The pleasure of eating

If there is one thing that makes me sad (maybe I have little to be sad over, but this is important nonetheless), it is seeing people who not only fail to derive pleasure from food, but feel guilty for enjoying it. So, what is their remedy? Not eat? Impossible. People need to eat. Food provides an extraordinarily sensory experience. Sight, taste, smell, sound, and touch. All of those things that numbers and "scientific studies" have distorted.

No, potatoes won't make you fat. Carbs are not "bad." You won't get fat if you eat a piece of dark chocolate cake.

However, you will be miserable if you consistently tell yourself such things, and you fail to recognize that you MUST EAT. Often. to live.

Moreover, what WILL make you fat is depriving yourself of something you love, such as a cookie, and then one day, finding yourself in a room alone with a box of cookies. After lying to yourself and saying that one cookie will make you fat, and after depriving yourself of one small pleasure and letting it fester in your mind and your stomach, what will happen? One box of cookies will disappear into the depths of your stomach, and will cloud your thoughts to the point of insanity. Keep it up, and you WILL be the obese monster you feared you would become.

People are better than this. There is so much pleasure found in a bowl of chicken stew--the chicken cooked so long it slides off the bone, the vegetables rich with the heady savors of wine, thyme, and melded with the other ingredients of the pot. The whole scooped up with thick chunks of warm bread. Afterward, close the meal with a rich dark chocolate cake. A meal needs to end well to satisfy you until the next. Pleasure should dominate your experience.

Eat when you're hungry, and stop when you're full. Don't feel guilty for eating because people need to eat. If you overeat one day, take a salad the next meal, but don't tell yourself, "I'm not going to eat x anymore" because it's not true, and you will make yourself miserable for having broken an impossible promise.

Eat, my friends, and love it.