New Year Thoughts

I don't eat well.

I mean, I love to cook. I grew up with both my parents in the kitchen. Mom taught me how to knead her homemade bread pretty much as soon as my hands were strong enough to do so. She read me "Little House in the Big Woods," and we planted vegetables in the back yard. My favorite sort of garden is a kitchen garden. Reading about food is one of my favorite pastimes-- and sometimes I even try to put that fancy French cuisine into practice (citation: my father's large-round-number birthday dinner in 2003, for which I served Cornish Game Hens in a port sauce).

Somewhere in Junior High, I became incredibly self-conscious about the amount I ate. My closest friends were guys, and I was obsessed with the need to appear small and delicate around them by not eating anything. So I'd take a vanilla yogurt and water to school... then walk home and binge on soda and chips and cookies.

I stopped dancing second year of High School, to make room for theater rehearsals and homework. I didn't gain much weight, though, because having decided to go Vegetarian, I was far more conscious of balancing my diet. Despite this, I hated my body-- so much so that my mother paid for Weight Watcher's subscriptions for both of us, hoping we could do it together and get me in a shape I liked before going off to College. (Irony here in that I spent that summer volunteering at a Soup Kitchen in the Castro... insert comment on socio-economic structures here.)

As so often happens, College didn't particularly help with anything. Soda, my great weakness, was readily available-- if not in the dining hall, then in the dorm vending machines with chips and candy bars I'd eat all night, staying up to write papers and do problem sets. I switched from Coke to Pepsi because I could drink more of it without feeling sick to my stomach, to facilitate all-nighters. When I wasn't drinking soda, I drank juice as a "healthier substitute". I packed my tea with sugar.

My eating habits didn't much improve once I had an apartment of my own. I was always too busy to go grocery shopping or cook, and ate with my friends at the dining hall. I sustained myself primarily on grilled-cheese-sandwiches-with-tomato and fries... with a soda on the side. I lived right down the street from CVS, which provided easy access to Cherry Coke and Peanut Butter Cups for working late into the night. Veronica and I would stay up until one, go get donuts and coffee, and then stay up even later.

Wales was full of excellent beer--which we went out to drink every night except Mondays-- and far, far too many potatoes. On my return I was once again a Vegetarian, in the hope of both losing the beer & potato weight and capturing the heart of a young man who had never touched meat. Once the semester started up again, I was eating like I always had. As I told Professor F, you don't want to know how many Peanut Butter Cups had to die for the writing of my BA thesis.

Unfortunately, Toronto, despite the easy access of Kensington market, hasn't proved much better. I've been relying on cheap chow mein (with the crispy noodles) from a take-out on Bloor Street. Somewhere along the line I developed an addiction to Pringles potato chips for when I'm writing my papers. I'm drinking too much coffee, not enough water-- and the local beer here isn't even good, but for some reason I order it anyway.

I see in myself the tendency to be careless about time for myself, including food preparation. I eat according to my emotions-- so I'll binge on chocolate and chips if I'm stressed, or writing (writing is SO an emotional state, don't tell me it isn't), but if I'm really into something that I'm doing, I'll forget to eat until it is far too late-- then I binge, and feel sick. I'll forget that eating well really does affect my ability to think, so I'll have macaroni-and-cheese out of a box with nary a vegetable in sight, to save twenty minutes for more... procrastinating.

All of which is a rather long-winded and somewhat self-serving background meditation to what I want to do this year. I'm not going to say that I want to lose weight (which I do) or that I want to eat healthier (which I do), but that I want to break this cycle I have with food. I don't want to see it anymore as a purely functional caulking for filling the hole in my stomach or my spirit when they hurt, or an annoyance that will take time I don't have. I'm tired of abusing caffeine because I don't know how to manage my time. I'm tired of late-night breakdowns because I don't know how to take care of myself by prioritizing. I want to take time for real pleasures, not false ones (reading a chapter of a book, rather than spending thirty minutes browsing cute cat pictures online, or savoring a Green & Black's bar piece-by-piece over several days, rather than swallowing a Snicker's bar only to wish immediately for more.)

And if, in the end, I can fit back into this dress--


(vintage 1950's. From looking at the inside, I think it's handmade by the original wearer, or someone close to her.)

Well, then, all the better.