Archive for July 9th, 2009
Being a fatgirl for most of my life (since age 4, I surmise), I go on the assumption that the way I eat is the way most people eat: fingers out of the way, all hands on deck.
Before you think I just slap my face around a trough at mealtime (oink! more corn, please!), I need to explain where this thought came from.
My little bro had heart surgery yesterday (by little, I mean 30, but a little bro will always be a little bro) so today I hung out in his room while he rested with his wonderful pain med drip. In the room, there’s one small window that overlooks the vestibule of the heart hospital. It also looks into the waiting area of families awaiting news on other heart surgeries. While I watched, a woman (my age) and a man I figure was her dad sat down with a paper sack full of lunch between them. She had something–I couldn’t voyeur that far, (love people watching behind shaded glass~) but he had a sandwich and a Frosty. And a book.
Mind you, this was around 3pm. I’d had a bowl of Fruity Pebbles around8 this morning, so I was a wee bit hungry. Some people watch Playboy, I watch food court. As I watched him eat (after pouring the entire salt packet on his sandwich….in a heart hospital….ugh), I realized something. Five minutes later, he was still eating. And reading. And chewing.
I think he’d taken like three bites in that five minutes. In the same time span, I could have eating his sandwich, fries, frosty and have been in line for something else. He wasn’t paying a whit of attention to his food. Rather, he was engrossed in his book.
For some reason, this made me reflect on how I eat. For me,there’s some type of unbreakable laser-like spell with any type of food in the vicinity. And not in a good way. If you ever watch Cesar on the Dog Whisperer, it’s like when the dogs get so fixated on another dog, or a rabbit or a person and can’t see anything else in the universe except that thing–until Cesar breaks the spell. (Poke me in the ribs, Cesar, and see if I stop eating). It really is scary to be food in my presence. There is no cease fire.
But this guy…he ate about half the sandwich then proceeded to wrap up the rest and toss it out. I like to think it was the massive sodium content, but after watching him eat two bites of his Frosty, read for five minutes and eat two more bites, I realized the real deal–the man is not stark raving mad around food. He enjoyed his lunch, ate til he was (presumably) full and enjoyed his dessert. I imagined myself with a Frosty–no one gets near it til it’s gone.
This made me very aware of how I eat, and I tried carrying over those thoughts (shameful, if truth be told) through dinner. I ate slower, tried to enjoy my food without dying to scarf it down. It was nice. I don’t know if it will last but I keep reminding myself that his slowness and enjoying the food vs. my maniacal food attacks are probably why he was skinny as a beanpole and I’m as fat as a tomato.