Food Kicks

Some people think of the heart as the storehouse for all of their feelings, or if you want to be more scientific, the brain.  I, however, store all of mine in my stomach.  I know this because food has always affected my mood so powerfully that my feelings can’t possibly lie anywhere else in my body.

Food makes me happy, good food.  Likewise, bad food can really ruin my mood, especially if the expectation is high.  I can’t be held accountable for my actions when I don’t have anything good in my stomach.

Because of this, when I eat something that makes me happy, I tend to want it all the time.  I go on these “food kicks” and, for a while, everything is great. I am uplifting to those around me, often singing and dancing because I am so overjoyed with life while my happy food is around.

A scene from my kitchen last week, sang to the tune of Color Me Bad's I Wanna Sex You Up

Soon enough, however, the food that I grow so fond of ends up destroying my life by turning the people I love against me.  It can happen one of two ways:

One way is that the love dies off. 

As a kid, my mother would see how happy a particular food made me (or maybe she just wanted to save herself from going to the grocery store seven days a week) and would buy me 12 boxes of Kellogg’s sugar smacks at once.

The problem is, she wouldn’t catch on until I was weeks into it; by the time she realized I was going through a box of sugary cereal puffs a day, I was over it.  I’d eat half a box more and then never want to look at another smack again. This left me with a discouraged mother -- complaining about my wastefulness and the lack of space in our kitchen that was now crammed with cereal I would never eat again.

But sometimes it ends differently. Sometimes I don’t stop loving the happy food until it’s too late. I grow to need it. The daily helping of porterhouse steak with A1 sauce leaves me with an outrageous credit card bill, or the people I live with become fed up from smelling spaghettios with meatballs at 8 am every morning, or eating banana waffles topped with Aunt Jemima and vanilla ice cream for dinner four nights in a row.  I'm so ruled by my voracious appetite that I can’t stop myself from eating a third grapefruit in a row. It’s like a drug for me, and the person I turn into isn’t pretty.

People become concerned; they think my propensity for the food-of-the-minute is unnatural and they whisper to each other about attempting an intervention before it’s too late. 

I start sneaking the food into the house and hiding it in the back of the fridge or cupboard; slinking around in my own home like a common criminal just to get my fix.  One day I am fine and enjoying life, and the next I find myself throwing up jalapeno nacho cheese and scrambled egg sandwiches all over the kitchen floor at 2 am. "How did I get here, where did I go wrong in life?," I wonder.

No matter how bad the end of my food kick’s experience is, I always vow to never go on one again.

But in the end, the bad memories fade and food always wins…