When my mom’s best friend was dying of breast cancer, she told me something that has rattled around in my head for the past dozen or more years. Sitting there holding her mug, she uttered the simple words, “I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”
Yes, she was a lifetime yo-yo dieter. I’d seen her overweight and slim but she was always beautiful – naturally so as well as perfectly groomed and dressed.
“I wish I’d never given up cream in my coffee.”
A couple of years later, my mom threw another “rattler” into my psyche with, “You know, I’ve worried every day of my life about being fat.”
These things were said by 70 year old women – women with wisdom and experience and intelligence, a shared wicked sense of humour and a resilience for all the hard things life threw at them.
I use those two phrases to keep a check on my crazy levels so I guess it’s as good a time as any to ask them again.
- Will I one day regret not having cream in my coffee? (not that I like cream in my coffee – but the equivalent for me)
I’ve just asked the husband if he really misses anything from the days when we ate with no real thought for fat content or calories in general. He figures he misses home-made pizza and full-fat Cumberland sausage with mash with (his) home-made Yorkshire pudding – but fully acknowledges that we only stopped making them because we didn’t have a family here to eat them and would eat the whole lot ourselves. We still have these meals when we have a crowd to feed.
And me? I don’t think so. We like both the taste and ritual of food too much to banish things we really like. I’m not a great cook but I love having people round the table eating and drinking and laughing. I actually think that’s when I feel properly alive – does that sound funny? This past weekend we served Jamie Oliver’s Five Hour Braised Lamb – two big pans which just got plonked on the table and everyone served themselves. Happy times.
There are certainly some foods that I don’t trust myself to have in the house unless a crowd is going to eat them. Did I say some? I meant loads and loads -truckloads – and that’s right near the top of my list of things to conquer in the next part of my life. Though I did have a little breakthrough in that arena this morning. I went to get blueberries out of the freezer and realised there was ice-cream left over from the weekend’s dinner party. Not long ago I would have ditched porridge with blueberries for an ice-cream breakfast but it just didn’t appeal.
That’s actually bigger than most people would understand. I’ll let you know if I succumb. Maybe that can be my Lenten discipline: living for 40 days with a tub of ice-cream in my freezer. Wow – that sounds spectacularly pathetic.
- Will I look back and say that I’ve spent every day worrying about my body?
Maybe not every day and I had a few “skinny breaks”, but from the age of about 8 till 47, I spent an obscenely wasteful number of hours worrying about being fat. Even when I wasn’t particularly fat. (I’ve just identified a precious gift from my mother!)
When I saw these Before and After Quitting photos, I felt sad for my young mom self. There was so much good going on in my life: I had amazing family, great friends and life was full – but I worried and worried about my body without actually taking control of the situation. That’s the regret – not that I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, but that I didn’t just do something about it.
So the next logical question for me is: Is writing daily about weight issues not just another way of “worrying”? Oddly, it’s not. It’s a way of saying things and getting them out of the dark corners of my mind into daylight where I can see how useful or harmful they are. It’s my way of “doing something” that I should have done all those years ago. I have stacks of journals full of my handwriting covering more than twenty years – but I never once used them to DO SOMETHING about the one thing that made me so unhappy.
So here we are, all caught up to the present.
Is there a lesson?
Don’t give up cream in your coffee if you really love it.
But don’t eat the ice-cream in the freezer just because it’s there.
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