Food
I spent a lot of time thinking about food this year. I sort of pretended initially that I was tracking my food for health reasons (Ha! I absolutely was not). The score I settled on each day was how much I liked the experience of eating the things, and not so much whether or not they were good for me.
My worst food week was a work trip in October, when I was pounding peanut butter cups and alcohol after crashing alone in my hotel room. Sometimes new and scary situations call for matching scary personal choices. The best food week was during the winter holiday. Days of eating tomato-based things with family were followed by nights of secretly annihilating cured meats over the sink with my brother (both of us in a fugue Christmas state).
Hunger or Distraction
I would describe myself as a person with a poor attention span, one made worse by hunger, stress, or a combination of both. I’ll note that even when I have eaten the required amount of calories for my daily expenditure of energy, needing to do things that I really don’t want to do will fire up an immense snack attack that builds in proportion to the stress of the situation. It’s truly unbearable (I whine). Why do I, a normal person, have to do anything ever other than eat grapes while reclining from an Etruscan sofa? It’s completely unfair, as this chart shows.
Delicious or Disgusting
There are some foods that make me feel good, but almost immediately make me feel bad. Any type of alcohol, glazed donuts, those little peach-flavored jelly rings--these are foods I can’t stop putting in my mouth, although I regret it pretty soon afterwards. Fast forward to the following day, though, and I’ve forgotten that they are my Enemy. They say a toxic relationship isn’t one that’s bad all the time, but is one where there’s a lot of high highs and low lows (see top left quadrant). I know there are lots of things I can eat that don’t fill my body up with gas or set my stomach alight, but my Venus is in Gemini and I like the unpredictability.
Little Treat
Am I dating my food? It kind of feels like it. There’s a romance in everything related to food, for me. I love walking the grocery store, caressing potential ingredients on the shelf, imagining what I could cook with them. I love looking up recipes for the things people are eating on tv, pausing a movie to google whether or not “carrot salad mold” is truly a thing, and if so, can I make it with gelatinized ginger ale? There were few to no days each month this year in which I didn’t fantasize about, or did provide myself with, a little treat.
