Day 55... Just another day.

Last night I had the last of my baby lima beans--mixed vegetables-diced onion-crushed tomatoes--olive oil--crushed red pepper--curly parsley--chopped garlic--low sodium salt. All raw, cold, uncooked. I can't complain. It was actually pretty good, and it satisfied any hunger I had. During the day yesterday I had at least six peaches from a box left by our insurance agent here at the company. I could have had as many as eight peaches. I just know that as often as I get up I would grab at least two. They were very good, and I discovered that yes, I can eat fruit with my veggies and still maintain my goals. Though I believed my weekend warrior eating habits got the best of me, I am now two ounces below last Friday's weigh in. This morning I weighed 345.4 pounds. I see myself on the edge of the 340 pound mark this Friday. Am I starving? No. But I do tend to postpone my eating until the end of the day.

When I started to tinker with my eating habits some months ago I was obsessed with having enough to eat throughout the day, and I was obsessed with having breakfast, lunch, dinner and a few 'healthy' snacks in between. I spent almost a hundred dollars, it seems, on spices and condiments of one sort or another with the intention of dining sumptuously and mimicking the flavors I was accustomed too at the buffet style Indian restaurant, or adding the flavor of Italian marinara or Mexican cilantro and salsa to the table. My food needed to be nutritious, delicious, low calorie and high quantity enough for me to be satisfied. Well... Besides the fact that I am a lousy cook, all that business became too much work for me. It's really too much work for me to make super meals at night. Even the slightest cold veggie salad takes about a half hour to prep. Then there's the eating. Then there's the cleaning. The putting stuff away. The getting my plastic dishware filled to take with me to work too. I don't want to be bothered by all of that. It's too much of a bother for me. I'm lazy, slow and disinterested. This can be a problem for me in the future, seeing that many relationships revolve around the joy of food. My observation is that when two people form a partnership together, food seems to be more important than sex, work or leisure. Food is another form of intimacy that couples experience together, so that they don't have to eat alone, and that they can enjoy eating as well. From this point of view, eating alone seems more like masturbation. As a result, I find myself thinking about food as something I have to do, rather than a pleasure or obsessive need. For me, I'd rather have all my meals in one convenient pill, and then straddle up in front of the TV on matching treadmills, holding hands and walking while watching a video or our favorite program. There is one couple I see at the gym often, and they take TaeBo kick boxing with me, and I think it's just amazing and a lot of fun to work out with them. For one thing, they are super-fit. They also seem very happy as well.

In the future, I would have to become fit, and find a partner who is a fitness and nutrition freak as well. That's just the way it is. But even fitness addicts enjoy an occasional pizza and Merlot every now and then. I would have to find a sober vegan fitness freak to live with. That is my prospect for me at this point and time. That is what I believe in. And I won't compromise on this either. If I can't find someone out there for me then I'd rather be alone. Eating my insanely healthy, simple end-of-the-day meals of raw veggies, nuts, seeds. Eating alone at the salad bar at lunch. The mad obsession to 'eat well' has transformed to an 'eat fit' ideology, and that has changed too, from an obsession of getting my three squares in so that I follow FDA guidelines to feeling like 'I need to be a man' and that I'm only willing to eat at the end of the day, and only when I feel as though I earned it. And now I've come full circle again. Now I can eat as much as I want, however and whenever I want so long as it's raw and requires sunlight, soil and water to grow. It was not too long ago, when the world was mostly poor and people used to go outside to use the bathroom, a man would eat when he could, and only when he earned it -- usually at the end of the day when the work was done and when he had a chance to cook and eat. Food was generally organic and unprocessed then. If he was married, his wife would fix him dinner, and she would do what ever it took to please him (sexist as it sounds, but true nonetheless). She'd make him a bit of toast in the morning, maybe send him off with a little lunch. But a man struggling to survive on his own would eat when he could and that's just the way it is for me. I like staying a little hungry during the day. It adds a bit of tooth to my edge, if you know what I mean. I like that eating is the last thing I do, and that I eat only after a workout. I do this, knowing also that the weekend is also near, and I tend to reward myself with food then too. I like going to the middle eastern restaurant, the Indian buffet and Mongolian barbecue. But now, I am eating raw. That limits me to the salad bar.

It will be interesting to see if I can survive the weekend eating this way.