Food for Naught

I like eating, at least as much as I like food. Unfortunately I am not very good at it. I've got better, but it remains one of the things that frustrates me in daily life. Now I am one of the messiest eaters I know (although the messiest has no physical disabilities as an excuse).

The most obvious manifestation of this difficulty is when I have spilled something without knowing, and the dried stain marks my clothes thereafter. I didn't want to spill food in the first place, and now I have a badge of shame that I didn't even know about, and won't see unless someone points it out.

There stains are horrible. I don't so much care about the spill, it's just something else to go in the wash, but I hate going out oblivious to food accessories on my clothes. 

Soon after I had the strokes, I couldn't care less; that I could feed myself was enough. Now, though, I loathe the idea that I might be thought the sort of person that would leave the house dirty.

That conflict between my capability (sometimes I spill food, and can't see it), and my self image (I would not go out stained with food), seems irreconcilable. I don't want to accommodate becoming someone else, so I just have to wait and work until I get back to the ability to eat without spilling food. In the meantime, if you see me wearing food, let me know: I haven't seen it.

Young Adulthood Is a Trap

As I look at my life and swing between feeling ancient (when I'm outpaced by geriatrics in the pool, or struggling to keep up with my walking stick) and between feeling the same age as I did in college (a surprising amount), I think the calorific bounty of our age lays a terrible trap for younger people; a trap that I walked right in to.

When I was in my teens I was strong, fit, lean and healthy. I also ate a frankly vast amount, and it didn't affect me much: I was growing enough and active enough that I could shovel great piles of junk food in my mouth and be little the worse for it.

College involved less food, but also less activity, and a lot more booze (lots of calories!). In my early twenties, I could still eat a bunch, drink plenty, and stay in reasonable shape with as little as 45 minutes of squash every week.

What I didn't realize, until it was too late, I was 40, and I'd had a stroke, was that I had encoded the idea that I could eat anything, do a little exercise, and be just fine, into my brain's world view. Because it seemed to be true. I made a habit of eating large amounts, and exercising only rarely.

Therein lies the trap: it is true, but only for the quarter to a fifth of your life (assuming you'll be 80-100 years old) when your brain is most malleable. The sad reality is that for the majority of your life, you will need to eat less and exercise more to stay healthy, all evidence to the contrary.

I guess it's one of the modern tests of adulthood: can you override your biology to account for our time of plenty, and thereby survive to old age? Not everyone is as lucky as I was and gets to retake a failing grade.

(Of course I'm aware that not everyone is living in a calorie glut; I hope this isn't obscene and offensive.)