Doc Time

I'm going to the doctor tomorrow. Time for still another checkup. This isn't the cancer checkup. That happens next month, with scans and everything. This is the tsk tsk you still haven't lost enough weight check up.

The fat clings to me with stubborn tenacity. I never, ever thought I would be a really fat person. I always struggled a bit, but for most of my life I thought I was a healthy weight. Perhaps a little more than the charts said I should be, but I felt good and strong, and that was all that mattered. I know what happened. It was the combination of losing Morgan, who was my "food brake" and eating my way through the depression of his death, and then marrying a man who saw no problem with saying, "Of course; let me get it for you" when I expressed a longing for ice cream.

But gustatory hedonism has deteriorated into full scale food addiction. They say the first step to conquering any addition is admitting you have a problem. I have a problem. I have a love affair with bread: rich, dark, heavy, seed-laden whole wheat bread; oat bread with cinnamon and raisins; any bread as long as it isn't white. I love bread. It loves me. It clings to my hips and my gut like one of those clinging teddy bears that you pinch on the back to spread their little legs and then they attach to wherever you put them. That's bread on my body. I don't eat ice cream -- I'm allergic. I don't eat sugar--it makes me dizzy. I do confess to a love for fatty foods, but my gall bladder has taken care of those days. The misery of the result of eating fried food far outways any pleasure.

But bread... it doesn't give me the trots; it doesn't make me dizzy; it doesn't fill me up to the point of discomfort. It smells wonderful, it tastes yeasty and beery and warm and says LOVE and HOME and COMFORT. How do you get rid of an addiction as powerful as that?

I stopped making homemade bread, thinking that the absence of the passion of baking bread would quell my desires. But I live in the land of bread. Anyone who hasn't had a loaf of Dave's -- any variety: peace bomb, cin Dog, spelt, seedy fields -- you haven't tasted bread. And then there is Kettlemen's where they have turned bagel making into a fine art, a gourmand's delight.

Someone suggested that I make bread a special treat, an occasional thing, a seldom tasted pleasure. HUH? How do you do that? How do you... oh my, I am an addict. Toast, bagels, baguettes... so many ways to make and eat bread. It isn't fair.

I know it shouldn't be a laughing matter, but I cannot help but laugh. I'm a walking loaf of bread. Somebody help me.