My Eating Habits

When I started at my job five years ago, I had a pretty poor diet. One thing which didn't help was the store I work at was two minutes from Taco Bell and I'm a sucker for that place. A likely meal for me would be a bean burrito with no onions and extra cheese, a Reeces Cup, and a Mountain Dew. I drove to get those things.

In the past three years or so, a lot has changed. Two years ago the store moved, which helped a lot, but the changes had begun even before then. I began walking to Kroger down the strip to buy a frozen dinner and a juice. I stopped eating things like candy and cake. I slowly stopped drinking pop.

This year alone, I can truly count on my fingers the times I've had pop. I have had maybe five orange-soda-floats from Wendy's. I've had, I believe, two Mountain Dews from Taco Bell and two from KFC. Cakes, brownies, and whole candy bars make me want to vomit (cake really, truly makes me feel ill when I eat it).

My parents keep buying me sweets when they go to the store, and right now, I can see a package of carmalized waffle cookies, a box of smores cereal, a box of strawberry shortcake rolls, and a giant Hershey's bar which does have a few bites out of it but that's because my mother wanted some. I have eaten a few of the cakes, with milk, and only when I feel shaky like I'm having a low blood sugar attack (hypoglycemia). What I prefer when I feel an attack is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, mostly because peanut butter supplies both the sugar for immediate affect and protein for a lasting affect. Sometimes I munch here and there out of the cereal but it's taking a long time.

So here's the bottom line: I don't like sweets. And I'm beginning to abhor "home cooking" because all my mother ever makes is fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and hamburger steaks (fried) and fried potatoes and etc. etc. ad nauseum. It's disgusting. I try to keep back-ups for these occasions. Salsa, hummus, cous-cous, guacamole, assortments of cheeses, deli-thin ham.

And breakfast has become some kind of religious experience for me. When I was in grad school, I got out of bed, took a bath, left for school, returned home, ate a bowl of soup, returned to school, returned home, ate cheese and crackers, did homework (ahem, um, yeah) and went back to bed. I lost forty pounds.

Now, breakfast can't just be waffles (my mother happily pulled them out of the bag as though I should have jumped up and down because she bought them - I reminded her I'd throw up within the hour if I ate waffles for breakfast), and it can't just be cereal, and it can't just be a banana. It has to be a meal. A typical breakfast for me, with ingredients hoarded away in the little refrigerator in my bedroom, is an English muffin with an egg, ham, amish swiss cheese, and garden vegetable cream cheese on it. Or it's a breakfast burrito with sausage, egg, cheese, avocado-ranch mix, and taco sauce. Or it's chili cheese home fries with a few slices of turkey bacon. Tomorrow morning I think it's going to be a grilled cheese sandwich with one slice American, one slice muenster, on honey-wheat bread with turkey bacon.

In general I just can't eat like they do. It's hard to buy groceries for six people on $100 or so a week, so what we buy are things like hamburger and huge pork loins that can be divided up. Chicken legs are always extremely cheap for a large package. The rest of my family thinks macaroni and cheese is a gourmet meal. Spaghetti is relatively cheap. Chili is enjoyed by all (including me) and makes a huge pot so we make it about twice a week (it gets old, though, eating the same thing over and over). Tonight we had chicken legs and macaroni and cheese and corn and cottage cheese. I tried to eat a piece of chicken (but it was undercooked so I stopped), some mac and cheese (but it was undercooked so I stopped), and some cottage cheese (it wasn't cooked so it was fine).

The more and more that things like this go on, the more I dream of a studio apartment where I only have to buy food for myself and since I don't eat much, I can get what I want and make it last. And it will be good food, like fruits and vegetables and juice (I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and juice or occasionally tea the rest of the day). I can only imagine the dinners I could make with $100 a week for just me. I don't know that I would even need that much money.