Food, Or Lack Thereof: A Narrative

I'm sitting here wondering if life is worth living. It's not the typical depression thing, no questioning the meaning of life or anything like that. Not that much at least. I really like the community and the attitude that this Wellness.com thing is about. I really want to embrace it and internalize it and live it. I think. So pardon me while I have a moment. Consider this my call for help after a handful of AA meetings. A brief slide backwards. You can be my sponsor. You must hear me out and get me through my moment of weakness.

I just ate a salad for lunch. Not the 1020-calorie chicken salad at Hardees that I read about with great interest on this site yesterday. Not a brimming bowlful of Italian antipasto rife with two kinds of olives, salami, provolone, ham and pepperoni. No, this one was small plate of lawn clippings topped with dried cranberries, raisins, soybeans and almond slivers. I chased it with 2 one-liter bottles of water. And I'm not very happy right now.

I left the office for my lunch hour with a single-minded purpose--to eat something healthy so that I don't feel that sense of "ahhh why did I do that!" that I so often do feel. So that I don't wake up in the middle of the night with a symphony playing in my digestive system. So that I don't feel like such a loser when my co-workers return from their lunch hour with a sweat from having forsaken their meal and gone to the gym.

So I cruised the main thoroughfares seeking inspiration, rejecting the plethora of fast-food neon that beckoned me. It seemed that every quarter-mile stood a place that might as well have been called Calories-R-Us. It was a character defining sojourn.

Nevertheless, I settled on a trendy looking place that from its facade made very clear would not let me poison myself. I parked and entered with trepidation. I felt like a late-arriver to a party I wasn't invited to. The demographic was split down the middle. Half the patrons were 110-lb or less (mostly females and one or two diminutive men). The other half were pre-Subway Jarrods. I looked around for the videocamera. I was sure Alan Funt and his Candid Camera were behind this and that this whole health movement was a ruse to see if I would go along with the masses (save the self-centered comments, you won't be telling me anything I don't know). I struggled to hear my thoughts over the whirr of a gizmo right out of a Dr. Seuss book squeezing the bedickens out of a variety of innocent fruit.

All of the salads had full sentences for names. Like "The truly greatest most wonderful salad ever" or "The salad that if you eat it will be like the best thing you could do except if you eat it with a plastic fork and don't recycle the fork salad" or the one I had, the "Sell your soul and everything that makes you you and eat this salad with dried cranberries, raisins, soybeans and almond slivers and then debate slitting your wrists salad."

I ate it. I felt like I was sitting at a desk in high school struggling through a test I didn't study for, a plastic recyclable fork replacing my trusty old number 2 pencil. My head never came up. "Power through," I reinforced to myself repeatedly. I couldn't handle the thought of making eye contact with any of the Jarrods. My anguish might have travelled through space and derailed them from their missions to halve their pant size. I couldn't live with that guilt.

And then it was done. That was two hours ago. I have accomplished nothing useful since. How many more of these days must I endure before I have officially "drunk the Kool-Aid"? What will it take for it to be second nature for me to say to my buddy, "Hey, let's go get a salad after work." And is that really what I want? Don't I have a responsibility to the shareholders of Anheuser-Busch who will suffer if I limit my post-work indulgences to eating shrubbery?

I've got to get through this. So what to do? Must I choose between my cravings or my desire for self-preservation? Must I be grumpy to be healthy? Does the grump factor outweigh the benefits of the diet? Will my epitaph say, "Here lies a lean, trim, miserable son of a bitch?"

My stomach is full, but I can only think of barbecue sauce. Oh such a conundrum!

Someone tell me the withdrawals get easier with time. Or get me a bacon burger with extra cheese!