Just Fucking Eat Something

I was in Philadelphia with the man at one of his fancy pants conferences heading out to the final dinner of the event. This required less than formal-more than business attire and shoes with both toes and heels (!). I was expecting a nice sit-down, which is the norm at these affaires, so of course I chose the shoes that were lovely for the cocktail hour and then rapidly got taken off under the table. Imagine my surprise when we arrived at Constitution Hall only to find a heavy hors d’oeuvres spread scattered through out the exhibit.

So there I am, fashionably late in ungodly high shoes, ready for a damn drink so I could shake hands with lots of people I don’t know fucking starving half to death. Having expected a full dinner, I ate accordingly, right? Plus I had to zip the damn dress. Little did I know that there was to be no dinner, and those heavy snack stations were to be it. I’m hungry. I’m uncomfortable. And now I have to go scavenging around a huge two story exhibition hall in order to find food.

This, folks, is one of my worst nightmares. And let me tell you, now that he knows, it is one of the man’s as well.

So off I go, shoes in hand to find 1. the bar 2. the food 3. the food 4. the food. What I found was a really vile glass of white wine and a series of stations full of the exact same fare. I was like… whaaa? This event is for money people—people who have money and people who move money. And this is what we get?

Mini- peeled carrots (blech), itty bitty throwaway cocktail bowls of risotto (carbs at this time of night?) and over-cooked logs of tenderloin carved by a twelve year old in a bow tie (carcass on the table? Cut across the grain? No, thank you.) I figured that surely there was to be another course of different food coming out. Maybe fish for those who don’t eat beef. Maybe vegetarian options. Maybe some salad of something.

So we waited, had another glass of questionable grape ferment and took in the Prohibition exhibit. Which I found to be super funny given the context of the event and the bar next to the entrance. Twenty minutes later we emerged, only to find that all of the food had been cleared and dessert was out. Chocolate cake. Cookies. Pastry. The whole food service had come and gone in forty five minutes.

But….but…..I haven’t eaten anything. I’m not going to get to eat anything. There is not and therefore will not be anything to eat. I am utterly fucked. Enter melt-down and full on food psychosis. This was a fairly new thing for me, and it had been getting steadily worse over the last few months before culminating here, in Philadelphia, at a fancy pants event where the night is all “SMILES PEOPLE! PLACES, PLEASE!”

So, seeing the beginning of this, the man wisely says, “Lets get out of here and get some dinner. Anyplace you want, in all of Philadelphia, just tell me and we can go there.” Isn’t he sweet? But alas, the crazy had already set in… and it looked a little something like this.

The brewery across the street had great beer and a bar menu. Fried Mozzarella aka, dairy and gluten deep fried in fat (bad combination and calorie choice at 8pm). They had cheesesteaks aka, carcass and faux dairy on gluten bomb (more bad combining and, hellloooo GLUTEN!). They had “salads” with iceberg, tomatoes, meat cheese, croutons and bacon aka this is not a fucking salad, Felicia, and there is no way for me to sub out enough to turn it into one. So we had a beer and left.

As we were walking back towards the hotel, he is pointing out Asian take out. Rice and oil aka, heavy carbs and fat with no redeeming caloric value. Italian takeout aka fucking Italian food my ass is growing larger even thinking about it. The late night cookie joint; Dude I haven’t had anything of nutritional value I can’t even rationalize my way into cookies for dinner. Oh, its a full crazy boat sailing now….

We get back to the hotel and he is literally waving his arms in the air at me shouting in the lobby, “Just fucking eat something, Jamie! Its only calories!” I think I actually laughed at him as he stomped away. It was the first—and the last—time I had seen him lose his temper.

I went to bed hungry that night and woke up feeling like shit the next morning. I just hadn’t had enough calories from the day and my body was letting me know. Sad t hing is that I did know. I’m no food dummy and I have a really strong grasp on what a physical body needs in order to function. But there was a growing breakdown between my old learned knowledge, my intuitive knowledge, and what I had been recently studying about diet and nutrition.

And none of it was jibing.

This is because my mind works in an inclusive and balancing fashion. I tend to take disparate ideas, find the similarities and distill down what works together to create a harmonious system. In yoga this has given me a really balanced practice. In my business, it had done the same. It should work for food, given that we exist in a fusion culinary culture. But here, in my thinking about what constituted a healthy diet, there simply was no resolution. There is so much conflicting information coming out and so many disparate styles of “eating” that the whole process has become a jumbled and irreconcilable mess.

There is literally NO way to reconcile what works about vegetarianism with what works about Paleo. You cannot, for love or money make Mediterranean eating and gluten free work together. Forget about trying to get keto to make friends with anything other than keto. Low carb/ Atkins with Asian Food For Heath? Nope. RAW food combining? Sister, please, I am no a bunny! Whole 30? Why don’t you suck the joy right from my life. Carb cycling? Hormone rotational eating? The ONE SUPER FOOD THAT DOES IT ALL?

Yes, of course, that’s perfectly easy to find at 9pm in the city of Philadelphia. So I have three choices at this point, right? Starve. Give up and eat whatthefuckever to enjoy a full boat of guilt at failing to be healthy. Or learn to photosynthesize.

I lost the battle that night. And many nights after that. As a matter of fact, it has been almost a year and I am just now coming through the crazy, even though I know it is just a bad restaurant moment away. If I think about it, the whole thing reads a bit like an eating disorder, albeit one that we don’t talk about and probably don’t understand. Thing is, it shouldn’t be this damn hard. Fuck. It didn’t used to be. You just kept an eye on some basic math and took a little bit of everything.

Maybe we should think about that.

And while we do, I will share with you the meal that I was secretly hunting for in the streets of Philly that night and knew I would never find.

My ex-husbands Italian Gravy served over a roasted spaghetti squash.