Food and I have never been friends.

Food is like that friend one has when one doesn’t have a car, who one doesn’t really like or enjoy spending time with, but they have a car! So you hang out with them and get to go places and do things, but putting up with that person is a real pain in the rear and even makes you question, at times, if going places is all that important after all.

(I never had that friend in real life, by the way. The only people I remember regularly relying on for such were my parents, Fish, and Schneider, and I really like all these people a lot.)

The point is that food and I have a long and often tortuous history. Most of my childhood arguments with my parents were about food (at least those that weren’t about haircuts). I didn’t like it – really, any of it – and while I didn’t enjoy feeling hungry, I often preferred the sensation to what was being passed off as “food” at any given meal. A whole lexicon of dealbreakers on food developed, usually summarized into “green things” by my parents, which referred to most any type of parsleyish seasoning in otherwise almost tolerable edibles. I actually liked a lot of the big “green things” that people refer to with that phrase, such as broccoli, celery, or green beans, but if it was microscopic and green, there was no chance. I really could taste these things (or more often feel them – texture was a big deal) and they really did ruin food. My parents were skeptical that anyone could really detect such things and I think often assumed it was psychological. On these grounds, they tried to leverage my love of the color green into an affinity for “green things”. No dice.

And as one can imagine, I spent my childhood being ridiculously thin. There were many jokes about my profile being invisible and I was always able to squeeze through inhumanly tight spaces (though I did get stuck in a window in the Science Center for a really bad 45 minutes in high school). And always I was told to stretch my stomach, to eat until I could feel the stretching.

But as I have aged, as my father predicted, my hatred for many foods has softened. In large part, it’s just been a process of attrition – I was so often told to try things and so often told to eat as much as possible to “stretch my stomach” that I eventually found more and more foods palatable. I am still the pickiest eater any of my friends know, but the range of things I’ll eat positively dwarfs what I’d consume fifteen years ago and I was only recently able to get away from the idea that I have to eat till I am in physical pain to “stretch” my stomach. After all, I’ve suddenly been putting on weight. And while I’m still on the low end of normal in the much-vaunted BMI (body mass index), I’ve been increasingly troubled by the facts that my gut sticks out and that my thighs now touch each other.

This is a tricky issue to talk about, because people are extremely sensitive about weight and many of them have been pretty much straight-up angry with me when I bring up that I’m starting to worry about mine. I don’t really know what to say about this, except to really try to expound on exactly how much of a non-issue this has not only been for me in the past, but I always assumed it would be in the future. Yes, it was probably silly to assume that I would spend the entire rest of my life effortlessly rail-thin and always able to eat as much as possible of whatever junk I wanted. But at the same time, the same people who told me that this was silly also told me it would be impossible to do this at any time. And yet that was a full quarter-century of my experience – no matter what I ate or how “bad” it was, I never put on weight and never had health problems associated with what I ate. And while we can learn from what others tell us if it resonates with our experience, it’s very hard to do so when others’ advice not only contradicts but actually rules out one’s actual experience.

But the impossible dream expired after about twenty-five years, and suddenly I began to slowly realize that what I was eating actually impacted my body. This had literally never happened before… there had been no relationship between intake and output. I would eat massively or fast and stay exactly stagnant in weight, appearance, and feeling. But suddenly about a year or two ago, I was fluctuating like everybody else.

It’s taken about 18-24 months for me to make some sort of peace with this and realize that I should be proactive in correcting this or face suddenly having to take warnings about obesity seriously. I hasten to add that it’s not that I’m obese now (or even close) or in jeopardy of becoming obese tomorrow (or even the next day). It’s that I have realized, after two years of being mortal in the arena of food, that I will no longer blithely be able to consider myself immune to the concept of obesity for the rest of my life unless I change my habits now.

This is a bit of a struggle, because I really don’t like much food and I really can’t stand planning around the concept of food. Scheduled meal times don’t work for me – I’m usually either full or starving and there’s very little turn-around time between these two states. So I eat when I’m starving and don’t when I’m full. I tend to eat one or two foods over and over and over again until I get sick of it and then move on to the next food. And I basically only eat out, a product of both the starving/full quick-change dichotomy (little time and energy for the protracted food preparation process) and in order to incentivize myself in actually trying to eat instead of just riding out the hunger and winding up with a migraine or something. If eating has a fun component beyond the drudgery of having to consume food, I’m more likely to do it.

