Dieting up, or How a good hamburger bun can spark joy.
Recently, my wife and I have embraced a pair of obsessions, both of which promise to change our lives in fundamentally fruitful ways. The fact that this coincided with the month of February — and thus our wedding anniversary — is not lost on me, but I’m trying not to read a lot into it…
For most of our lives, we’ve both struggled with physical fitness and healthy eating. This struggle is exacerbated by the professional lifestyle we’ve chosen to pursue as political operatives and public servants, which does not offer a great deal of time for reflection, meal planning, or what any rational person would consider exercise. (Hey, we’ve all used our Fitbits to count the steps from our desks to the office restroom.)
Now that we’ve “settled down” and are looking to start a family, we’ve come to grips with the need to make some changes if we’d like to be around to see our future children have children of their own. And because I refuse to become a gym rat, and late night walks in the dark don’t appeal to her, we decided to team up and attack our diet. That’s how we found the Whole30.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to lapse into a flowing, semi-cultish narrative about getting back to basics and rejecting the food power structure. But taking a month to cut out all the shit our bodies aren’t designed to process sounded like a good enough idea. And as long as meat and fruit were on the list, I knew I could survive.
Of course, this meant taking a break from our love affair with In-N-Out and the blessed Double Double, animal style, light lettuce, no tomato… with fries and a shake. Yes, we could always get just the beef wrapped in lettuce, but what the hell is the point of a burger without the bun?
So we started in on our 30-day plan at the top of the month, and a little more than two weeks in, I can report that we’re still alive and eating well. The temptation to “cheat” has been constant, and we’ll admit to “fudging” a bit when it comes to unavoidable conflicts like working lunches, fundraisers, and community events.
But the real pain comes from missing out on the foods that we truly, madly, deeply love, even while fully comprehending the sacrifices to our health that we make in consuming them. And that brings me to the other new obsession in our lives, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.
For those of you living in a time warp for the past year, Marie is a spritely Japanese woman who descends on the homes of American hoarders like a soothsaying Tinkerbell, complete with axioms about order and organization. In five easy lessons from her KonMari method, she teaches consumers to whittle down their possessions to whatever makes them happy and doesn’t add clutter to their lives.
A key step in the process is to hold each item you own in your hands to see if it “sparks joy”. While the notion of picking up each pair of my boxer briefs to see if it brings me joy strikes me as a little superfluous, the concept on the whole is appealing — though I could do without Marie and her creepy translator coming by the house every week to check in. And binging the show over the past couple weeks has helped us see our healthier, sometimes tastier, far more curated diet through a different lens.
There are many foods and dishes that spark joy for us — steamed bao buns, wood-fired pizza, and gelato come instantly to mind for me. And let’s be 100% clear, there is no way we’re giving up Double Doubles forever. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we choose to do with the clutter both within and without ourselves. The point of both the Whole30 and Tidying Up is that we have a choice.
So take a look around as you navigate a society based on instant gratification and forgotten consequences. Look at the “choices” that present themselves as you enter a typical grocery store in the days leading up to one of our aptly named “Hallmark™ Holidays”. Look at the clutter we’re encouraged to consume, and think of who truly benefits from the slow and plodding devolution of the human race.
Then join me for a Double Double in two weeks.
