Deliciously good for you

March 18, 2004

Dear Patty,

I have experimented with a few diets over the years. One had me washing down a meal of baked potato and tuna fish most every night with a half gallon of water. It worked, but thinking of those two foods in combination now almost sickens me. In another, I tried not to eat anything containing wheat. Wheat farmers will be glad to know that's nearly an impossibility.

On a whim in my mid-20s, I fasted for 10 straight days on mineral water. A cheeseburger was the food chosen to break the fast. I could live quite awhile without food, I had learned, but who wants to live without cheeseburgers?

My yoga teacher/fitness advisor doesn't believe in diets. Stick to the new food pyramid, she says. Control how much you eat, exercise and you'll do fine, she says. I tried, but my food pyramid contained secret passageways leading to caches of Girl Scout cookies and the Dairy Queen.

I am not one of those men who won't ask for directions when he gets lost. I needed someone to draw me a map.

The worst part of my new diet was going to the grocery store at 10 Saturday night with a huge list of the food needed to begin. It is telling that though our cupboards and pantry and refrigerator and deep freeze are full of food, not many of those are on the diet.

The cart rolled down foreign aisles containing lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash and zucchini. There were stops for ricotta cheese, orange roughy, salmon, shrimp, London broil, pine nuts, asparagus, peppers, mushrooms, and cabbage, lots of things far from the aisles laden with the deliciously wrong kind of carbohydrates.

But those other foods are delicious, too, I've rediscovered.

The hardest part of the diet is adjusting to the fact that good food takes a little time to prepare. It's only 20 or 30 minutes, but when you've become accustomed to letting restaurants fix your supper, food preparation at first seems a bother. Another discovery: Being involved in the preparation somehow makes eating the food more pleasurable.

The question in this era when two-thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese, is this: What are we really hungry for?

Jim Carrey, the movie star, doesn't eat grains and a few other foods he thinks he can live better without. But he says the most important thing to remember when you're hungering for a triple-decker sandwich late at night is that it's not really hunger, it's a feeling wanting to be recognized. You're uncomfortable having that feeling, so you stuff some food in your mouth to push the feeling down.

Instead of a sandwich, have the feeling.

Actors and actresses have easy access to their feelings. Having feelings scares most us. That's why we numb ourselves with work, alcohol, drugs, and food.

In Big Sur, we used to stop work every few hours to have a "Weather Report." Around the circle we went, each of us telling how we were feeling at that moment. Some were spilling over with happiness. Others would erupt in a storm of tears. And some would search the ground and others' eyes trying to figure out how they themselves were feeling.

The more weather reports we had, the easier it was to know.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor for the Southeast Missourian.