I guess you’re wondering at this point how I’m gaining weight when my gut instincts are so adversarial to food. I’ve been wondering too, somewhat incredulously, and this has really kept me from truly facing the issues I’m dealing with regarding food until the last few weeks.

I guess it’s a little like the habits one picks up when one’s single. At first, when one hasn’t ever dealt with a real romantic situation, let alone love, one doesn’t really have any bad habits around the gender of one’s attraction. They’re just people and one may be interested, but has a certain amount of innocence in such interactions; one is ready to be surprised by love.

But once one has had a serious relationship fail, one picks up all kinds of bad habits that become increasingly hard to unlearn. One starts seeing every member of the attractive gender as being a possible interest and gets increasingly focused on this as a daily expenditure of time. It’s almost impossible, no matter how much one may want to, to ever return to that first-love innocence of one’s youth and shed all of the trolling outlook on life one had to learn when one was first bitterly single.

Similarly, I’ve spent so much of my time learning bad habits about food. Not just the stomach stretching thing, but also to associate eating as something to increase and encourage in myself, and sometimes even to seek out more weighty foods in order to not be quite so thin. And now that I’m not only not rail-thin, but am actually over the weight I would consider ideal, it’s trouble. Returning to one’s gut intuition is not as easy as one thinks after spending so much time learning something different.

So now I have to make a plan and rules to get myself back where I want to be. I’ve decided that 130-135 is a reasonable place to be; a place where my gut and thighs would sufficiently recede but people wouldn’t stutter in horror about me just getting off the boat from Somalia. This is even “BMI”-approved… 130 would put me at a BMI of 18.7, when the border between normal and underweight is 18.5. How perfect is that?

After topping out at 150, I had some work to do. Although thanks to help from my India trip, which I guess was pretty active (because I felt like I was eating constantly), I haven’t been back up quite that high. Though my first few weeks after India, plus splurging on my trip to Chicago cemented the undoing of much of India’s good work. I basically started this plan at 147.

The plan has been pretty simple, and underway for about 3-4 full weeks, with the brief interruption from Chicago. I have a list of foods that I’m allowed to eat when I’m hungry. In general, these foods have been pulled from a narrow list of foods that disproportionately make one feel fuller than their calorie count would indicate. There are all sorts of articles and indexes on the web about this – satiety indexes and such. It was a revelation to me that calories have extremely little to do with how full one actually feels after eating. Much like money has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of work one does. In both cases, sometimes they coincide, but more often they don’t.

There was another angle to this food thing – I’ve had some recurrent acne and have attributed it after much research to a possible Vitamin A deficiency. I have since probably discredited this hypothesis, but it’s why carrots, which (like pancakes) make one hungrier than one was before eating them, are on this list.

The List:
-Bran Cereal
-Carrots
-Honeydew Melon
-Potatoes (boiled)

Plus, I get one totally free meal a day, where I can eat whatever, wherever. It goes without saying that I’m not to go hog-wild at such meals and eat a double-meal or something, but my low threshold of fullness helps automatically keep this in check.

It wasn’t until the last couple days that this exhaustive list of four foods for all eating outside of one meal/day was starting to wear on me. Thus I have added two brand-new foods!:
-Celery
-Lentils

This diet has knocked me down to 140, though there seems to be some push-back at this line. My nadir was 139, which was pretty exciting, since I could really see a dramatic difference in the distribution of that weight differential. I’ve stabilized in the 139-141 range, but seem to need some sort of prolonged or new move to get below that.

Then there’ll be a larger issue of what it takes to maintain the 130-135 range and whether it requires upkeep of these habits or a slight shift to something different.

After several weeks, I’ve established that this regimen is healthy, effective, and sustainable. It makes me appreciate the one meal out a day more and not have to worry as much about what I’m going to do to fulfill hunger when hunger arises. The foods on the list are simple to maintain, and basically all of them can be eaten raw and stored easily. No preparation time, no real thinking time, just getting eating over as fast as possible – the way it was always meant to be.

Meantime, I can watch my nephew Paul V grow up and see him be exactly like me (through 7 years of life, he’s nearly identical in his relationship with food). Maybe I can warn him about what happens at 26 before it’s too late for him and he has to resort to a plan to maintain what I grew up thinking would always be automatic.

Maybe he’ll just have to find out on his own.