pb&gah

I have spent the past month – has it been a month that I've been ostensibly been on a diet? – eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I enjoy peanut butter, and I am a fan of jam, and together, they make beautiful love on top of squooshy and deliciously carby honey wheat bread, but after you've had one for breakfast and then – ehhhh, I don't know what else to make and I don't have time so I'll make one for lunch, and then you get home and you are tired and just want to crawl into bed with a book and a cat on your head, and you think – ehhhh, I don't have time for water to boil, I'll just make a sandwich, with hey! Peanut butter and raspberry preserves! Woo! I'll mix it up like a crazy person! Well, you get tired. Very, very tired.

Peanut butter, I am breaking up with you. But I can't! But I have to. But oh god, I can't! You are easy, and you are delicious, and I am wretchedly, wretchedly lazy.

I think I'm broken.

There is something soothing about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for every meal. Not just the homey simplicity of it, the callback to childhood and a more innocent time and milk mustaches and cartoons. Not that I've ever stopped watching cartoons.

It is also the fact that it takes approximately thirty seconds and not a whole lot of skill to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the ingredients, they are cheap and plentiful on the ground, so to speak, and I know the caloric points kind of count of each and every piece of that little portable meal which I have created, with no estimating or guesstimating or eyeballing.

It is five points, filling, sweet and a little bit salty, crunchy, perfect, delicious, and I think I am going to kill myself if I make another one.

But I am scared to move away from the safe world of peanut butter and jelly. On any of the weight watchers plans, on any of the diet plans, you can eat anything. At any time! Kind of. The world is your oyster! Within reason. But even though there are strictures and guidelines, it's too much. Too much freedom! Dizzy, dizzy, delirious freedom.

If I were a very rich person who was also nauseatingly spoiled, by god I would have a personal chef, and the chef would tell me what to eat and I would be happy. I would not stress and panic and worry and things would be easy and birds would sing and the hallelujah chorus would break into beatboxing joy.

Not being rich or spoiled, I frantically search for guidelines, boundaries, a tiny little box in which to lock myself. I tried to look up the Discovery challenge, uh, challenge, in hopes that there was a meal plan, but they only shouted at me with exclamation points. I've looked up diet sites, but they've only popped up at me and offered to count my calories. What calories! I shrieked. What calories should I be putting in my mouth! I sobbed.

I heard about Oprah's boot camp and thought that that sounded promising! Very promising! Oprah, she would tell me what to do. Her giant head is very comforting. But all it says on her site is some nonsense about no bread and blah blah protein and blah blah I KNOW BY GOD. Please, please just give me a meal plan?

I spent the week looking for the paper copy of the magazine, in hope, in hope, in hope, but no luck. No hope, either.

This morning, for breakfast, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I will get my act together. I just – I have to work through this feeling of paralysis, this sense that there's too much information, too much coming at me and too little time to process, and what if I don't process it right?

It is depressing that I do not trust myself – but you know, trusting that what I wanted to put in my face was fine, just fine! That's what got me to a place where I am not fine, just not so fine at all. I have everything to relearn, which I am doing slowly, but it's going to take a long time before I trust my instincts again, before I can do this on my own.

Hold me, Oprah.

This entry was posted by anne, on Friday, February 11, 2005. You can leave your response.