Historically unnecessary food anxiety

Weigh-In Wednesday: April 10, 2024

Photo by Mike Cox on Unsplash

Back in grade school, we didn’t have a cafeteria, but once in a while the room mothers – including my mom, who helped spearhead the effort – would organize a fast-food day of McDonalds, hot dogs or pizza. I loved pizza day. You could smell it the moment it entered the building. Glorious. Great memories of Migelito’s sheet pizza wafting through the air from the hallway while I was learning division, and the remainder of my attention was being divided by lunch. Friend, would it shock you to learn I loved that pizza so much that it filled me with great anxiety? This weekly journal is pushing a lot of memories to the surface. With food, it’s always been complicated.

Pizza day was the best when all went according to plan, and for me that meant three large slices with crust, preferably corners. I’ve since become a no-crust man. As an adult, I seek to maximize the cheese ratio per square bite because I now view pizza as a cheese delivery system more than anything else. Crust is for kids. Maturity strikes in unexpected places.

On pizza day, it could all go wrong in a number of ways. You didn’t want to be the last class called to get your pizza because that meant you had to wait the longest. I’d have to sit there and wait forever knowing all the other kids in the school were eating delicious pizza while I stared at my chocolate milk the way a cowboy stares at his slug of whiskey before stepping outside the saloon for a showdown.

If yours was the last class called – heaven forbid – you didn’t want to be at the end of the line because … what if they ran out of pizza? Ladies first at Catholic school, so I was always at the end of the line. I don’t remember them ever running out of pizza. Still, I worried. WHAT IF THEY DID?!? I would look ahead to see how many pieces were left while counting how many classmates were in front of me. I did unassigned math in my head. IT WAS THAT SERIOUS.

But I wasn’t just worried they might run out. Let’s say you were one of the first classes called. Where you stood in line determined whether you got great pieces or possibly crummy pieces. If you were coming up next, and the box was close to being finished, all the good pieces might be gone before they opened the next box. It was all the luck of the draw. If you were the first kid with a fresh box – heaven. If you were the kid at the end of the box – all that would be left were the scrawny middle pieces that had weird burnt bread bubbles that looked like the surface of a Star Wars planet. If I got one of those pieces, it ruined my whole lunch.  ON PIZZA DAY!

Ah, kids.

They all have their hangups.

Certainly, I outgrew this. 

Not a chance.

I’m a 9-year-old with a mortgage. 

If I’m standing in line for food for what feels like too long – like at an amusement park or ball game – I become an unreasonable monster. And it makes no sense. Absolutely none. I’m not going to starve if I have to wait to eat. I know – consciously – that I could skip food for a good solid week and I have enough fat on my body to see me through. I know this, and yet my subconscious is mashing the fight or flight button. I will leave a really long food line in a pique of frustration only to go to another long line that ends up taking even longer than the first line, leaving me even hungrier, all out of inexplicable spite for that first line. I’ll get mad at the first line for being a bad line, as if it’s perfectly normal to assign blame to a group of random people patiently waiting for something desirable.

Does anyone else do this?

Or am I uniquely crazy?

And is there any plausible explanation for my being this way?

For the purpose of finishing this week’s newsletter, I thought about it, and I have an evolutionary theory that I like because in the end I come out looking pretty good.

Humans once lived day-to-day and meal-to-meal as hunters and gatherers. We faced starvation regularly. Because of that, we evolved to have intense feelings around food. The main feeling being – if I don’t get some food, I will die. I suspect that the way we talk about food in this country takes very little of how we used to live into account.

I like to think that in the days of yore, when nomadic Donatellis wandered Southern Europe hunting and gathering, my food anxiety may have been beneficial for my tribe. As the guy who was always thinking about food, and looking for food, and talking about food, my desire to avoid food scarcity would have been viewed as resilience. “Joe The Ever Hungry,” my fellow cavemen would have said, “is always thinking about where we will eat next. He never rests until there is food. His maniacal dedication to eating is a great blessing to our people.”

