I have often said over my life that my biggest problem with food is less about the fact that I love it too much and more that I have no respect for it. While that is hardly something to be proud of, I do think it accurately reflects the relationship I have generally had with food. The only time I was ever involved with food preparation was in my early college fraternity days. I was the kitchen boy for one semester and then the steward for a full year. If I was ever destined to be someone who liked cooking, that three semesters pretty much killed that possibility. Manhandling food at an institutional level has a way of grossing out even the most stoic person. To this day, I hate touching raw chicken and rare roast beef reminds me of holding the bloody mass in one hand while I sliced it on the rotary slicer until it was unrecognizable. The end result of all of that is that I have done very little cooking or food preparation of any kind over my life. I have often said that if I had to cook everything I eat, I would weigh 120 pounds because I would almost rather not eat than handle food.
But my relationship with food went well beyond not liking cooking. When asked where I would like to eat (as it eating out), I always say that my favorite restaurant is whichever restaurant is closest. In actuality, that is both a case of indifference to cuisine and abject laziness. When I go to a restaurant (be it a high end fancy restaurant or a gritty diner), I will invariably pick the very first thing on the menu that sounds like something I would be willing to eat. I really do not enjoy perusing the menu. Whatever you call the opposite of foodie, that would be what I am. I’m always the jerk at the table that says we are ready to order when most of my dining companions are still browsing the alternatives. As much as I look and seem like the kind of person that would eat anything, I am actually extraordinarily narrow in what I will eat. I’ve been watching a series I have just encountered called The Reluctant Traveler, hosted by Eugene Levy. Like an old, but poignant movie, The Accidental Tourist with William Hurt, a guy who decidedly does not like going outside his comfort zone, Levy goes around the world and tries doing and eating things that he has spent a lifetime avoiding. He had never tried sushi before going to Tokyo for the show. In the very first episode he goes to Finland and eats half-raw reindeer meat. I’m not sure you could pay me enough to do something like that. That said, I am a lot more like Eugene Levy than Stanley Tucci (Tucci in Italy) on the food adventurousness scale as Tucci seems to relish the new and exotic in food.
The other dimension in my food relationship is that my palate has definitely never matured, and I don’t eat anything that I don’t like…just like a kid. Trying new things is way down the list of the possible. Consequently, my eating habits have never been very good. Some might say that is being too kind to myself and that they are atrocious. I’m not sure they’re wrong. It has little or nothing to do with nutritional knowledge. I suspect I have more of that than most. Two two-week stints at Pritikin and a full month at Duke Weight Loss Clinic has given me more nutritional education than most physicians get in Medical School. It’s never been about not knowing what is best, but rather not giving a shit about it for some reason. To be more accurate, I lacked any degree of focus on what I ate. At various times in my life, I have engaged more focus on food, but it never seemed to last. Now I plan to change that.
I attribute this new attitude to my edema that created those two nasty lower leg sores I had in the late spring. It’s funny what sparks change in life. After six weeks with those sores and feeling them constrain my walk-around comfort while we were in Malta in early June, I finally did something about it. Fixing the edema caused me to lose twenty pounds, putting me at my low adult weight. I have felt so good since then and noticed such a change in my physical capabilities that I want to once and for all drop more weight nd get to a true “fighting weight” for the first time in my life. After my LapBand surgery nineteen years ago, I lost so much weight that my last twenty years were pretty comfortable for me. Now the aging process has cut through those gains and I feel I need to go the next distance to make my next 10-15 years comfortable in the same way. As I have reported, I have done that by starting a course of Zepbound this week. Like with the LapBand, Zepbound is supposed to do the heavy lifting of the program by killing my appetite and generally forcing my body into weight loss mode. But I am too smart to think that is all it takes. I know from my Lap Band experience that the prophylactic does a lot of the heavy lifting, but I also know it doesn’t do it all. And with Zepbound, I sense that there is an ever greater need to change my approach to eating to make this really work.
I know from my semiannual checkups that I am shrinking. I’ve lost two inches in height already at 71. I also know that I have lost some strength in my muscles even though my weight has kept my bones pretty strong. Nevertheless, all the Zepbound literature warns about the need for protein consumption and a combination of exercise and weight training. This week I have started to drink several protein shakes per day, which gets me part-way to my daily protein goal. The rest has to come from my food choices. So, this week I have decided to go beyond just eating less, and rather to make wholesale changes to what I eat. It is so new to me that I don’t want to leave it to Kim or anyone else to determine what I can tolerate in that department, so I actually went to the supermarket the other day and have started to choose my own foods. I bough nothing other than meat and raw vegetables. I have decided that what might work best for me is to cut up strips of meat (mostly chicken) into strips and do the same with raw vegetables (peppers, carrots, celery to start). Strangely enough, I visualize what I want to eat and what form I want it in, so I have actually taken to preparing it myself and keeping it in plastic bags in the fridge.
To be fair, it is far too soon to declare any sort of victory since its only been a few days, but it is a big enough change for me to finally have a food focus that I am very hopeful that I may finally be riding myself of some of my bad eating habits.