Last night I had dinner at my parents’ house, along with my husband and kids, my sister and her husband and kids, and my aunt. There were 13 of us in all. Italian food is Mom’s specialty, what I remember from growing up.
I’m allergic to perfumes and fragrances. (This is relevant, really.) My mom was too, so I didn’t grow up with them. Once when I had to leave a party because of heavy fragrance, I wondered aloud to my husband,
“Why do people need to use this stuff, anyway?”
“Well,” said my husband, “didn’t you ever have a smell that you associate with a favorite person or a good memory?”
“Of course,” I replied. “That would be the smell of lasagna and brownies.”
When we arrived at my mom’s last night, I learned that the dessert would be brownies from a mix and a purchased crumb cake. I decided that the cheesy pasta shells, my mom’s special “company dinner” since I was a tiny tot, were indulgence enough and I didn’t care that much about the dessert.
I had planned to entertain the little ones while dessert was served, or remain in the living room like my husband has done sometimes when he’s trying to abstain from dessert. (We always wait an hour or two between dinner and dessert. My parents believe you have to let the food “settle”.)
But I suddenly decided to have a brownie.
My diet group has been instructed to try to notice what goes through our heads when we decide to eat unplanned foods—those little things you hardly know you’re saying to yourself until you pay attention.
What was going through my head was,
“Hey, lasagna and brownies are my two favorite foods. If I have a brownie now I’ll have had my perfect, favorite meal.”
Notice that I was not thinking I was hungry, nor salivating at the thought of chocolate. This was an intellectual decision. I liked the IDEA of having my two favorite foods together.
I’ve noticed that sometimes the idea of food is what makes me decide to have it. A day just “feels like” an ice cream kind of day or a cookie-baking kind of day. I do a lot of foods associated with special days—common holidays as well as saints’ days. My mom decorated cakes, and had lots of cake decorating books that I loved to look through. Now I feel like I should make St. Patrick’s day cupcakes, or flower cupcakes for May Day, or a Halloween chocolate pudding with Oreos sprinkled over the top and Milano cookies pressed in to look like gravestones, or anything else I see in a magazine or in the Just for Fun Blog here at Families.com.
This is part of what I mean when I call myself a “foodie”. I associate food with celebrating and I don’t want to give that up. Food has played a central role in family holidays. When we go on vacation, my mom always asks for descriptions of the different foods we’ve had.
Here are some ways I am trying to cope with this desire—this feeling that I “should” have a certain food just because it’s a certain day or because I’m with certain people– while trying to lose weight:
• Finding healthy substitutions—a fruit rainbow for St. Paddy’s Day , crudités arranged on a platter to form a Christmas tree.
• Trying to take the focus off the food and find a tradition such as a reading, poem or song to associate with the holiday.
• Realizing that I now have a great storehouse of foods associated with each holiday—more cookies than we can possibly make or use each Christmas, for example. I can choose just one or two associated foods to have each year.
• Taking a cue from my husband’s appreciation of textures and scents, and finding non-food-related comfort measures-—for example, when I want a little boost and a quick break, breathing in the scent of a different tea (sometimes I’ll even keep a few tea bags to smell if I don’t have time to make a cup). Another suggestion is to have a favorite sweater, Sherpa fleece, velvety fabric swatch, or other texture that you enjoy.
I hope that this will help me to take some of my focus off of food, while not forgoing altogether the central part it has played in family holidays past.