Sadly, It's Just Food

Over the past couple of weeks I have come to a rather sad realization. Well, it's sad, because I feel like my fantasy-land bubble is bursting... but it's also a joyous thing in another way. In other words, I think once I get over the sadness I will be thrilled with this lesson.

The new insight is this: it's just food. Now, this is not news to a lot of people. In fact, I've been reading variations of this concept for ages: "food is just fuel" and things like that. I even caught glimpses of a non-emotional relationship with food when I got completely off junky foods and started low carbing with Medifast. I described sitting by a loaf of warm bread and it not "calling" to me; it may as well have been a rock on a plate. I just didn't care.

However, I can assure you that if I were to take a bite of that bread *anyway*, suddenly it would become way, way more than a rock. Food, once it is in my mouth, has always become an Experience. It's some kind of transcendent thing where, for example, if I eat a slice of cheesecake it is almost as if I am suddenly floating above the clouds with angels singing and beams of light shining around me. When I'd sit down on the couch and eat a bag of chips I'd sort of zone out and go to some other place, unaware of anything around me, wrapped up completely in the crunch and the grease and the salt, the sensation of the food going down my throat and the fat coursing through my veins. When I'd eat a plate of pasta, nothing else existed and I was thrown back into some kind of carb high in a world of Parmesan cheese and sausages. It's weird, but it's almost like getting drunk or high I guess. A complete "experience."

Well, that seems to have changed. Over the last few weeks, food HAS called to me as I went off Medifast for one week. I HAVE had cravings and hunger that I have given in to. But none of the foods... NONE... have given me what I wanted from them like they used to. A candy bar used to erase my problems for awhile. A sugary latte would drown out any stress or sadness I was feeling. A plate of cheese made me happy. And the actual, physical experience on my taste buds was just euphoric. Now, I am not sure what happened... if my brain or my body or my taste buds changed so dramatically from being on Medifast for 9 months... but now, it is just NOT the same.

I eat a cookie, it is just a cookie. It's the same recipe I made and got high on last Christmas, but now it just tastes bland, too sweet, boring. I get nothing out of it but a bellyache.

I make my favorite sandwich, take a bite, and it does nothing for me. No erasure of negatives, no special happy high. It tastes like its components: ham, cheese, pickles, mayo. Combining them does not magically turn them into a special potion to solve my problems or make me happy.

I have a piece of bacon, and it tastes like salt and grease. I don't love it, I don't hate it, it is just a piece of bacon and does not change how I feel, and it does not send me spinning into a bacon-happiness coma.

Today is the day my father died, more than two decades ago. I cannot believe he has been gone from my life longer than he was in it. It makes me terribly sad. I have blogged before about how his favorite sandwich was a Reuben, how I didn't even like them when I was a kid and teen, but suddenly after he was gone, I wanted them all the time. Every chance I'd get in a restaurant I'd order a Reuben sandwich, and that first bite would throw me into a delirious swirl of salty, greasy, miss-my-Dad-but-I-am-like-him-with-this-sandwich head trip. Now that I am getting healthy, I try to avoid Reubens. Haven't had one in a long time. But today, I was in a restaurant with one of my kids who got a food gift card for Christmas, so he'd asked me to take him there for lunch. On the menu? Reubens. Big, greasy, salty. I thought about my Dad and how he was gone. I knew it was "the right thing to do" to have a Reuben today in his honor, to be close to him. Only, I knew it wouldn't work. And for the first time in 21 years, I didn't want a Reuben.

I got something else, a turkey sandwich, which was fine but was, again, just food.

It is sad to me, in a way, that there is no special food anymore. I have let myself have several things I have been "dreaming" about for the past 9 months but have not let myself indulge in: a piece of lasagna, a cupcake, some cinnamon toast. Stuff that used to send me flying when I ate it. But this past couple of weeks, every time I ate one of those things, I was disappointed. It may as well have been a plain boiled chicken breast with broccoli. It didn't matter. It *doesn't* matter anymore. I like nicely prepared food as much as anyone, but it is still just food. And now, the simplest things have the most delicious taste to me. A piece of poached salmon with some steamed green beans and salad would be more satisfying than any fancy dish I could dream up.

So yeah, things have changed, and I am kinda sad that I can't "get high" or "escape" with food like I used to. But knowing that whatever I put in my mouth is going to be JUST FOOD and nothing more is also very freeing. Because if that lasagna and garlic bread is *really* the same experience to me as chicken breast and broccoli, then there is no deprivation involved in choosing the latter. And losing weight becomes routine, and not as difficult, and I know I am really... for the first time in my life... okay with NEVER having another Big Mac or another Reuben sandwich again. And that, my friends, makes me happy.