When I stop to think about it, I make most of my food choices within a lot of constraints. During the week, breakfast is limited to what I can eat in the car or, failing that, what I can buy at school. Lunch is always what I can buy at school. While there’s significantly more flexibility with dinner, but it still involves balancing my tastes with my partner’s, as well as planning food that we have the time and resources (i.e., clean dishes) to cook on any given day. For me, there’s usually the added issue of limiting foods that are likely to trigger the hormonal and autoimmune issues that live in my guts. And as I’m sure is true for most everyone, there are the constraints of what’s available locally, what we can afford, and what we currently know how to cook.
Recently, a great many — though not all — of those constraints disappeared for me. That week, of course, was spring break. Five would-be school days of home alone.
Sure, some of the constraints — the ones about money and food available in my city, mostly — remained, but a lot of them went away temporarily. Even the one around triggery foods. I mean, no, I didn’t start looking at foods and saying, “Hey, this will give me intestinal cramps, gas, and fiery diarrhea! Neato!” On the other hand, if I did have a craving for, say, deep friend jalapeno poppers with cream cheese, the resulting bathroom adventures would be less disruptive to me now than they would either at school or on a night before school.
With reason, I could eat whatever I wanted.
And you know what? That was kind of scary.
I know I’ve had spring breaks in the past where I’ve had the same food choices, but this was the first time I examined those choices closely.
There was the spring break of eat the same culturally approved healthy food — in this case, dark green salad with no dressing and bowl of soup — every day. That was unsatisfying and unfun.
There was the break of the fast food spree — some type of fast food for lunch every day. Just because I could. That involved a whole buttload of guilt I don’t need again. Also, in all honesty? I can pretty easily cook food that I will find more sustaining and better tasting.
There was the spring break of sushi. Delicious but financially unmanageable. And again, if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, I’d rather splurge for really good sushi once in a while than to eat respectable but uninspired grocery store sushi every day for a week. Besides, they’ve since changed their sushi provider, so I can no longer vouch for the respectability.
There was the spring break where contemplating food on my own was just too overwhelming, so I consumed nothing but coffee for breakfast and lunch. Actual food only at dinner. Let’s not go there again.
When it comes to my free range food choices, I think it’s safe to say I have a history of both overdoing and underdoing. It’s easy to pick an eating theme and stick with it. It’s a lot harder to figure out what I want on a daily basis. Ironically, the big thing I discovered about myself is something I’ve known about and consciously applied to my students for some time.
The big thing is this: I have to give myself the freedom to make mistakes.
The mistake I make most frequently is that the food I eat on a “first pass” isn’t filling enough. I underestimate how hungry I am. The simple fix for that is to eat more, possibly choosing a food that’s a more substantive fat or protein source, and move on with my life. But emotionally, there’s a lot of baggage attached to that mistake. Because the fix is to eat more, and eating more is “bad,” right? It’s “wrong” to be so hungry. Because the fix is often to eat a more calorically dense food, and those foods are “bad,” right?
It shouldn’t be — but it is difficult to create a mindset that doesn’t produce guilt when what I really want is just to make myself a peanut butter sandwich already.