Change a Man

Change a Man

There’s an old joke about not trying to change a man, unless he is in diapers. Reforming ourselves may be just as difficult. Especially if the change involves food.

I complained last week about not getting my au jus with my French Dip sandwich, and I guess it has been bothering me so much I got another one today. But before I pulled out of the Arby’s parking lot, I checked to see if I had my hot, meaty au jus. It was there, and the sandwich was delicious. So eating habits can be hard to change, and I have found the fewer things I am actually allowed to eat the more weight I gain. I was okay with cutting out broccoli and spinach, but it has to be replaced by something, and today that was curly fries. At least they are in the vegetable group. The fried vegetable group, but at least at one point they were vegetables.

I had the same problem with soda. As a dedicated Coca-cola drinker for the first 21 years of my life, I had a problem when we moved to California. The water at the Coke bottling plant was nasty, and I could taste it in the drink. I switched to Pepsi, and have never gone back. I’ve now been drinking Pepsi longer than I drank Coke, by about 10 years. I’ve teased my mother about weaning me with “Num-num”, one of my first words for the nectar of the Gods we call cola. But there always was a bottle around, and I got used to having caffeine whenever I wanted it.

For those of you who are caffeine purists, I do have to state for the record that caffeine is my drug of choice. I even like it when it comes to my pain medication, and probably so do you. No, you scoff? Well, contemplate this little detail. If you like Excedrin as your drug of choice to get rid of headaches, pains and other life complaints, you may be one of my caffeinated friends. Each tablet contains 65 milligrams of caffeine along with the other ingredients. That’s the same amount of caffeine in four 12 ounce Cokes, or three 12 ounce Pepsis. No wonder I like Pepsi better. More caffeine per cup.

Thinking about the relative ease of my access to caffeine in my youth makes me wonder what restrictions on goodies does to us. I know my wife has a great sweet tooth, and her parents worked on the principal of the equally divided candy bar. Since she was in a larger family, they didn’t buy each kid a candy bar, but split up the delicious treat equally, so each kid would get about a fifth each.

When we married, I was used to eating a whole candy bar, and she wasn’t. When I told her to pick her own candy bar, she kept insisting on having part of mine, and I don’t like to share all that much. She told me recently, after more than 30 years of marriage, that she thought I was incredibly wasteful and greedy to want to eat a whole candy bar myself, instead of sharing one. She’s over it now, and doesn’t hesitate to get whatever she wants, but I bet it still makes her feel guilty.

Here’s one food reform which has worked for me. Since I’m basically a lazy person, I have found a couple of foods I like to eat for breakfast and lunch. I keep them both at work, and use the microwave I brought from home to prepare these incredibly bland, boring and mostly tasteless meals. I cook oatmeal for a couple of minutes each morning and dump a bit of real maple syrup on it. Then I start cooking some brown rice for lunch, and I’ve only burned the rice four or five times of the hundreds of times I’ve prepared it. That’s right. I eat rice for lunch every day and oatmeal for breakfast every day.

It’s probably more healthy than the stuff I used to eat, which was mostly pre-packaged. It is bland, and it is boring, and people ask me how I can stand to eat the same thing every day. I’m not sure how to answer. I like to drink Pepsi every day, and no one asks why I drink the same drink all the time. They know I’m addicted and they know better than to ask. But can you get addicted to oatmeal, maple syrup, rice and sugar? Probably.

At least my body knows what it is going to get most days. I guess the process of reformation starts with the recognition change is needed, and then the willingness to change.

Tomorrow maybe I’ll have rice for breakfast and oatmeal for lunch.

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