My food restrictions and I haven't been on the best of terms lately. There are lots of "practical" reasons why (prepared food at the company retreat, camping with communal cooking, lack of groceries, unbelieveable exhaustion, etc.), but in each of these cases I could have, with just a little bit of effort, worked my way around.
And let's review: I'm supposed to be staying away from wheat and dairy, and, if possible, HFCS. This isn't all that complicated. I don't much like bread or pasta, but I love rice. I adore really good ice cream and fresh mozarella, but I don't miss most cheese and actually think it's kind of gross. I love cookies, but I can be made happy with really good dark chocolate, which generally has neither dairy nor wheat nor HFCS. I like my veggies to taste like veggies, so I'm not used to butter or cheese toppings on everything. I have a small Coke addiction, but I'm assiduously replacing it with Honest Tea. In theory, none of this is that hard for me to do.
In reality, though, it can be challenging, especially if we're eating out a lot, as we have been lately. (See "exhaustion," "lack of groceries," above.) With the exception of broccoli, green beans, carrots, and lettuce, restaurants don't serve much in the way of veggies because they're harder to keep stocked. So I'm left with meat and maybe some rice unless the place has really good salads, and for some reason this area is not so hip on the really good salads. Enter Thai food, sushi, and Indian food, most of which fits the bill, but these, too, get old. And if, as is happening frequently these days, I'm feeling squeamish about industrialized meat, I tend to want to avoid meat when I'm eating out. In other words, as long as we're eating out, I'm screwed one way or another.
Eating at home isn't a whole lot better in many ways, because while the selection of food is more appropriate to my system, it involves us having to actually plan, cook, and clean up, and even when we manage the first, the second trips us up. Worse, it ends up feeding into the housework crisis we're in the middle of, and it's easier to just throw up our hands and get something else.
See how well I can rationalize the calzones, the tzatziki, the bruschetta, the buffalo mozzarella? It's not that any of the above is untrue. Far from it! But the difficulty and the inconvenience is not the whole story, since I managed to avoid wheat, dairy, and HFCS for months at a time when I was single in graduate school, and friends, I don't really cook.
Walking to Whole Foods today to buy iced tea (and thereby break a $20 so I could pay for my $5 massage), I realized that part of what's going on is that, in this culture, especially if you're female, a "treat" is anything that is "bad" for you. This is usually defined as ice cream, chocolate, sweets, celebrity magazines, bad television. What's hard about food restrictions is not that I'm actually deprived. It's that the foods I'm restricted from shift over into the land of "bad for me" and therefore into the land of "treat."
And so, when I'm already feeling alone and vulnerable, as I am right now (see Mother's Day, writing the adoption letter for L&S, confronting the first birthdays of everyone else's kids, housework conflict, feeling isolated from my friends, lack of real downtime, BFF's emotional crisis, dog fight residuals, hosting V, trying to figure out vacation plans when the dogsitter can't come, etc.), food is one of the ways I comfort myself. I "deserve" a "treat," when the real issue is that I'm feeling sad or anxious or depleted or frustrated or defeated or hopeless or exhausted or whatever. And just to make it harder, when I'm feeling alone and vulnerable, mustering the extra energy it takes to ask for what I need at a restaurant or help spearhead cooking at home is more than I have to provide.
I don't miss bread, but suddenly I'm eating toast at breakfast. We don't eat pizza for months, and suddenly we're having pizza or calzones at least once a week. We're getting up too late to eat breakfast at home, so I'm getting bagels next door to work. It's a bodily version of the pathetic fallacy: my metaphorical insides feel crappy, so I make my literal insides feel crappy, too.
None of this is rocket science, and neither is the repair: take better care of myself emotionally. But I'm struck again by how interconnected it all is, how subtle and fine the tendrils are, how it all comes back to the same thing: tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.