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.