Food, glorious food

[darkemeralds]

In an unanticipated bonus of Project Empty, I've made a brilliant discovery: I now know why I've gotten so fat! I already knew how: eating too much. But today I figured out why. It has nothing to do with my mother, my sexuality, my deep-seated fear of intimacy, or cigars.



A couple of months ago, with the new clarity of mind that Project Empty was providing, I decided to refinance my house, resulting in a shorter term but a higher payment. This forced me to make some spending cuts.

One of the obvious candidates for the chopping block was restaurant eating. I started taking my breakfast and lunch to work, and for the past six weeks, I've been eating almost exclusively food I make in my own kitchen out of ingredients from the perimeter of the grocery store--fresh stuff.

Not surprisingly, I feel better. Slightly more suprisingly, given how heartily I've been eating, I'm losing weight. But it wasn't until roseambr and I went out to lunch today that I fully understood why--why I'm losing weight eating delicious food every day, and why it was impossible to lose weight before.

We went to a local bar and grill where, we both knew perfectly well, most things on the menu were going to be of the "cooked freight" variety--packaged, processed, frozen or canned items that are delivered to every restaurant in suburbia from a big truck backed up to the loading dock, and which are then heated, sauced from a packet, and served in over-large portions on plates the size of tea-trays.

Though the "food" at this place was particularly egregious--not just cooked freight, but badly cooked freight--I don't think it differed significantly in content from what's served at your average Applebee's or sold in the center aisles of the supermarket. It is standard fare in America.

I was pretty hungry, so I ate about half of the "chicken Dijon roulade" that was put in front of me. In terms of calories, I almost certainly soldiered through a light lunch's worth--maybe 400 or so, presumably enough to fuel the rest of a lazy Saturday afternoon.

My head started aching. My fingertips became slightly numb. My tongue got tingly. My sinuses flared up. roseambr reported the same. So, MSG for sure. Hydrogenated fat of some kind, definitely. My reaction to that stuff never used to be so obvious; apparently six weeks of relative purity has made me more sensitive.

But here's the clincher: before we even got back to roseambr's house ten minutes away, we were both hungry again. Hungrier than we'd been before lunch.

It was evidence of what I've believed for a long time: that America and I have gotten fat not because we're greedy piggy-wiggies with no moral fiber, but because the generally-available diet is laced with stuff that turns off our enough-o-meters and makes our bodies think we haven't just choked down a full lunch's worth of "food". Stuff that fools us into thinking that another 400 calories or so of the same sounds real good. And maybe another 400 after that.

That's not food, that's addiction.

It was all I could do to get through the afternoon without eating again. I drank loads of water instead, the headache passed, and I think I'm just about done sneezing now, though the post-nasal drip persists after (I now realize) about six weeks of freedom from that annoyance.



It's a damned good thing I like to cook. I've believed for some time that the only possible way to overcome the fatness epidemic in America is from the farm to the kitchen, one delicious, home-made, real-food meal at a time. Now I know it for sure.

Comments

[str8ontilmornin.livejournal.com]

Well, I've learned something new today. And I could definitely do with spending ten minutes a day just standing inside a humidor and enjoying the aroma.