My recent concern over my health has caused me to evaluate my relationship with food. What purpose does food serve in my life? Does it compare to the way a car uses gasoline or the way a woman uses a Hallmark movie? Does it provide me energy to move or do I use it as an emotional hideaway? Ok, I’ll be honest. The woman in the previous scenario is me. Give me a movie involving Sam Elliot and a terminally ill child and I am hiding my tears in the over-sized sleeves of a Snuggie.
I’ve found that I am very often an emotional eater (more on this in tomorrows post). But, I was observing my furry friends, Max and Gawain, the other day and thought that some of my reactions to food may even be animalistic.
Gawain watching me eat
I see in their eyes the same lust that I have when I have eaten my pint of Ben & Jerry’s quickly, and my wife is slowly savoring hers. It is pretty much identical: I stand there at her feet with my tongue out, begging for one tiny, creamy morsel!
Max snatching a pretzel
Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if we just had some sort of bar to eat for every meal that had every bit of nutrition we needed, much like that weird oatmeal stuff they eat in The Matrix? It reminds me of dog food where everything they need is wrapped up into tiny little pellets of goodness.
As I ponder it more, I don’t think that is a good analogy. Just because dogs have these nourishing nuggets doesn’t mean that is all they will eat. My dogs will eat anything! Just the other day we left Gawain out unsupervised and he dug up and ate cat feces. I also disregarded the fact that there are many different kinds of dog food that have varying degrees of canine nutritional value. So, the complete nutrition bar was a really silly idea. You know that if that bar existed there would be one person growing “the last corn stalk on earth” in some backwoods shed that people would start wars over like in the movie Children of Men.
A part of me came up with the idea of the nutrition bar because I watch too much science fiction. The other part of me really believes that might help me to eat less. But, I know I would just wake up from a food induced coma one day with nutrition bar wrappers littered around me. In the end, not much separates me from Max in the picture below. No matter what the food is, we will both have our heads in the bowl.
Good think you clarified that Hallmark movie reference . . . . . .