The Other Last Supper

Ah, Thanksgiving. A holiday celebrating spending time with family, eating delicious food, and, you know, colonization [not going to go there right now but let’s not forget it]. Plus there’s often a little element of fitness thrown in there – I can’t even begin to tell you how many Snapchat stories I saw of my friends running Thanksgiving 5K “turkey trots” and the like. So basically a pretty great holiday, right?

 I mean, yes. Thanksgiving is awesome and I love it – I love the kickoff to the holiday season, I love my three-years-strong tradition of going to my boyfriend’s house and celebrating turkey day with his family, and most of all I love the food. Pies, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, turkey, and my personal all-time favorite: stuffing. I would put my life on the line for some good cornbread stuffing [yes, cornbread stuffing is the best and I will die on this hill]. But even as I talk about the absolute feast I experienced on Thursday night, I feel a little bit of anxiety bubbling up, and I think this is a feeling so many of us can relate to.

 Food is delicious – we recognize that, and most of us hopefully enjoyed lots of it on Thursday. That said, a holiday centered around eating can also be really challenging for many of us, myself included. Everyone has a different experience with food, of course, but let me tell you a little bit about my personal eating struggles this Thanksgiving.

 While some of us fall into the camp of restricting our diets after a big meal [e.g. “I had so much food on Thanksgiving, now I’m going to exclusively eat kale for three days”], I personally don’t possess that level of willpower or self-control. I tend to occupy the increased-binging camp instead [think “I had so much food on Thanksgiving, now there is no possibility of recovering my health so I am just going to keep eating lots of food and an unbalanced diet”]. So as you might imagine, the last few days have been pretty delicious, but they have also been pretty stressful. As many of you know, I am a big proponent of eating happy over eating “healthy” – find the foods that make you and your body feel good. The thing is, happy and healthy often end up coinciding. Sure, pizza for days sounds like a happy experience, and may taste good at first and make me smile, but I’m already cringing imagining all that grease sitting in my stomach and making me feel bloated. Sure, I could eat only pasta and ice cream, but I would feel sluggish and I wouldn’t stay full very long. My body and my mind are happiest when I’m eating a balanced diet.

 It always amazes me how I’m capable of recognizing that fact verbally and on paper – I say it and write it down what feels like all the time. My body and mind are happiest when I’m eating a balanced diet. It’s not a shocking revelation. Yet when I have a big meal or otherwise deviate from this balance to a certain extent, I tend to feel that my other choices don’t matter and I should just go back to eating whatever whenever because I imagine that I’ve irreparably abandoned my principles of balance. Unfortunately, I gather from talking to the various people in my life that this feeling is all too common.

 And what I did next is also all too common. After coming back from spending the week in Pennsylvania, I returned to school feeling as though I’d eaten nothing but dessert and carbs [nothing wrong with those food groups, just not the entirety of a balanced diet] for five days, and resolved to get “back on track” with healthy eating. My body was craving vegetables and some actual nutrients. But instead of listening my body’s cues by having a salad for dinner or cooking up a plate of chicken and broccoli, I indulged in what I like to call a “last supper.” I already felt like the meal didn’t “matter” since I’d eaten so much in the past few days, and so I decided to go for it and things I imagined I would miss once I returned to the ~healthy~ life.

 For my “last supper,” I went through the Wendy’s drive-thru after work and got a bacon cheeseburger with fries. Don’t worry, I’m not about to claim that I didn’t enjoy it – fries are tasty, and that’s the truth. But it was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be. I really wanted something green, or even something fruity, but because I was thinking of health in terms of restriction, I chose to eat something I was planning to exclude from my diet going forward.

 Here’s the thing though – while a huge Thanksgiving meal may not fit into a balanced day of food or even a balanced week, we have to refocus on the bigger picture and understand that balance is a large-scale endeavor. There will be days that aren’t balanced, and the holiday season provides plenty of opportunities for that, but we have to trust our bodies to help us reach that balance by responding to what they’re asking for. What will make you feel good? If it’s a burger and fries, then go for it. But if it’s a plate of carrots and hummus, eat that instead of the stereotypically greasy definition of “satisfying” snacks.

 The unsatisfied feeling I got when eating my fast food reminded me of the scale on which I hope to achieve balance. I want to be able to enjoy family meals and holiday dinners, I want to be able to enjoy an ice cream cone on a date or a mug of beer at the bar with friends. Having these foods is part of balance, not an aberration from it. Working towards balance in my eating habits will, I hope, allow me to better enjoy these items and the experiences that come with them. Food is so integral to our culture – when I meet up with a friend it’s pretty much always on the pretext of coffee or lunch. For me, working towards being able to eat without constantly worrying about calories and trusting my body to regulate itself has been instrumental in finding even more enjoyment and relaxation in the social world of eating and drinking with friends.

 To return to an earlier point, I mentioned how I had mistakenly felt as though my dinner on Sunday night didn’t “matter” because of all of the other “bad” food I had been eating. First of all, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no such thing as bad food. Every food has value in some way, whether that’s in terms of nutrients or vitamins or filling you up or just tasting really darn delicious. Second, and maybe equally important, every meal “counts.” I’m not saying this to make you feel bad about eating cheese fries at bars last weekend or to say that every meal needs to be balanced in and of itself. What I mean to say is that every meal, whether its cheese fries or salad or grilled cheese and tomato soup or a chicken salad wrap or literally anything under the sun [am I hungry right now or something?] – every meal is part of a larger scheme of balance.

 We don’t have to call the days when we eat a burger and fries “cheat” days or say that “weekend calories don’t count.” It all counts, and for something to count is neither positive or negative. It just is. You’re putting food into your body, consuming calories that fuel the things you do. We don’t need to say that we’ve broken the rules by eating something, because there needn’t be such strict rules, in my opinion, whether those are self- or societally-imposed. I genuinely believe that balance is a large-scale endeavor, and that trusting our bodies to regulate themselves (which sometimes involves expelling problematic ideas and re-learning positive ones about food and body image to allow our bodies to do that regulation) will result in the lifelong, big-picture balance that we hope for.

 Here are my take home points, so to speak, from this post: 1) Thanksgiving dinner is delicious, and I am so glad to have partaken – I hope that all of you also had a tasty and fun holiday, 2) having a big meal or a few days of unbalanced eating does not mean that your balanced eating aspirations have gone down the drain because, 3) balance is a long-term project and all of our meals fit into that picture.

 Thinking of balance on a larger scale has really helped my relationship with food. Trusting my body to regulate itself and learning to listen to and respect my hunger cues has been an ongoing project for me, and a long term idea of balanced eating fits in with those strategies. My new goal for myself is to stop thinking of any food or any meal or combination of meals as “bad.” It’s not wrong to have sugary or carb-y meals, just like it’s not wrong to have veggie-heavy or protein-heavy meals. These are just different points on the balancing beam of eating, and they all stack up to balance each other out.

 I hope this way of thinking about balance is helpful to any one of you all too! Drop some comments letting me know your favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner and how you approach the holiday season and all of its delicious food as part of a balanced lifestyle. Happy holidays!