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August 30, 2005
The Danger On the Rocks Is Surely Past
One of my favorite things about Steely Dan songs is that they basically make no sense, so you can imagine that they are about pretty much anything. Such is definitely the case with the song "Home At Last," which I listened to on continuous repeat while sitting in traffic for an hour and a half this morning due to an accident on I-476 involving livestock. [You wonder how I have time to blog while I'm in the midst of a very long work day stretch: I write the entries in my head while I drive then just spit them out in about fifteen minutes at the computer. Neat trick, eh?]
The song, I think, contains a reference to the Odyssey:
Well the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast
I considered that line this morning (in between wondering what in the world the police were going to do about livestock on the highway) and was reminded of the recent thread on the CR Society email list inspired by a CR sister who has decided to go a little softer-core on her CR now that she is in a new relationship.
You probably think this is going to be another bragging rant about how happy I am to have a lover who not only supports my CR but pushes me further and makes CR easier for me (he packs little megamuffins when I go on a plane... isn't that sweet???). Another line from "Home At Last" springs to mind:
You think you've heard this one before.
Well, yes, you have, and this won't be *entirely* about the joys of double-CR couplehood.
While I may be safely partnered with the CR'd man of my dreams now, I am definitely no stranger to the warm, dark undertow of love/lust and how it can intensify all the other passions, not the least of which is the passion for good food. The thoughts of Odysseus as his ship sails safely past the siren inhabited waters were probably similiar to the feelings I experienced upon reading the CR sister's message to the list. The description of the intimate connection between food and love, and between food and sex, brought back a flood of memories of times in my life when eating with wild abandon has flowed naturally from falling wildly in love. Pure sexual attraction seems to be even more conducive to this phenomenon for me: I tend to be completely unable to eat while chasing an object of much desire (I don't think MR saw me eat a bite during the entire CRS conference) and then I am completely overcome by a need to eat high calorie, preferably high fat foods immediately upon obtaining the object of my affections. The calories balance out in the beginning, especially if it takes such a long while to catch the boy that I have a few weeks of under-calorie days, but when the routine of the relationship involves heavy food and drink, this can eventually become a recipe for disaster.
Now I want to make it very clear that I am talking just about my own experience... it sounds to me like the CR sister is finding a new balance in her relationship with food that will be very empowering and happy for her, so I am not trying to imply that negative consequences will result. I'm just reflecting back on my journeys through the siren infested waters of sex and food.
There's something about powerful, chemical sexual attraction that makes me feel invincible: like I can organize large hospitals, mobilize scientists to find the cure for aging, and brew my own coffee at home instead of stopping by Starbucks. The raging passion has given me the courage to do things I'd never dreamed I would do. I have risked expulsion from Yale for sitting in the president's office, risked arrest at many a protest, organized hospitals, changed my diet and lifestyle dramatically, and eaten wheat bran, all out of some curious mixture of conviction and love.
The vast majority of the time, my instinct for chasing boys has led me in the right direction. Erica Jong writes in Fear of Fifty about how we straight women seem to fall for men because we want some characteristic in them that we fear we lack. The "Good girl falls for bad boy" scenario and such. This is definitely true for me. I want to be fanatically self-disciplined, hardcore CR'd, a genius, an incredible writer, and slightly orange in color. Even though I haven't always understood it at the time, when I look back over my 31 years, I can clearly see all the times when a seemingly harmless crush led me to make one of the most important decisions of my life. Yikes, I chose my college based on the romantic idea of following Lee Franklin, my long term high school crush, to Yale! I became a union organizer in large part at the urging of my good friend Francis whom I ambiently chased for seven years before finally getting together and discovering that we're much better friends than lovers. And don't even get me started on my two years working as a computing assistant...
When it comes to food, however, this has not always been the case. I am pathologically attracted to skinny men, but most of the skinny men in my past didn't get that way through CR, they got that way by eating everything they could and not gaining weight. For a girl who tends toward fertility goddess proportions when eating ad lib, this usually resulted in weight gain, declining self-image, and general ickiness. The lust-induced feeling of invincibility often made me think that this one high fat, high calorie dinner won't matter... and neither will the one tomorrow... and neither will the shared bottle of wine or the bagel and cream cheese breakfast or the coffee with cream and sugar until, you guessed it, I've gained the Relationship Ten. Somehow, the men never gain, all the fat in the relationship has been carried by me.
