Eat, Drink and Be Merry

As Memorial Day approaches, I’ve started thinking about celebrations. For me, the summer always seems a time for making merry. It’s the season for high school and college graduations. Attending June weddings. Kicking back and taking well-deserved vacations. It’s a time for getting together with those people in our lives who are nearest and dearest to our hearts. To laugh. To cry. To play. To pay tribute. But most of all…

To eat.

Is it possible to celebrate anything without an excess of food? I think back to when I was a kid. Memorial Day meant the first cookout and – more importantly – the first macaroni salad of the season. It might also have been the first day when the water was warm enough to go for a swim, but that’s not what sticks in my memories. The Fourth of July was all about hot dogs and corn on the cob, slathered in butter and salt, and finished off with a slab of Neapolitan ice cream, mouth-watering with its layers of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. There were fireworks too, but in truth I looked forward to the ice cream more. My birthday is smack-dab in the middle of summer and what’s a birthday without birthday cake? Or a wedding without wedding cake, for that matter?

Summer is not the only season for celebratory eating. What would Christmas be without Christmas cookies? Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Easter without peeps? Any time people decide to rejoice, it seems that food is center stage. Not just any kind of food, mind you, but “good food.” And you all know what that means.

This has been one of the toughest challenges of my post-fat existence. It is one thing to give up foods I loved, but that made me heavy, in my normal everyday life. I can take a salad to work for lunch. Make fish for dinner. But on my birthday, do I have to give up birthday cake? My family and friends react as though I’m being overly neurotic when I express my angst about birthday cake, or summer barbeque, or cookies. Don’t worry about it, they say. Even my doctor says that. Yet, I know that if I have “just a little piece,” I will gain a few pounds and those pounds won’t come off as easily as they went on. You might say, what’s a few pounds? But for someone who’s been more than 100 pounds overweight, “a few pounds” can be the beginning of the long slide back into hell.

That’s looking at it from one side of the mirror though, the side that expects formerly fat people to adapt to the world, learn to manage those celebratory foods so they don’t do too much damage, and struggle alone with the consequences. On the other side of that mirror is a question. Must celebration equal food? Could Memorial Day be special enough with a first swim of the season, sans macaroni salad? Instead of sharing birthday cake, could we share a birthday bike ride? Or if we must have food, could we have birthday broccoli?

To suggest such radical concepts is to run the risk of being considered a party pooper, one of those insufferable bores who ruins the fun for everyone. It can be perilous to suggest that such a fundamental truth – that food is an inseparable part of celebration – may be only one of several possible scenarios. Perhaps it is a crazy idea, but the possibility that I could lose 100 pounds was once a crazy idea too, and you know how that turned out.