catch and swallow

Mere minutes ago I got into a slight altercation with a tub of almond butter.

There was celery, there was crunching, there was tongue to roof of mouth action.

Two stalks of celery. Two tablespoons or so of almond butter. Or so. But really, not half the container or anything. I am trying to lose weight here.

(eye on the prize)

It's snowing. Again. Have I written that somewhere else on the blog perhaps? Surely I have, given how many times I have looked up from this computer screen and seen snow falling through a slice of picture window, book ended by curtains.

What I've eaten today:

I cup Kashi Vive cereal (I actually like it) with 2% milk

Leftover spaghetti (marinara) with turkey meatballs (about two cups pasta, one cup too many, and three meatballs [according to the package, a serving is 4])

Celery and almond butter.

Water. Water. Canada Dry Cheerful Cherry Sparkling Seltzer Water. Water. Water and water.

It's strange to see a spray of bright daffodils

trumpeting right below a window

outside of which snow blows sideways.

We thought spring was here. And it is, but this is Colorado.

Juxtapositions.
And shadows that we catch and swallow.

Decided then. I'm not going down with the almond butter ship. Veggie burger with sauteed onions (no bun) for dinner, some baked beans (not CORE but fuck 'em), a salad. When the wife comes home, we'll dust off the George Foreman grill and have ourselves a little indoor spring blizzard BBQ.

Preparations for dinner to the rescue!

Eschewing more immediate chewing,

that's what I'll do.

hunger surfacing

So I'm in the zone. The hunger zone. This will pass, of this I am certain, but right now...right now I am hungry. Dinner is simmering. Chicken (organic) adobo, as I call it, basically a Mexican-influenced stewish dish with tomatoes and onions and bits of jalepeno...good to eat with tortillas (whole wheat) or my human pincers. I've got some rice on, and a salad. Balanced meal. I'm waiting. To eat. Until then, I am in the hunger zone.

I had a moment today wherein I felt different. I felt like I had a long neck. I was meeting a woman to talk about PR efforts for my employer and we met at a cafe in what is now called LoHi, or Lower Highlands, in NW Denver. We ordered chais, mine with rice milk, hers with skim. That was when I felt it...lighter. It registered in my neck and chin, of all places. I felt comfortable in my own skin, akin to invincible, and even though I had to keep from sheilding my eyes so that my line if vision wasn't straight to the baked goods case, I felt in control.

It was like driving slowly by a big picture window and seeing this happy family around the dinner table inside, their smiles lit by the golden glow of the arts-and-crafts pendant light hanging above their heads. Like a mind photograph that you take and file away to remember. And occasionally you do remember. It's still pretty clear, that image. That's what this feeling in the cafe was. I will remember it always. I will file it away for later and recall it when I'm about to order that third beer. Or take that second helping. It was a me with a bounce, me free from the bonds of self-flagellation-due-to-fatness.

Dinner is ready. Time to feed this hunger, slowly, masticatingly, consciously. Time to feed the body, not just eat.

what, me? Human?

Over the course of the past few minutes, I have engaged in what is, for me, an almost age-old debate. It goes like this:

TO RIDE, OR NOT TO RIDE?

It doesn't have to do with rain. It has to do with tired, and night-time returning and Friday night-time returning, and the prospect of working 11 (or so) hours and then attempting to navigate myself home.

So the decision to take the bus, it's not that weird, really. And there's a good 30 - 40 minutes of walking in there, too.

The part I have to deal with is the little voice that wonders if this means I'm done exercising. If this bus-commute in will be the gateway drug.

Nope.

And how odd, that in honoring my level of exhaustion (and how physical my job really is) that I should work so rapidly (and stealtfully) to the conclusion that I am destined to become some kind of slacker.

Perhaps it's time to watch STAR WARS again, to watch that whole trust the force, Luke bit... maybe not. Maybe I'll just trust myself without the saga.

wearing wiffy's pants

I got up a little early and hadn't set anything out and I didn't want to wake her, so I grabbed these jeans out of the laundry basket and I thought I'd see if I could squinch into them, and lo and behold I can, and they look and feel great. I know they aren't mine. I know they will not become mine. But it's kind of amazing to have these things on, really.

