Day 4

Day 4- Wednesday, December 15. 2010

If I could some up today’s experience with food in one word it would be disinterest.  I’m not sure why.  This is particularly uncharacteristic of me.  This is the girl whose first word was cracker.  I always have to have some belief system about food.  In order to prevent myself from eating so much of it, instead I look up recipes, look at it at the farmer’s market, cook it-anything but eat it.  That is, of course, until I do eat it-where I go out of control.  Today though: no interest. 

It is possible the disinterest occurred because food & I got off to a bad start this morning.  It did, after all, catch on fire in my oven this morning, forcing me to break out the fire extinguisher.  This left a nice film of dust all over my kitchen, rending me breakfastless & late for work.  I do not function without breakfast.  Granted, if I had been smart, I would have just put a pot over the fire, but this did not occur to me until halfway through the day.  Anyways, I stopped at Panera for a latte (yes the one I made was ruined by the dust too) & an asiago bagel breakfast sandwich.  I ate it on the way to work – attempting presence with little success.  Eating in the car was a big breach of my contract with myself-but necessary given the circumstances.  I spent about an hour after I got home cleaning my kitchen & living room of the dust.

At lunch, I started with dessert.  I had some more of the dark chocolate, then one bite of the chocolate rum cake everyone was obsessing over.   Let me repeat this statement;  I ate ONE bite of the chocolate rum cake.  I do not think I have ever eaten one bite of anything with sugar in it in my ENTIRE LIFE.  The craziest part about it was that I didn’t even realize that this event was significant until my car ride home.  So not only did I only eat a bite-just to see what it tasted like- but I had so little craving for more afterwards that it didn’t occur to me that one bite was impressive.  All my life I have been jealous of girls who have a little bit of dessert then put it down.  Now, I AM that girl-it’s sort of a lot of pressure-I don’t know quite how to process it.

I eat the rest of my lunch-the left over lamb from yesterday & a piece of spouted bread.  I still have hunger but just don’t feel like eating.  Who is this person?  There was a little bit of temptation to eat the cornucopia of Christmas junk food in the coffee room that afternoon-mostly due to the fact that it is easier to prepare than the other food I have, & I did still have hunger.  I settle though, for my  macaroons and go the rest of the day with a little bit of hunger.  I should specify that these are the world’s healthiest macaroons.  They are raw, made of coconut, coconut oil, agave, and a few other ingredients.  There are 5 grams of sugar for a serving of two-which is what I ate.  This is less sugar than what is in most fruits.   I end up stopping at Chipolte for dinner on the justification that I won’t be able to cook or eat in my dirty kitchen.  I get the usual & a Shiner & eat it there.  I still seem distracted during dinner, though I enjoy the beer.  Thinking a little about whether I’m still hungry,  I reach a point where I just stop.  Then something miraculous happens.  I throw the rest away.  I throw food out all the time.  Cooking in bulk, the food I make usually doesn’t freeze well, so I have to eat it all in a week.  Often, I end up getting bored with it by the end of the week & eat out instead.  Then, I threw the rest away on the weekend.   For some reason, usually when food is on my plate, I can’t throw it out.  Tonight, though, I threw it out- I didn’t take it home for later-it wasn’t enough for a meal.  I threw it away.  I apologize for anyone offended by my wastefulness-I feel a little bit guilty myself (as I usually at least compost it).  This event, though, was significant on a symbolic level.  I was able to let go of my food.  Like a hoarder justifies the mess in their house with the waste of throwing it away, I justify eating or even saving food that I’m not hungry for as a waste of food.   I hoard food.  Throwing it in the trash was my way of releasing my obsession with food.

I also have been hoarding the definition of fullness.  Trying to understand it.  Thinking about it really hard so I would know just when I was no longer hungry-trying to have control over it.  The point of not having hunger, cannot be analyzed, it cannot be controlled.  You recognize the time to stop by letting go.  There is a feeling to it-but the more you try to find it, the less you feel it.  The point of no longer having hunger is like riding a bike, just hop on and you go; analyze your pattern & fall over.  It’s like when you hold something slippery in your hands and the harder you try to grasp it the more it falls out of your hands.  It isn’t until you relax your grasp that you can hold it.  We all have the ability to know when to stop eating.  It is hardwired within us.  We just need to let it be to find it.  Our culture creates an unnecessarily complex relationship with food.  We are shown commercials to make us crave it then made to feel guilty when we eat it.  We go nutrient by nutrient, trying to understand it.  We grab onto food trying to analyze to maximize our health.  Yet since we have started this campaign for health, out incidence of obesity and heart disease has sky rocketed.  We’ve been trying to control our food, shout nutrients in take out others.  Yet we remain fat.  It isn’t until we release food, let it BE food, instead of nutrients, that it can nurture us.  Until we release our control over food, it will control us: How much we eat, what we eat, how often we eat.

Jessica Prentice describes in Full Moon feast her determination to stop her obsession with food like this:

Did I ever develop a system? No.   Did I ever move beyond my preoccupation with food? No.  But that wasn’t what I really wanted, even at nineteen.  I just wanted to stop suffering in my relationship with food.  And that indeed happened.  I finally just stopped fighting food and dived into it headlong . . . It has opened me to a world of politics, of history, of art, of pleasure, of anger, of grief, of faith-all the profound things I thought food was keeping me from.  It has helped me to feel God’s healing presence in my life, and taught me how to be vulnerable, how to love, and how to let go.

It seems a little too good to be true that letting go is all there is to have a healthy relationship with food.  That being a little more present and stopping a little bit sooner is all it takes to stop cravings and addictions.  Is this really a sustainable method?  Is it really this easy?  Have I been over thinking this whole eating thing?  Have we all been over thinking it?  Only time will tell.  I will let you know in two years if I can still throw my food away, when I no longer have hunger.