Pickle Aisle Moment

So here's a weird thing that happened.  I was in the pickle aisle at the grocery (and that's about the only food aisle I will go down) when a grocery store employee (we'll call her Eunice) stopped me with these words: "You have abs. How do I get abs?"

And the earth's axis broke. The end.

Really, I may have had the appearance of abs that day but you'd have to work pretty hard to actually see them underneath some of the other nonsense going on there. I am writing to you as a woman of average weight who makes plenty of errors in consumption (hormonally fueled errors most of the time) and who eats out more than she eats in currently and who is the occasional unpaid marketer of Diet Coke.  So what I suppose she meant was, "You are over 40 and do not appear to be overweight so tell me how you do that."

Now this is the kind of situation that one must respond to appropriately.  FIRST, let's acknowledge that there's a certain amount of DESPAIR that causes a grown woman to stop a stranger and ask for advice.  So we want to tread lightly and then let's acknowledge that I'm probably only going to have 3 minutes maximum to help this person because it's not likely that we are gonna become best friends.  Eunice here with her hair net and extra 60 pounds doesn't have any idea of the food books that I've read or the exercise that I like but she happened to catch me at the exact right moment in my struggle with the processed food industry.

See, for years I have read all the books on how the processed food industry manipulates folks into eating more and more toxic garbage. I have done the research on their commitment to scientifically pinpointing what lights up that pleasure center in your big old brain and I am terrified of how closely it resembles other addictions we see that kill people. I have seen publication after publication regarding their very deliberate attempts to attract children to things which are not even food in order to assure their future financial commitments to big food companies.  And if there's anything I hate, it's knowing that I've been manipulated.  If there's a reason to give up the garbage, it's that your brain, currently blurry and fuzzy from all manner of chemicals not intended for humans, can make a much better choice once it's had a few days of Oreo-free clarity. Also I had just been at Six Flags the day before and witnessed first hand the MISERY that folks who are enslaved by sugar, fat and salt are slogging around every day in their motorized scooters.  The fury I feel for these people and their children had been simmering when I ran into Eunice.

Eunice, of course, only asked a question.  She wasn't asking me for a treatise I keep in my head on the Devil in Dairy so simplicity was in order. Eyeing the cross around her neck I decided to appeal to her through her spirituality. I told her, "Don't eat anything God didn't put here on the planet for you, Eunice. Stick to all those fruits and vegetables and fishes and fowl there in those departments and don't touch any of the stuff that man made for you. And no frying."  I was hoping God would have more pull than Kellogg or Kraft. She was nodding.

She says, "I'm diabetic. I've got the cholesterol and the high blood pressure and my doctor is skinny.  She tells me to exercise, but it's hard."  Oh Eunice.  She's got a doctor who can't begin to imagine how to communicate the specifics of exercise to a person who's never worn tennis shoes for that purpose. So I told her, yeah, she had to move around some more. If her skinny doctor tells her to do one lap around the track today, try two tomorrow.  Her numb, diabetic foot will hopefully take her farther every day and then maybe she could think about strength too. I didn't mention that you don't get abs from walking. Start slow Eunice...

She tells me about her friend who had lap band surgery (who also happens to be gaining back all of her weight) and that's when we get to the hardest part of our pickle aisle conversation.  I am shaking my head begging her not to consider surgery because see, if you are carrying more than say 30 or 40 pounds, or if you're gaining and losing it over and over and over, I believe it's not about the food anymore. Sure, you are seeing consequences of consuming the food. As Geneen Roth says about obesity in Women, Food and God, "It's not about the food, but it's not NOT about the food."

There's plenty of evidence that food has become a tool to play out whatever struggle over your worth is going on inside your head and heart at this point.  What about Eunice doesn't think she is worth seeing her kids graduate and her grandkids' futures?  After 30 or 40 pounds or several decades of struggle I think it's worth it to ask a professional, a counselor, to let you spend some time on the couch figuring out what would cause you - other than that you are being manipulated by big food companies - to deliberately, with every single bite, choose a shorter life and, since most of us are purchasing and preparing food for everyone else in our houses, to choose a shorter one for our children.  Intellectually, all of us know how to lose weight, but the fact that most of the people you know are in a constant struggle between gaining and losing, along with the fact that we live in a culture that supports a $60.9 billion dollar weight loss industry and still remain obese tells us that the problem is bigger than the gaining and losing of weight. If we are still obese with that kind of money spent, it's time to do something different.

I just met Eunice, but I did tell her right there amongst the relish and poisonous condiments that I hoped she'd consider that something in her head was keeping her from the life she wants.  I told her that I thought she was worth being around longer, that her children deserved more time with her and that she already knew everything she needed to do. With her little hairnet and her exhaustion, she's worth even the one more day or week or month she can have here with her family and friends.

So we had kind of a moment there in the grocery. Maybe she helped me see the real despair of people around us who struggle and maybe I helped her see that the goal is bigger than abs. If I read our moment wrong, at the very least, Eunice has learned to not stop people in the pickle aisle.