There's also that need to give pleasure to each other, and the delight in seeing one's lover enjoy sensual pleasure. It never occurred to me before I began cooking for MR what an intensified pleasure it could be to feed a lover a meal that both delights the tastebuds and nourishes the body. There's something so bizarrely whole about the process of cooking CR food to share with my orange angel... as part of a ritual that gives the beloved pleasure down to the cellular level, it makes ad lib cooking and eating look like a relic of a quaint but dead religion.
On the way to the altar of hardcore CR love and its life-extending power, the first step is the delight in the sensual pleasure of food. The second step is the knowledge of the power of food to nourish life or speed death. Their synthesis is the ecstatic communion of CR-friendly pasta-less lasagna. Most people get stuck on the first step: they never get beyond using food as a vehicle for sensual pleasure at best, for self-destruction at worst. But some get stuck on the second step: they learn to use the life-giving power of food but they lose the visceral delight in eating.
From the safety of my well-established CR practice, I can look back at the siren-infested waters of old relationships and feel not nostalgia but compassion for the person who used to be drawn so easily into the cycle of overeating, bad body image, and bad health. I do still dip my toe in the water from time to time: I still go out with my friends and enjoy an excellent restaurant meal, or have a bite of a cookie that a friend baked. This isn't "cheating," it's a conscious part of my CR practice that enables me to enjoy the good things about eating with those who are not of the CR brethren without harming myself. I just balance out the calories in my other meals. Doing CR doesn't mean giving up the foods I loved before, it just means making an occasional treat, not a steady diet, of them. Now that my body and soul are nourished by healthy CR food, I no longer feel the pull of the Dunkin Donuts bagel. When I go out, it's for well-prepared, excellent food that is sometimes higher calorie than what I would normally eat. When I come home, I know that a fridge stocked with life-giving veggies and eggwhites (not to mention a freezer-full of megamuffins!) awaits me.
For me, the danger on the rocks is surely past. Having experienced the fusion of love, sex, passion, food, health, and life, I could never go back.
Well the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast
Could it be that I have found my home at last?
Home at last...
Posted by april at August 30, 2005 8:55 AM
Comments
whew - what a day to just happen to tune in ... must be some kinda cr psychic connection ... or whatever ...
i have one comment - and it doesn't really address anything much of what you're talking about here. that is - having abandoned the 'rigid measuring-cup-control' approach to cr, i find i am, overall, eating less (and even losing a bit more weight). you could chalk this up to more than one thing. but one important factor is that i don't binge-eat at all anymore, whereas before, i had a 'mildish' binge about once per week. perhaps this is due to a slightly higher overall calorie intake, but something in me feels it's at least as much due to a kind of 'letting go', by which i mean, not necessarily knowing, trying to control, nor getting all that tense about what, when, and exactly how much, precisely, i'm going to eat tomorrow.
best - from one still partially tethered to the mast -
christina
Posted by: christina at August 31, 2005 1:41 PM
Very cool entry, April. And also a very cool comment, Christina :)
I like the whole "letting go" concept, and when I eat out, I generally do. Well, to an extent. I don't worry about calories very much, but I try not to eat foods that will make me feel like $h!t either.
This usually means something with plenty of veggies and a reasonable source of protein. I try to avoid large servings of carbs, and I'm pretty relgious about avoiding deep fried foods, although I indulged in a little vegetable tempura a couple months ago, which, somewhat surprisingly, I didn't regret.
When I eat at home, though, I do have a tendency to be somewhat more monotonous and take the time to measure what I consider to be the "important things" (namely, oils, nuts, dairy, and protein sources).
By the way, I find this fascinating:
"I write the entries in my head while I drive then just spit them out in about fifteen minutes at the computer. Neat trick, eh?"
Do you plan out the actual sentences in your head or is it just a sketchy plan of what you're going to write? If you actually form the sentences in your head and remember it hours later, that would blow me away. I can barely write when I'm looking at the thing :)
Posted by: Dan at August 31, 2005 5:34 PM