While there are some days when I want to drive to Marsh and stuff an entire stuffed-crust pizza in my mouth, there are also days when I come home wishing I wanted to binge but have to admit I’m just not feeling it. Last night was one of those nights. I was tired from work. I went out of my way to get diet cat food at PetSmart, and then got stuck in traffic for 20 minutes because a Thunderbird stalled in the left lane of traffic. My head still hurts a little all the time. I had no energy.

In the car and on the couch, my thoughts kept coming back to, “What can I eat to make myself feel better?” I think I just do that out of habit though. There wasn’t anything I was craving. I didn’t feel like chocolate donuts. I nixed Snickerdoodles. I thought about eating a lot of baked apple oatmeal, but eh, it didn’t sound right. When I listened to my body, I realized I didn’t even feel hungry, [...]

• Continue reading "Some days you feel like a nut, some days you don’t"

Sometimes healthy living is so easy for me. I eat my snacks at the scheduled hours. I have a salad for dinner and genuinely enjoy it. I walk past boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the office kitchen without reaching my hand out to grab a bite and it’s not hard at all. Then there are nights when I’m sitting in the Marsh parking lot at 8:00 at night thinking, “There is something seriously wrong with me.” Because it is not normal to eat a box of ice cream sandwiches, two donuts, God-only-knows-how-many bowls of oatmeal, and a lot of other stuff I can’t remember two weeks later, and still want to drive to the grocery store to buy a stuffed-crust pizza.

Thankfully, it’s been so long since I bought a Tombstone stuffed-crust pizza that they seem to have stopped making them, or my Marsh just doesn’t stock them, so that was one small chip of the iceberg my personal Titanic avoided. I did wander around the freezer section for literally 15 minutes trying to decide [...]

• Continue reading "Vampire eating"

It’s been a whole year since I became half of myself! While the last couple months have been tough – changing jobs, fighting the winter blahs, and experiencing train-gain – I can still stand naked on that scale in the morning and weigh-in under 186. I only ask that you respect my modesty and not actually imagine me standing naked on the scale in the morning.

Monday night, Michael Pollan will be speaking at Butler University here in Indianapolis. Pollen wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and recently released In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto which are all about food, which you should all know I am a fan of. I had the full intention of reading these books before attending the lecture tomorrow night, but unfortunately this requires actually scanning the words with my eyes as I flip pages and not just setting the book on the shelf I have entirely dedicated to my library books. (Confession: I am the world’s slowest reader.) So, if anyone actually has read these [...]

• Continue reading "A whole year of half of me, omnivore Q’s, and Wilma, where are you?"

I have never been sure if I was a binge eater. I’m still not sure.

I know I used to eat some wacky stuff. I’d sometimes make frosting just to lick it off of spoons. I loved crunching on frozen orange concentrate crystals. And surely everyone has eaten an entire box of Twinkies over a weekend, right? Right? Hello? Why aren’t you answering me?

Though that eating behavior was rather atrocious, I usually felt in control of it. I was eating a can of frosting because I wanted to, not because I couldn’t stop. And I’m pretty sure I always stopped when I was full. From what I’ve read, binge eaters usually eat rapidly. They’ll eat even when they’re full or not actually hungry. I typically ate this food alone, which is a binging behavior. But who would eat orange concentrate in public anyway? I get strange enough looks for admitting I like to eat Ramen noodles raw.

Yesterday Marla was saying she’d never binged like someone who ate a pint of ice cream in one sitting. My [...]

• Continue reading "Stop the conveyor belt"