have battled intense anxiety before meal times. I’m consistently amazed at how other people seem to make it through a day, navigating a billion food choices without having dozens of mini meltdowns, like I usually do.

I’m not a foodie. It doesn’t interest me. I don’t have an adventurous palate; I don’t get excited about taste. Figuring out how to eat and what to eat have caused me stress for as long as I can remember. I was a picky eater as a child, despite my parents’ endless attempts to introduce me to new foods. We’d eat dinner as a family every night—for example, chicken and vegetable stir-fry with rice—but my mother would have to make me a separate meal, such as plain chicken with potatoes. Yes, I was that child, always fussy. And I never grew out of it.

“It was so frustrating to have a fussy child,” says my mother. “You can’t understand why they don’t want to eat. You cajole, try to sneak new things into their meals, all to no avail. Feeling desperate and guilty, you give them what they like, which in Muireann’s case was no vegetables, no sauces, no slimy textures, even foods she didn’t like the look of, and hope that they grow out of their aversion to other food.”

I got away with it as a child, but at 35, it has long since ceased to be cute. I have a list of about 10 ‘safe foods’ and I just eat those. Every single day. I’m a spinning instructor, teaching more than seven classes a week, I walk everywhere and I try out new fitness classes all the time. I move a lot. I should be eating around 2,000 calories a day.