And Up From the Ground Com'a Bubblin' Crude...

Oh, how I wish this title meant I'd struck oil while gardening in my backyard. Instead, it refers to the gusher of heretofore unexpressed and completely unexpected emotion that came gushing out this week like the bubblin' crude that sprang from the earth when Jed Clampett was shootin' at some food.

No need for details, but let's just say it was a bad week. A very bad week. The kind of week that left me spontaneously bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. And this from someone who has never been a crier and would have been hard pressed to tell you the last time she shed a tear. But the dam was breeched this week in fairly spectacular fashion. I suspect I might have been better off if I'd been crying a bit more often in recent years. But on the bright side, I definitely made sure I was getting my money's worth out of my therapist and nutritionist this week.

In terms of food, there was another bright side that my therapist helped me see, which is this. My "bad" food weeks are not nearly so bad as they used to be. What normally might have left me saying fuck it and stuffing my face with Whoppers until I was in a stupor and too numb to lift myself from the sofa, this time manifested itself in eating slighly past full at most meals and polishing off a half a bag of mini Heath Bars over the course of the entire week. That's pretty good progress, actually.

I've still got a long way to go. And we're stepping back a bit in my IE work and focusing more on the feelings that I would have sworn I wasn't, but am still clearly pushing down with food. The ones that bubbled to the surface, slapped me in the face, and demanded to be taken seriously. It doesn't feel good and I'm definitely not liking this. I don't like the idea of being a drama queen, but I think I fit that description this week. Actually, at points I would have been happy to feel only like a drama queen and not like a complete basket case. But this is leading somewhere and it's clearly somewhere I need to go. So let's suit up and get going.

How Do Intuitive Eaters Grocery Shop?

Oddly, I find it increasingly difficult to grocery shop now that I'm trying to eat more intuitively. Often, I can't, for the life of me figure out what I want to eat. Sometimes, stuff looks good at the store and I bring it home, then I don't want it and end up tossing it. Equally as frustrating is that I often find that items are too large. I buy something I want, but there's too much of it. Before, I would have eaten it just to use it up. Now, I know that unless I eat the same thing three times per day, I'm going to end up tossing stuff. And that annoys me.

I'm struggling with this aspect of IE these days. The obvious solution is to freeze more items, but that presents its own challenges. I'm not a terribly picky eater in terms of ingredients, but food textures are an entirely different matter. Freezing changes the textures of food and there are a lot of items that I just won't eat after they've been frozen. But the other side of the coin is that when I do use frozen foods and I come home starving, often it takes too long to get them from freezer to table and I resort to what's easiest, which is a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast, or a handful of nuts. These often don't satisfy me and I end up trolling for snacks all night long.

I don't know what the answer is to all this. I'm still trying to find my own personal solutions. Something that allows me to have just the right foods on hand when I need them and doesn't result in so much waste. Foods that are nutritious and satisfying but don't require too much effort to prepare after a long day at work. Right now it seems that short of getting a personal chef (not possible unless I win the lottery some time soon), this isn't going to happen. But I'm hanging in there and I know I'll get there. Still, I'm continually amazed at how something that really should be second nature to us can be so darn difficult.

Lessons From the Spend Less, Eat Better Project

I'll freely admit that the spend less eat better project has gone by the wayside for a while. But the reason is that while yes, it is entirely possible to eat very well on a limited budget, it takes a lot of effort and planning and herein lies the first lesson. When you have an option, exhaustion wins over healthy and budget conscious eating every time.

It's easy to judge people who habitually eat junk. I'm guilty of it myself sometimes. Often it's a matter of not knowing how to cook. Too many people don't know how these days, and many don't have the slightest desire to learn how (I have a friend that falls into this category and I must say, it makes me crazy!). But I know how to cook and it's something I actually enjoy doing, so that's not an obstacle for me. For me, it's that theme that we keep coming back to, balance. When I'm working late and I reach that certain level of exhaustion that it takes a while to recover from, honestly, there are evenings when taking five minutes to nuke something feels like too much effort. Even when I take extra time on the weekend to clean and prep as much as possible so that all I have to do is toss it in a pan and cook it, that can still seem like too much. And yes, I know I could cook things and freeze them, but there are a lot of foods that I just don't care for frozen. And cooking a week's worth of food on the weekend takes the better part of a day, which is that much less time I have to try to rest and recuperate for the week to come.

And so, I have a much better understanding of and empathy for those that resort to fast food out of convenience. It's a god awful habit, to be sure, and we suffer the consequences. And yes, sometimes it doesn't even take less time than fixing something. I know that I could saute a piece of chicken and some veggies in less than a half an hour if things are ready to go. But there are an awful lot of times when its easier to drive to my local fast food emporium and sit passively in my car at the drive-through waiting for my burger for 15 minutes (hey, at least it's a few minutes of calm and peace and quiet in my day!) than it is to cook and have to clean up the mess later. I hate to say that. I *really* do. But it's true.

That's not to say that I've become a fast food junkie, but I will admit that my shopping cart at the market this week was almost exclusively convenience foods. It's been busy and I feel awfully tired. I knew, when I couldn't even begin to come up with ideas for what to make for dinner this week so I could prepare a shopping list, that it was a sign that I shouldn't be trying to cook. Because it would end up like too many weeks have, recently, with a lot of fresh food that has turned into a science experiment getting dumped into the trash, untouched, on trash day. I hate spending more than I should have to for food that doesn't taste nearly as good as I could make myself, but when the alternative is a Big Mac,large fry, and a coke, it's money well spent.

I work pretty darn hard, but so do a lot of people. I'm at least lucky that I have the option to spend the extra money to buy convenience foods that are somewhat healthier than the standard fare (god bless you, Whole Foods!); a lot of people don't have that option. I can now totally appreciate how just getting enough decent tasting food into your body to make it to the next day trumps all the messages we hear about health. I think it's awful. And I wish, like crazy, that there was an easy answer to making healthy eating both easy, affordable, and as convenient as going through the drive through. But I get it. Going forward, I plan to really give some thought to solutions that will work for me, because I'm not ready to give up. But I don't think anyone should underestimate that challenge. I know I won't. Not anymore.