It’s entirely possible I’m a top-notch caveman born 20,000 years too late.

Drum roll, please...

Starting weight: 187

Last week: 177

This week: 177

Goal: 170

Feeling: The breakthrough did not happen. I take heart in the fact that all my pants are looser. The efforts just aren’t showing on the scale.

Shoutouts

Michell wrote: I decided a while ago, when I was living at home with my parents, that I didn’t want a large, heavy breakfast because in a few short hours I would be eating lunch. So I started eating a light breakfast, more than toast but less than a “grand slam breakfast” (iykyk), and then a nice sized lunch. Because I decided the hours between lunch and dinner were a. more in number and b. longer time wise and finally c. more active-unless you’re me and you spend the afternoon lounging in your chair and putting out whatever little fires erupted overnight. This works in my new environment as well, sometimes. We often have a large lunch followed by a large dinner, or some days one is small and the other large. Today, both are lighter. You can’t always win. And lately our desserts have often been healthy, like “fresh” fruit, applesauce or peaches. I will be honest, I have not even approached a scale since I’ve been here. I don’t think I can face the reality. My clothes are still fitting the same, so clearly there hasn’t been much-if any-change. I’m glad you feel a breakthrough on the horizon. I give you props, I would have quit by now.

Hey Michell - I spent the last few days at my in-laws. Had a great time. But I lost a lot of control of what I ate due to not being at home. It made me think about how big a role your immediate environment plays. Did I fail to lose weight this week because my mother-in-law makes hamburgers with BBQ sauce and I lack self-control? Maybe. But I also realized something important – hamburgers should only be made with BBQ sauce. Life can be complex. Anyway, trust the clothes, not the scale. The clothes … knows. That’s where I’m hanging my sanity these days.

Laura wrote: In case you couldn’t guess, I too am Italian-American. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if you are aware, but I am also related to you. I’m sure you would not remember me since I probably saw you last when you were a small child.

But where I’m going with this is my son is dating an Italian girl. She lives in Italy, not Italian-American, and is working here for a limited number of years. 😬 He has been to her home in Northern Italy (not where our family is from) and it is gorgeous! Apparently there are two kinds of Italians: potato and tomato. She is the potato variety. They eat pasta, potatoes, butter, olive oil and lots and lots of cheese. And she is tiny…..because also where she lives there are mountains and lakes and they hike and are very active. They walk everywhere. They sit outside and eat in 50 degree weather with beautiful blue skies and sunshine.

What I got from his visit there was that they enjoy everything. They enjoy the food and they enjoy the outdoors and the exercise. And that keeps them thin and healthy. Everything I do seems like work: going to the gym, planning a healthy diet, obsessing over the scale. I just want to reach that point in my life where everything evens out and doesn’t feel like a chore.

Maybe I’m just crabby today. No loss, no gain this week. I’m ok with that considering it was Easter and there was ricotta pie. Good luck!

Hey Laura – A couple weeks ago I mentioned our correspondence with my mom, and she told me we were related. This explains a lot with both of us and food! As for Italy, I think a lot about the way we live in America and why it’s not conducive to health. Man didn’t evolve to sit in cars and drive to a place where we sit in chairs all day to work and then drive back home to sit on a couch. We’re meant to be more active and social than that, and I think people who live in some other countries haven’t lost touch with that essential humanity the way we have. 

This hit home:

Everything I do seems like work: going to the gym, planning a healthy diet, obsessing over the scale. I just want to reach that point in my life where everything evens out and doesn’t feel like a chore.

I feel the same. I suspect one way over the hump is radical change. One of the reasons we left our old house (which we loved) and moved to our new house (which had a raccoon living in the roof) is that we can now walk to the park, the beach, the restaurant, ride bikes, and the kids can walk to their friends’ houses. We can’t all move to Italy, but I think a lot about how we can bring Italy into our lives whenever we can.