Breakfast!

Here was the scene that greeted me when I came into work this morning:

 What you are seeing is a spread, approximately ten feet long, of every type of baked good under the sun. There were cookies, donuts, brownies, muffins and strudel. There was an especially crumbly, flaky, sticky little pastry whose name I could not quite recall. The shiny items towards the end of the lineup were bagels of every variety, with abundant cream cheese and butter. The inspiration for all of this was the celebration of National Boss Day.

I have to admit that I was a bit scared when I saw this baked goods blowout. The very foods that have been my life-long nemeses were laid out in front of me, beckoning.  One of my co-workers said, “Sandy, have something to eat!” When I demurred, saying that I couldn’t eat those kinds of things, she said, “Oh, come on, one little piece won’t hurt!” Hmm, where have I heard that before? But then came the kicker. When I replied, thanks, but I think I’ll pass, she said, “We got fruit salad, you can have that.”

Sigh.

Yes, I can have fruit salad. I like fruit salad. And I’m sure that the intent behind this breakfast bonanza was genuinely well-intentioned, an expression of caring and camaraderie. But, forgive me for saying this, it seemed particularly cruel to ask a former fat girl to pass through a gauntlet of ganache on the way to the lonely bowl of mixed fruit. It’s kinda like inviting a recovering alcoholic to a wine tasting, telling them not to worry, we got you a carton of grape juice.

In my last post, I talked about how our culture seduces us with non-stop food porn. As my experience this morning shows, it’s not just the mass media, it’s us too. We do it to ourselves. A person who has lost a lot of weight, and who wants to keep it off, has to deal with this daily assault on the culinary senses. It’s one of the main reasons that so many people regain in my opinion. To add insult to injury, the companion paradigm is that obesity is a personal problem. So we surround the newly slender person with temptation at every turn, and when they finally cave, it’s their own fault! Then we wring our hands, wondering if we’ll ever find a way to help obese people conquer this problem. It’s positively diabolical. And by keeping obesity an object of personal shame, we never have to look at the milieu that fuels it.

By the way, if you’re wondering how my office adventure ended, I didn’t eat anything. My willpower prevailed. And I felt like a complete and total schmuck.

But a thin schmuck.