I tend to look at my Frau as thin, or lanky, or svelte. She's shaped very differently than I am, and many things that she wears won't get over my thighs...

So it's that thing about projection-- we tend to see our sig-figs as having something we don't-- be it an attractive body, or fitness, or youth, or a certain type of beauty.

Wearing wiffy's pants deconstructs one of those projections. It tells me that despite how I might see myself, I am something else entirely. I am that thing I idolize, long for, hold as some ideal.

The call is coming from inside the house-- the delicious booty is mine!

what it means to be me-- a wee ramble

I think about food all the time. I dream about it, too. Mostly those are professional dreams-- big vats of this and that, in need of tending, perforated pans of crab cake mixture in need of shaping, sauces that need thickening. But the thinking about food, it's what I do, horizontal on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, staring out the window at the rain and the yellow blossoms. I think about what's in the house, and what I can do with it. I weigh my options, think about what I've already eaten today, feel what my body wants/needs, what the weather is dictating, and then I (r)evolve into a decision.

There are times when a trip to the grocery store is excruciating and so rife with conflict that I feel like I could run screaming from the building, pushing an empty cart ahead of me. Sometimes what I want to make and what I need to make are at odds with each other. Sometimes my culinary training is the antithesis of how I wish to eat. Sure, I'm versatile, I can do no fat, low-fat, vegan, wheat-free, gluten-free, or carnivore's delight. The issue is that sometimes there are things that I want to do/make (in Spanish that would be the verb hacer) that I have no business eating. The desire to hacerlos has to do with my sense of experimentation, expanding my repertoire, mixing things up a bit. The no business eating has to do with maintaining my sense of balance, striving to be healthy, staying on the straight and narrow for fear that anything else is a slippery slope indeed.

So those times when I think I'm gonna have a meltdown in the grocery store, they usually involve an overwhelming sense of possibilities (plural) and/or desire to engage the parts of me that delight in fat, sweetness, salt, umami and the kind of crunchy that is often formed in either a large factory or a small vat of 375'F oil. When I have these moments-- these itchy blooded boilings in the bulk aisle or the cheese section or the place near where the rice cakes live-- I just have to keep on keeping on. I work through it. I find a compromise, or I lead myself off in a different direction, entirely. In retrospect, this makes me thankful for the very versatility that is at the root of the torture-- there are a lot of things I can cook-- for every dangerous trap, there's an escape route of some other, lighter culinary variety.

If I stop thinking about food, I could be in a rough spot. I might lose those appealing escapes and be at the mercy of cravings that are not entirely free of an emotionally motivated element. In fact, the few times that I've been the most distant from food thoughts just happen to be the times I've been closest to death. I'm not shitting you.

I've always found it a bit funky that WW pushes folks to find ways to celebrate/reward without food-- I mean, I look at every culture around me and food is the center of celebration. I think that shifting how those celebrations go down would be a valuable practice. Enough is as good as a feast can be a guiding principle, celebrating with a sense of balance (yin and yang, alkaline and acid, crunch and cream-- you name it) leads to satisfaction. So I wanna be satisfied, and I don't want to deny that I'm in love with food, because it makes me happy (despite my struggles), it brings delight, it reminds me of how I, we, the seasons, the planet-- are alive and in motion. To be one with food, to work in service to food-- it's a gift.

Take and give.

identity

Following a supremely enriching conversation with une blogmate, I find find myself (still) in the kitchen, chopping ingredients to add to my forbidden rice salad--red pepper, green onion, edamame, cilantro tossed with sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, low sodium soy because I'm out of tamari--and the sun is coming through the back windows, spring sun, the real thing, warm enough that the snow in the backyard has melted into a mudpit that has been tracked all over my house by daisy but I don't care because I'm cooking, in my kitchen, food that is nourishing, healthy, whole.

This is, I will say it once again but certainly not for the last time, my one and only body.

And if that means i have to accept that it will always be a struggle, that divorce doesn't exist for people like me who just want to leave food behind, ignore it completely, act like it never lived because I come to food not just to cram it down my foodhole--though my conscious eating moments must multiply-- but to revel in its very existence, and to rejoice in the creative spirit that flows from me when I'm relaxed and in the kitchen, making do with whatever I can find in the fridge...I come to food with reverance, and thankfulness, and I never want my quest for apparent thin perfection to rob me of it to be something I love to do.

