I am 28, and it is dawning on me that I need to change the way I eat.
I love all kinds of food. Tasty is where I’m at, and while I love a clean and delicious and artisanal-everything meal as much as the next coastal elite, my love of tastiness includes crap junk food. My grocery staples are: eggs, milk, bread, spinach, mushrooms, and once a month when they’re on sale at Ralphs, jalapeno-flavored Kettle brand chips. When I’m lazy and distracted (so, during the entirety of my workweek) I will eat whatever involves the fewest steps of preparation. That means on good days I eat a lot of avocado toast, and eggs and toast, spinach and mushroom omelettes, frozen Chinese dumplings and some kimchi from the back of the fridge, veggie burgers on toast. And on the other days I’ll make a meal of butter almond thins. Or a banana and a bunch of cookie butter. Shrimp chips. Hello Pandas. Pocky! Or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Snyder’s honey mustard pretzels. Or, yes, jalapeno Kettle chips. (I really do live in The Snack House.) It’s disgusting but it’s so tasty.
What forced the realization? Not my full understanding of the vital importance of green leafy vegetables and the serious damage that even one fast food meal can do to a person’s arteries. Not Michelle Obama, one of my favorite public figures, and her healthy eating crusade. Not even my family’s terrible history with heart disease and high cholesterol.
This week I had a pretty nasty stomach bug. I really don’t think that much about my diet, but this week I became very aware of it because I couldn’t properly digest anything I was eating. I tried my version of the gentle stomach recovery BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) diet. I made myself a soothing carrot and mushroom soup in chicken broth. I ate an apple for lunch. The next day I had a banana (and cookie butter) for breakfast. Serious stomach unhappiness continued. And then I got lazy. I had a bowl of cereal. I went to McDonald’s for dinner (seriously, after two weeks of Olympics commercials that told me that I, too, could be a world sports champion if I ate a chicken nugget, I moved toward the drive-thru with a truly detached powerlessness over my steering wheel). Stomach trouble continued. Kevin’s always trying to get me to eat better, and usually it’s this running joke between us, but this week he got impatient with me. “I have no more sympathy for you,” he railed on the phone when I asked him if I was dying late one night.
Yesterday evening after running errands downtown I ended up at Chego and ordered spicy jjambong noodles. I’d worked straight through breakfast and lunch and was super hungry by the time I sat down to eat. I had a few bites and immediately knew I was hurting myself. Greasy, spicy, saucy noodles are decidedly un-BRAT-like. I texted Kevin a string of sad faces, took my leftovers home, and immediately made some oatmeal as repentance.
This morning Kevin cooked me breakfast. An egg and a slice of turkey on toast. What’d I do? Doused the thing in Sriracha. I don’t really know what I was or wasn’t thinking. But when I see an egg on bread I automatically reach for some hot sauce. Kevin looked at my bloodied toast and fumed. He’d made breakfast for me with the express purpose of feeding me real, and stomach-friendly, food. “You are obsessed with tasty food! Even when it hurts you!” he yelled, then reached over and with his fingers wiped up all the Sriracha off my egg, went to the sink and washed it down the drain. It really upsets Kevin that I can’t lay off my need for maximum tastiness even when my physical comfort and health is at stake. I on the other hand don’t even consider the likely outcomes when there’s a delicious fried egg in front of me and a bottle of Sriracha nearby. Most of the time I haven’t need to. But as I’m getting older I’m starting to feel the effects of my food choices, even on the weeks that are stomach bug-free.
I guess that’s what growing up is about. Laying off the hot sauce and spicy noodles every now and then. Also, listening to the people who love me. Learning to look past immediate gratification, seriously thinking through the consequences. Putting my work on pause for enough minutes (30 to be exact) to boil some oatmeal for myself. Isn’t it incredible that it can be so difficult to act in our own self-interest?
The other day Appu and I were sitting at home reminiscing about all the crap we loved to eat as kids, and came up with a long list. Totino’s pizza rolls, those puffed rectangular pillows filled with orange squidge which leaked grease all over the place. Lucky Charms. Bagel Bites. Hot Pockets. Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Neopolitan ice cream sandwiches which are in fact not ice cream at all but “frozen dessert topping” or some such thing. We thought about organizing a party around the theme. But then when it came time to figure out who to invite, we realized most of the people in our lives don’t partake in such fare. Turns out we’re friends with mostly vegetarians, health-conscious people, and adults.
As I type this, two dark chocolate Cadbury Mini Eggs are sitting sweetly next to my keyboard. They are delicious chocolate nuggets with a thin, chalky crunchy shell that I discovered only last year on a pre-Easter tear through the candy aisle of CVS. I keep tossing the bag back into my desk drawer to hide it from myself, then reaching over and pulling it back out. At the moment, the bag is safely tucked away. And I’ve got two more chocolate eggs I set aside to savor. You know, sometime later.