Saturday 24 October 2009

The Crankiness and The Twix

This morning, less than two kilometres into a 10k race, I had a serious attack of The Crankiness.

It was raining. I was cold and wet and clammy. I had my blackberry in the zippered back pocket of my running tights (a friend likes to tease me that it’s my hemorrhoids pocket) and it was weighing them down enough actually to pull them down, so every few steps I had to hike them back up. My shoelace came untied and I had to stop. I dropped a glove and had to stop again. Sigh.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do any of this. I just want to sit down somewhere warm and eat something nice and not have to think ever again about what would be a good healthy choice. If I could have thrown myself on the grass and kicked and screamed and flailed my fists, I might well have done it.

I kept running. One foot in front of the other and pick up the knees. Stop slouching. One foot in front of the other…

But I want to stop. This sucks. I’m already going to have a less-than-stellar finishing time because of all these kit problems. I might as well quit now.

Shut up, I told myself, more than a bit severely. You are the only company you’re going to have for the next 45 or so minutes (I’ve had enough of Lady Gaga) and you can make this really miserable or you can make this not-so-miserable. Besides, how lame would that be to have gotten up and gone all the way across London in the rain and not even gotten in a workout?

I looked down at the bright red Nike 10k t-shirt I was required to wear. It was a size small and I’d layered it over another shirt – I know this sounds completely obnoxious, but I enjoyed the idea that I’m small enough that I can fit a layer beneath a small shirt. (OK, it was a thin layer, but still.) I thought about how similar, in some ways, this race was to the weight loss process. I remember diets past where I allowed The Crankiness to take over too early in the process – when I’d eat something unplanned or I’d go to a restaurant and think: I don’t want to think about this any more. I just want to eat what I want.

I won’t say I snapped out of my funk completely, but less than a kilometre later, quitting was no longer an option.

* * *

Ever since I spied the bag of fun-size Twix bars on special at Tesco a few weeks ago, I’ve been debating buying them. And then, for some reason or another – mostly having to do with fear – I don’t.

Twix bars are far from my very favorite food, but they are an Issue with a capital I for me. Maybe it’s because they were and still remain a binge food. I binged on them in high school because that was the sort of candy we sold for fundraisers – it was always Twix and Snickers and maybe some M&Ms. I don’t know why, but I loved to experiment with eating the chocolate caramel bits off and then being left with the wafer. (Maybe I just liked them because they took me, oh, about five seconds longer to eat than your average candy bar. Maybe, because I’m greedy like that, I liked that you got two bars in the one package.)

In the past year or so, as I’ve eaten chocolate regularly, I sometimes pick up a Twix and look at the calorie count (306) and think: No, not worth it. I know that one bar won’t be enough, but that both bars of the package is too many for a snack. I also know that frankly, they are sickly sweet and unsatisfying and I’ll feel cross after I eat one because I could have had something better. So I leave them at the shop, and still I think about them. Which usually means I will buy one – sometimes a jumbo one – in the middle of a binge.

On my past couple of trips to the US, I’ve spent time eating all kinds of nostalgia food I craved, but in reasonable portions. Much of it (I am most definitely not talking about the Zabar’s cheesecake here) was disappointing – overly sweet and just blah. The sort of thing I could – and I guess I used to – eat and eat because it was about as satisfying as cotton candy. The more items I checked off my mental I-dream-about-this-food-because-I-think-I-can’t-have-it list, the more I realized that very few of those foods deserved to be on it any more.

Which is where the fun-size Twix bars come in. They are 98 calories per bar, which means I can have two for a snack. Time to see if this particular food still belongs on the list.

I bought a bag yesterday and haven’t tried one yet. I realize writing this that I’m actually not afraid of what will happen – if I like them, I’ll have two per snack times two snacks a day for however long it takes for me to get sick of them. (Maybe you’ll see me in the Tesco, buying five bags and pretending they’re for trick-or-treaters.) And if I don’t much care for them? Well, probably I’ll throw them out – less because I fear bingeing on them, and more because life is too short to eat bad chocolate.

I’ll keep you posted.

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