Curse of the food hole

Food. We love it. We consume it every day. It’s either bad for us and delicious, or good for us and like licking a piece of cardboard that a sweaty monkey has rubbed all over itself. Then set fire to. Then taken the ashes and peed on them. Then served it to you as soup. And of course you took the soup because the monkey was dressed as a waiter and that’s how monkeys get you - they wear people clothes and it’s so funny that you forget you can’t trust them.

The issue with deliciousness is that once you get the taste for it, it’s hard to stop shoving things in your mouth (by ‘things’ I mean food things, stop thinking that other thing you were thinking). ‘I’ll only eat one Tim Tam’ turns into an empty packet. ‘I’ll just have a light dinner’ turns into the pain of trying to digest an entire dead animal. ‘I’ll just have a quick sandwich’ turns into a quick sandwich followed by an apple and some 2 minute noodles and a bigger sandwich and some chips and eating Nutella off anything else you could find. Generally a spoon. Or your finger.

This anti-will-power phenomenon is something I like to call ‘opening the food hole.’ It’s like opening the floodgates, except the gates are your mouth and the water is fried chicken.

For many years I excused my behaviour with the old standards ‘but think of the starving children in Africa!’ even though me having another piece of cake was never going to help a starving child in Africa, and ‘I better eat it before it expires’ when the expiry date was months away. I thought I was doing fine until late last year when I finally decided to do something about the couple of kilos I gained in Europe. I came up with a brilliant idea: I was only going to eat when I was hungry.

This plan lasted longer than I expected. I dropped two dress sizes. I had to buy a lot of new clothes. I can walk up stairs now. Well, some stairs. More stairs than before. Stairs are hard. But recently, I started to slip. I allowed donuts back into my life, and they brought their friends with them. Their cake-y, chip-y and deep fried-y friends.

I’m trying. I really am. My jeans still fit, but I’m constantly faced by the struggle of working around baked goods and having lunch once a week with that friend who never finishes her food.

It’s not my fault. I blame the deliciousness.