The Diet

 At some point in my life, I decided to experiment with what I eat. I love eating—more accurately, I love gorging myself. Especially food I cook myself. I never follow recipes when I cook; I usually take some basic idea from them and then add whatever I think will go well together. But that’s only when I want to make a specific dish, which is rare. Usually, one main ingredient is enough for me to build from. For example, I have a chicken breast. First, I imagine its taste in different cooking methods—how it would taste boiled, fried, baked, or stewed. When I realize what I’m craving at that moment, say, baked chicken breast, I start thinking about what else I’d like to bake. I love potatoes in any form, and they go well with chicken, so the main side dish ingredient is settled quickly. But chicken breast isn’t very juicy, so it’d be nice to make a sauce. Mushrooms go well with potatoes, and chicken would taste better with them too, so I’d fry some mushrooms with onions and pour in cream or sour cream, since dairy goes well with both potatoes and chicken. The potatoes should be boiled almost to readiness before baking, and since I’ll be pouring mushroom sauce over them, it’d be good to cut them into cubes. The chicken breast could be cubed too and added to the pan with the finished sauce to simmer a bit. After that, I’d take a baking dish, about four fingers deep, line the bottom with various herbs, lay out the potatoes, grate some cheese over them, pour the chicken and sauce on top, and add more grated cheese toward the end of baking. For some reason, whenever I start cooking, I mistakenly think it won’t be much, but I never know exactly what I’ll decide to add in the process, so I usually end up with about two kilos of food.

I often did this on the last workday before the weekend—it was how I unwound after the workweek. I’d cook something delicious, buy a bunch of sweets, put on a movie or something else to watch while eating, and over a few hours, happily devour everything I’d cooked, plus the sweets. Afterward, very satisfied, I’d suffer from pain because I couldn’t stand, sit, or even lie down comfortably—it was all very painful. At some point, I stopped doing this, probably because I no longer needed to stuff my stomach to the brim to forget everything and feel content. So, I started experimenting. At first, I just ate less, then I started eating more healthy food, and eventually, I managed to break a dependency that was a huge part of my life—sweets. That was a big achievement for me. Probably the only thing I loved more than meat was sweets. I couldn’t imagine my life without meat and sweets before, but I overcame those dependencies, and now I don’t care at all whether meat and sweets are in my life or if I’ll never enjoy them again. What’s interesting is that even though I no longer care about things I used to love so much—not just sweets—I haven’t stopped enjoying them. I’d say I enjoy them even more now. Overcoming my dependency on sweets doesn’t mean I’ll never eat chocolate or cookies again. If I tried to avoid sweets even when I really wanted them, that would be a struggle—I’d be fighting it, which is just the flip side of dependency. It wouldn’t do any good; I’d just be torturing myself. So now, I feel neither love nor hate for sweets—I’m indifferent to them, and that’s exactly why I can truly enjoy candies when I get the chance to treat myself.

I kept eating less and less, and at some point, I started eating normal portions like normal people and feeling full from them. I was surprised when I felt satisfied after one burger, since before, even five wouldn’t have been enough. Then I decided to give up meat, fish, and root vegetables for a while, eating only vegetables, fruits, and grains. I stuck to that diet for a few months, and at the start, for prevention, I didn’t eat for two days. The first day was the hardest; by the end of the second, I didn’t really want to eat anymore. I’ll have to try it again sometime, but for more days. At first, I lost about four kilos, but visually, I didn’t change at all—it all came off from somewhere inside. Moving became easier, and I completely forgot what stomach heaviness felt like. I used to have a big problem with heartburn; it tormented me for years. I was on pills for years, and as strange as it sounds, I went from “can’t live without pills” to “tolerable” when I dealt with my anger. The most interesting thing about my new diet was that I didn’t even notice when the heartburn stopped bothering me completely. Since the changes happened gradually, I didn’t feel a big difference, so I decided to do a little experiment. After my first shift as a security guard at a shopping mall in a small town in northern Manitoba, I went back to Winnipeg and, for my days off—about ten days—I ate anything that smelled good and looked tasty. For the first few days, I enjoyed it, and though I felt heaviness, I didn’t stop eating, satisfying my desires and savoring the variety of flavors, letting them hit every taste bud on my tongue. I let myself abandon moderation. After a few days, the heartburn came back, moving became hard, and I started feeling constant fatigue. Even if I didn’t eat almost all day, I still felt tired. But I noticed that the physical changes weren’t the worst part. I stopped thinking clearly—it was like I didn’t have the energy for it. I got so lazy that even thinking was a problem. That’s when I understood why gluttony is a sin.

When the body spends too much energy dealing with all the junk and excess food I stuffed into it, there’s none left for anything else. That’s when I realized the difference. It’s like buying a new phone. When you first start using a new phone with a sleeker design, higher refresh rate, oleophobic coating, and a more stable, faster operating system, you notice it all but don’t feel a huge difference. But if you use the new phone for a month and then pick up the old one, where the oleophobic coating is just a memory, and the system lags so much you could nap between a tap and the app opening, then you appreciate the beauty of your new phone. Now I definitely won’t go back to my old eating habits, but I’ll keep experimenting to find balance.