Some days, it occurs to me that my entire life pretty much revolves around food.
Now, before you sign me up for Overeaters Anonymous, let me clarify that, for the most part, I tend to eat pretty healthy, and I work out more or less every day, so this is not some kind of cry for help. It’s just an observation.
I get up in the morning and the first thing on my mind (after my run, of course) is tea.
Yes, I know tea is not food, but it IS something you put in your stomach, so I think it counts, because my body does NOT let me start the day without it.
While I drink my huge pot of green tea, I think about what I’m going to eat for breakfast. (I do other stuff, too, but no matter how productive I am while I’m trying to get my head together and start the day, the idea of breakfast is always there, nagging at me).
After tea (and breakfast—which is usually something fairly light, like a yogurt parfait with berries and granola), I get to work. As much as I love what I do, it still takes less than an hour before my mind is drifting away from the project at hand and back to—you guessed it—food.
“What’s for lunch?” my stomach demands, usually with a little growl (as if we didn’t just eat our weight in mixed-berry yogurt).
If I don’t have an answer that my body likes, along with a planned time to EAT the lunch in question, I will be so distracted all morning, I might as well just abandon work entirely.
Now, no matter what time I eat breakfast—whether it’s 5:00 or 9:30 a.m.—I’m still starving by 11:00, because in my head, that’s the best possible time to eat lunch. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you.
So, at 11:00, I take a short break from work and eat my lunch, which (even while I’m eating) gets my stomach wondering about what we might be having for dinner. Really, it never quite ends.
Thankfully, I learned about these food-based idiosyncrasies of mine a long time ago and I’ve figured out some ways to work around them.
For example, I always plan my dinners for the week on Sunday, so in most cases, I can easily remind my nagging, annoying stomach exactly what home-cooked delight it can expect to enjoy at 5:00. (If I try to push back dinner any later than that, I’m pretty sure my body would force me to gnaw off my own foot to avoid starvation—that’s how hungry it always thinks it is.)
Knowing what I’m going to eat and when is the only way I can shut my stomach up and let my brain (you know, the part of my body that actually holds our whole life together) get some stuff done.
It’s not an easy way to live, but I don’t seem to have much of a choice.
I guess I should just be grateful that my body is generally satisfied with vegetables and hummus, chicken breast and fish, and other foods that are fairly good for me. There was a time when things were different and my stomach was nagging me not just to EAT, but to eat mozzarella sticks and chicken finger baskets with fries. Things could be a lot worse.
Now, what was on the menu for lunch again? Ugh . . .