You May Mindfully Eat Me

One of the problems I have, as many of you already well know, is that I am a remorseless eating machine. Not at all unlike Homer Simpson. I can eat a whole pizza, a complete leg of lamb, or 2 pounds of mediocre and possibly rotten cheese. If left to my own devices, the entire bag of cookies will be gone. The OJ will go from a half gallon to no gallons in 10 minutes. The hummus will be eradicated. You name it, it will go away. Many people will say that oh, you can eat a whole pizza, or gallon of ice cream, or entire tub of hummus. I get it, some people can do ONE of those things. I can do them all. I can eat all of something I mildly like. Not just 1 or 2 things. All of them. Always.

Over the years I've worked on ways to address this. Riding bikes, starving myself, keeping especially bad foods away from me, electroshock therapy to my groin. Some of these are ways to curb the effect. But nothing really works. I mean, WORKS. Things work for a little while, then stop working. There is no long-term anything.

This whole mindful eating thing is a great idea, at least at first glance. For those of you who don't know, mindful eating goes like this. You get a bowl of peas. You look at each pea lovingly, inspect it, eat it, savor it's life as it passes into your mouth and down to your stomach. And then you ruminate on the awesomeness of the pea. You zen the pea. Can I use "zen" as a word? If not, who cares. You get the idea.

That's in practice. As reality goes, this is generally what happens. You get a bowl of peas, dump 20,000 calories of pesto on it, and eat the whole thing in 19 seconds flat. Mindful of absolutely nothing at all. Maybe you belch and re-taste the pesto. Or maybe you get more pesto.

Theories are great. Again, quoting Homer Simpson, Communism is great. In theory. But in practice it sucks and the images from the dog-shooting Olympics this week will show you how put together everything is over there. So scratch Communism. And scratch mindful eating. Because as well as it might work in theory, one that says to put down your fork between bites, it's somewhat useless in practice. So as much as I'd like to do it, I can't practice it. I don't even think to practice it, which is probably the basis of the problem.

Take this morning, when you have about 200 seconds to make lunches for the kids, shovel out the foot of ice plow that the trucks made for you overnight, and then scrape the turtle shell of crust off the car. How the hell do you mindfully eat? The answer is, you don't. You dump some amount of cereal in the bowl, then some milk, grab the biggest spoon, and shovel it in like a Chinese railroad worker in the Midwest.

So until I retire and have 2 hours to eat my bowl of cereal, I'll need to resort to riding 12+ hours a week in the hopes that my medium shirts and size 32 pants start to fit again. Or maybe I'll give up and buy 34 jeans, large shirts, and a few mu-mus with decorative colors on them. In the end, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.