And I use it for comfort, solace, celebration, relaxation...

So, on with the rewiring.

What do I get out of sabatoging weight loss and healthy eating. Statement,
not a question. Rhetorical, even.

I don't suspect there is one answer, or even a host of answers. I speak it plainly. What do I get from eating too much.

To the mind leaps comfort.
There is no comfort in food.
___________

While chopping, I mull over the conversation with stine...considering the toxic hot implications of peanut butter spread on an english muffin, have I been an incinerator for years?
___________

I get out what I put in. Fullness. Familiarity. Sitting in front of the television, post-school, a cellophane-wrapped package of grapes in my lap. One by one. Zoom a zoom zoom. No one home but me. The grapes don't do it, quite. But they are there, cold, and I finish the pound, easily. And move to the kitchen to seek out more. More. Of what I'm yearning for.

This is what I know,
this weight of the ages,
hanging from the bone.
Years and years later,
I attempt the rewiring,
seek out those who know
this prison like I do,
the small window, the drafts.
Reflections. Learning to see anew.
Yearning to be like a slough of yous.
First you bite, then you chew.
Like walking for the first time
One step, wobble, one step.
And there, beyond all hunger
beyond third helpings
and empty pop-tart boxes under the bed
unbelievably (for how often I have fallen)
arms outstretched
_______________

If I'm fat, I don't have to accept that I'm beautiful.
If I'm beautiful, I can't stop the gaze.
It's not just about mass; it's about power.
Certain.
Constant.
Mine.

thirteen ways

On the heels of a parental visit...

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Food
(with all due respect given to Wallace Stevens)

I.

Beneath the ragged cap
of the Rocky Mountains
I begin my day with too much food.

II.

Worthiness cast aside
by those who can handle
food responsibly
and because I struggle
I am but a speck they spit and ignore.

III.

At the sushi restaurant, he falls
into a chair because his knees
work poorly. I wince in anticipation
of the chair breaking, see the men
at the table behind us widen their eyes
in fear of this hulk of a man
falling towards them
this man, this father, who cannot
see food as anything other than comfort
as anything other than art
ingested

VI.

What is the use?
The albatross of food
the necessity of survival
even those who lose
must plod along, fearful
up one pound, down two
stop short of goal
still post everyday
because they cannot loosen
the grip food has on them
and I wonder why
any of us bother
when there's no end in sight
and the scale
hangs like a noose
'round our days

V.

Amalgamation of two
this stomach, hers
these legs, his and hers
these hands, his
these eyes, hers
this legacy
love and disdain
for food
unfettered
under God
indivisible

VI.

At what cost this weight
carried for decades
and if I should die young
scatter food at my feet
say
this is what she loved
and what killed her
say
this is the host of hosts
come to lighten the load
say
finally, free

VII.

In Great Britain
a boy of 8 weighs 218 lbs.
and authorities threaten to take him
from his family.
When I was 8
I was dieting with my mother
and Mrs. Dash was liberally
sprinkled on everything.
Had you asked me then
if I would rather go live someplace else
I would have said
without hesitation
yes.

VIII.

I hear the melody of an oven
clicking on, clicking off
and the chorus of leftovers
calls to me from
the great cold box from hell
that holds all means of destruction
and I try not to sing along
but for these siren songs
I would never eat food again
Oh to never eat food again
Leave just vapor and the words
But She Was So Beautiful In the End
ringing

IX

First food, flax seed waffles
peanut butter, a little jam
Second food, leftover pasta
cream sauce, salmon
pour off oil
add white rice and mix
third food
to be determined

X

Foodstuffs
Foodwise
Foodie
Foodishness
Whatever way you look at it
it's still food
and you're doomed
to eat and eat and eat

XI

My breasts rest
atop this first roll
of a food-filled stomach.
Excuse me, but there
is nothing here to love.

XII

Food, my first born,
go and sin no more.

XIII

I eat food all day and into the night.
Continued cold and snow
not a chance to move in sight
and there would be no mercy
but for those other voices,
there, well beyond the fear
beyond the need for constant nimiety
but for moving slowly toward the light