The Painful Truth

For seven days, I have committed to chronicling all of my meals here. This is Day Five.

You know how at the beginning of this little seven-day food diary adventure, I said I would be totally honest? How, even if I broke down and went through a drive-through, I would cop to it?

Yeah, well, about that. I wish I hadn't said it, 'cause I've got some 'fessing up to do about a little, um, fall from grace that occurred yesterday. See, it all began with a series of unfortunate events...

I got carried away Friday morning, just doing things. I had a client coming by to go over some work I'd done, and so I spent the morning madly straightening up and making sure the kids and I were all presentable. Breakfast went fine and right on schedule, but sometimes the center just doesn't hold. Inexplicably, as The Client and I were sitting at the table reviewing some papers, The Semi-Permanent Houseguest chose that moment to pick up one of The Carnivore's guitars and start a little impromptu jam session in the loft directly above us.

And things just went downhill from there. Little Miss Piggy went down for her nap later than usual, my mother came by with some fresh vegetables (bless her - this was not part of the downhill slide, it was just a simultaneous occurrence), my nephew waffled about whether he wanted to run errands with me, and then I had to yank the baby up early from her nap so that we could caravan with my sister-in-law to an appointment. While normally, I can adapt rather calmly to chaos, somehow, in the midst of it all, The Big Boy and I forgot to eat lunch. And lunch is kind of a non-negotiable thing for me.

So it was that I found myself, about an hour and a half past our usual lunchtime, trying to reason with The Big Boy as he suffered from an incredible, pseudo-psychotic meltdown when I tried to extricate him from his friend's sandbox before he was ready. I had felt a tension headache coming on for days, and not surprisingly at all, my head went into full-force rebellion right along with my four year-old.

An hour later, accompanied by what had burgeoned into two extraordinarily uncooperative children under the age of five, I realized I had broken one of my cardinal rules, a rule that my own mother had drilled into me as a young child myself, something I should have kept front and center in my mind during this week-long public food diary experiment: I was starving and I was in a grocery store.

Never, ever go anywhere when you're starving to death. Never. Just don't do it. This is how I lost my religion.

Any other day, I would have been able to control myself. I would have picked up a protein bar from the health-food section and scarfed it down in the car on the way home, or I'd have grabbed an Odwalla protein smoothie or something equally virtuous. But not this time. Little Miss Piggy hadn't had enough of a nap, The Big Boy and I were giving each other the stink eye over his earlier meltdown, my head was splitting open, and I was close to the breaking point. I pretended I didn't know the children in my cart and I calmly crossed everything off my grocery list as I made it through the store, and when I got to the other side and saw a table stacked with boxes of chocolate iced Krispy Kreme doughnuts, I marched right to it, picked up a box, and ate one right there. In the middle of the store.

And then I ate another one (okay, two more) as I drove to the recycling center to sort my glass and plastic.

That's right. I had three doughnuts yesterday. What of it?

Here is Friday's food diary, the good, the bad, and the ugly:

BREAKFAST: 2 cups of Cafe Choco Andes coffee with vanilla soymilk; bowl of Banana Nut Rainforest Crisp cereal with unsweetened soymilk

LATE MORNING SNACK: Strawberry and banana smoothie made with vanilla soy yogurt, organic bananas, and conventionally-grown (read: chemically grown), mass-market, frozen strawberries; followed by a homemade cappuccino made with Cafe Choco Andes coffee and vanilla soymilk

LUNCH: bupkis

AFTERNOON SNACK: Three chocolate-iced Krispy Kreme doughnuts (see above public flogging)

LATE AFTERNOON CONSOLATION: another homemade cappuccino

DINNER: Since we have had an additional three houseguests for the past two weeks, I've been doubling and tripling recipes so as to follow the traditional Southern rule of always making too much food so guests do not starve on our watch. Thus, the refrigerator was slap full of leftovers and I declared it a Clean-Out-The-Fridge dinner, which suited everyone. I ate leftover Orzo with Garbanzos and Spicy Couscous with Garbanzos. Actually, Little Miss Piggy ate most of the garbanzos off my plate. I just ended up with the detritus. It's not like I needed the calories after gorging on the doughnuts.

EVENING SNACK: Stove-popped popcorn

LATE EVENING ADDICTION: 2 Edy's Strawberry Fruit Bars

If anyone needs me, I'll be at the altar on Sunday morning.