Journal Entries for Week 43
Post-Critic Eating and Fitness
As I suspected, it's slightly harder, not easier, to draw boundaries around eating on the far side of being a restaurant critic. The restaurant-critic job was a force and a metaphor for structured, rhythmic eating; it let me know that for two to three (or even four) hours every night, I'd have to eat substantially. And that knowledge governed and, in a sense, protected me for the rest of the day. There was almost never much snacking. There was almost never a really big breakfast. And there was only a sloppy or big lunch if lunch was a work meal and if doing the work responsibly demanded that sloppy, big lunch.
Now the rules of a given day are my own, and I sometimes find myself having a few too many snacks in a row around 3 or 4 p.m., because I can tell myself I'll go light at dinner, or skip it. Even though I usually don't go so light. (I love dinner. I think I'll ALWAYS love dinner.)
I need to re-hammer the lessons of enforced-rhythm eating into my head. Which I'm doing.
Another challenge of the current moment is the way the weather's getting colder. Toward the end of summer and in early fall, I started doing something I'd long meant to and that others who work to keep their weight in check had long recommended: staging one weekend day's activities around some sustained physical endeavor.
As I've described in a prior post, Tom and I would plot a long bike ride with lunch in the middle of it as a reward. We also took a few long hikes. Doing four to five hours of exercise in a day pretty much gives you free license for a big dinner (and a good-size lunch, too). And that's long been my goal, the whole destination that "Born Round" builds to: integrating a big appetite with a waistline that's not enormous. Having it all: a substantial amount of food; a body that I don't feel self-conscious about and that accurately reflects a good state of health and mental well-being.
So what to do, for example, last weekend? When it was cold and rainy in Manhattan? I plotted an arrival at the gym that would likely get me a treadmill right under one of the TVs, then I asked the attendant to change the TV nearest me to the Giants/Saints game, and then, knowing that a good football game would distract me, I set the treadmill to a low speed and set out to keep running or uphill-walking for the whole first half. I ended up doing more than six miles, and it was as painless as six miles can be.
I think that's what those of us who struggle with appetite and weight need always to do: find new motivations, new distractions, new little games we can play to keep moving, moving, moving. As I mention in the book and I've mentioned in a previous post, I don't believe those studies that say more exercise simply breeds more eating and that weight-loss doesn't occur. I don't see that in my own past, and I don't see it in my friends.
And Now . . . the Cookie Diet?
Oh, yes! You have to read this story in the Times, linked here (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Skin.html?em), because it says so much about the nature of dieting, especially fad dieting.
Why is the cookie diet popular? Because it presents itself as an antidote to the deprivation and joylessness that accompany and torpedo many diets. It says: you needn't banish a favorite treat! In fact, you can subsist on it! Make indulgence itself your best weapon in the battle of the bulge! The path to thinness is paved with chocolate chips!
OF COURSE you can lose weight eating cookies, if you only eat a limited number of them and not much else, because at the core of every successful diet, be it a grapefruit-based diet or a cabbage soup diet or whatever, is a diminished calorie count. The Crisco Lard Diet would work if your daily measures of lard added up to just 1,100 calories. A tablespoon of lard every three hours! Bon Appetit!
But is the Cookie Diet encouraging a healthy relationship with food and a healthy psychology about eating? Will the Cookie Diet alumni keep their weight off?
They've followed a regimen so monochromatic and extreme it likely can't be sustained, a regimen that hasn't created good long-term eating habits. They've bought into the notion that you can manage your weight through a nifty, fun cheat (through cookies!) when you probably shouldn't, from a nutritional perspective. And the whole premise of the diet (an evil, outlawed food redeemed!) buys into a good-bad, embrace-avoid approach to thinking about eating that doesn't serve many people well. It never did anything for me.
My Meat Loaf, Myself
These posts to date have perhaps too often involved guilty eating or thoughts on dieting, and while that's true to what frequently goes through my mind and defines my days, it's only part of the picture -- and only part of the book.
I celebrate and wallow in food at least as often as I feel nervous about overdoing it, and to that end I have lately developed a bit of fixation on meat loaf: on my mother's simple, retro, cheesy (not literally) but strangely yummy meat loaf, to be exact.
I'm not much of a cook, but her meat loaf (probably a recipe adapted from something on the back of a soup can) was one of the first "entrees," to be generous to it, that I succeeded in making when I began to try my hand in the kitchen in my early 20s.
It was also the dish that sort of put me off cooking for a good long while, because it's what was in the oven during an Oscar night dinner party 9 years ago when my inattentiveness and sloppiness led to a kitchen fire, an electrical short and, all in all, culinary disaster. My guests left hungry that night.
So it was with considerable trepidation that I returned to this meat loaf a little more than a week ago. I rounded up the ingredients -- ground beef (I went with sirloin, and definitely NOT the lean variety), tomato sauce, a big onion to be minced, and many other, lesser players --- then came home and, right away . . . problems! I forgot the bread crumbs. I didn't have the right size baking/casserole dish. Etc.
But I improvised, and found on the tail end that my improvisations, most of them intuitive and logical, worked. The meat loaf was terrific. My two dinner guests had seconds. So did I. No one left the table hungry.
Last night I loafed anew, this time trying to correct the mistakes that necessitated the improvisations and this time trying half pork with half beef. The combination definitely created a meat loaf with more flavor, more character, but it wasn't as tender and smooth and luscious at Meat Loaf No. 1.
Was the pork the difference? Or, in terms of the less tender and coarser quality, were the bread crumbs to blame. ONCE AGAIN I forgot to buy any, and while I'd adjusted the first time around by toasting slices of innocuous white bread and then smashing the toast into crumbs, this time around I had only a thicker multi-grain bread at hand. So I toasted and turned IT into crumbs. Did it substantially affect the resulting loaf?
It's a meat loaf muddle, a meat loaf mystery! But since I'm planning to press on with my loafy journey, the answers could well reveal themselves. Before I go back to this basic meat loaf, however, I'm feeling the tug of a whole new recipe, and I'm in the mood for LAMB. I could be loafing for many months at this rate.
