A Powerful Force

As an Italian, I am what you would call an "emotional eater". When we're happy, we eat lots of food to celebrate. When we grieve, we eat lots of food to commiserate. When we're sad, nervous, celebrating, tired, overjoyed, slightly annoyed, depressed or just a little down in the dumps... we eat. It's one of those things that makes it very hard to stay on a diet because no matter how we're feeling we generally have only one response: break out everything in the fridge and party down! There is however one particular emotion that tends to trump the others in my case: frustration.

I have the tendency to lose lots of patience in a short amount of time. Sunday several tiny frustrations hit me in rapid succession while I was attempting to clean the kitchen. Taken separately... no big deal. When they gang up like that it's a recipe for disaster. Actually it's more like a recipe for an extra large pizza with 4 toppings and 2 kinds of cheese. When I get pushed to the edge of frustration my appetite becomes a super power. Some of you comic book nerds might be familiar with Galactus, a being so large he eats entire planets. Yeah, I'm kinda like that.

So there I was Sunday, building into a Hulk rage (seriously, what's with all the super hero references?), standing right next to the fridge and I suddenly developed a craving for... um... everything. If a live animal wandered by, I would have thrown it on the grill, doused it in ketchup and the rest would be history. Thankfully the livestock knew better then to get in my way. The salad however was not so lucky. It died a horrible death. A quick and painless death... but horrible nonetheless. The rest of the day was spent looking for other similarly low-calorie foodstuffs to maim, but came up painfully short. I kept stalking the kitchen like a crazed lion to no avail. This wild beast would have to wait until dinner.

Those chicken tacos never knew what hit them.... poor bastards.

Somehow I made it through the day without completely going off the diet, which is a much more monumental achievement that most people understand. From that perspective I feel pretty good about myself, but honestly I kinda miss my old buddy. As always when I look in the mirror I'm happy, but when I look in the fridge I'm so, so sad.