Peace, Love and Sausages

Normally this would be my idea of hell: Someone else’s house, someone else’s choice of meals, someone else’s two-year-old. For days on end. Where there is a lot of talk of food. Where we often don’t eat dinner until north of 9 pm. In a tiny town. And without a gym. In France, for heaven’s sake.

And all of this following two weeks of fairly solid bingeing.

I’ve been in Provence now for nearly two weeks, and although I’ve been working the whole time (and on some stressful stories), this is the most at peace I have ever been. It’s because nowhere in the world and at no other time in my life have I been so calm about food. Not at any spa; nowhere.

I keep trying to isolate what it is; to distill it so I can take it home in a jar, like the lavender honey sold everywhere. Standing in the kitchen hungry at 9 pm, surrounded by food cooking and not having had dinner yet, I pause and think: Why aren’t I panicking? Why don’t I feel the need to have a secret stash of food in my room, so I can nip off and stuff some in my mouth at moments such as this?

Well, it helps that I have spent the week dressed either in pajamas, running clothes, or maxi dresses, aka the daytime nightgown. Not having anywhere much to go = total lack of stress about clothing. Lack of access to any clothes besides those in my suitcase also means I can only get so upset about what does or does not fit, and cannot ruin my day by trying on something too tight. (Well, there are things in my suitcase I’m quite sure don’t fit at the moment after the bingeing, but I’ve either been too cold, sweaty, wet, hungry, tired or busy to start putting on, say, the Courreges I wore to the wedding in London.)

The key thing, though, is that I make few choices about food beyond whether to have more (E or G usually serve me a plate, and one that looks very similar to what they eat) yet never have to worry about whether I will like it, or whether it will be fried or cream sauced to some point that I feel anxious eating it. At the same time, it’s nobody’s idea of diet food: sausage and lentils (it’s been unseasonably cold and rainy), lamb tagine, tuna steaks with caponata, whole wheat pasta with shrimp and eggplant, steak with green beans sautéed in walnut oil. Plus fresh tomatoes and peaches and nectarines and apricots that taste better than almost any I’ve ever had. (Also ice cream. There is a flavor here called café cannelle – coffee and cinnamon – that tastes exactly like spice cake.)

Not once have I tried to estimate the calorie count of what I’m eating. I do have to think when the cheese and bread appear, as they do at almost every meal. Do I need this? (E says cheese is “portion control” in France – people can eat smaller main courses because they know if they’re still hungry the cheese is coming.) I have been eating more cheese than I need, but nothing crazy. And I’m not ever tempted to eat it except when it’s on the table (meaning: I don’t even think about it at other times, including when I open the refrigerator).

I am definitely eating more than I would at home, so only once or twice have I even approached a level of hunger that might ordinarily make me panic. I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I can accept being slightly heavier – in other words, that some of this binge weight may not go – in exchange for more peace about and around food. Here I can live with it, but I imagine back in my own world – New York or London – with places to go and people to see, I may wrestle with my until-now everpresent desire to be thinner.

What else? It helps that there is zero judgment of what I’m eating. I don’t feel self-conscious about needing a snack, or going and getting one (often a peach and a square of dark chocolate, or some coconut yogurt and dark chocolate). That, of course, is E’s special gift (and one above all the cooking done, I know, with me in mind) – a calm that diffuses in the air like perfume.