Feeling good...

I think there’s a transformation that people go through that marks the launch of their official entry—however pitifully delayed—into adulthood. It’s a profound moment, this, and not necessarily a cheerful one.

Here, folks acknowledge—however privately to their own secret souls—their own mortality.

Here, they grudgingly admit that the fried mozzarella and parmesan-crusted Sicilian quesadillas that sustained them through their youth are due for a bit of a retrofit.

Here, they come to realize that the point of life isn’t so much about looking good as it is about feeling good.

For me, as it maybe does for most women, this realization didn’t dawn until relatively recently. While I have long recognized—devastatingly—the imprudence of eating cheesies and icing for dinner, it took some time for me to appreciate the more sophisticated distinction between eating less and eating better.

I reflected on this recently when I found myself offering an enthusiastic blast of reflexive congratulations for having gotten to a late hour in the day without putting any food into my gullet. Good for you, I thought. You are exercising restraint. You are strong. You are woman.

Later, when I’d been revived from where I collapsed on the sidewalk, I reflected on the wrongheadedness of this opinion.

Deprivation is not the goal. While it’s clever to reduce, it’s even more so to redirect. Eat still. But let the food in question not be so much extracted from a deep fryer as extracted from the soil.

But ah, me.

Theory is a thousand miles from reality. And the stretch between the two is populated with all manner of temptation: yes, those that urge you to indulge with abundance, but also those that urge you to indulge with denial. The impulse to congratulate when meals are skipped; to feel a surge of pleasure when the passage of another hour is not accompanied by another snack is strong.

It’s a ferocious battle, this one that seeks to rewrite a lifetime’s worth of association between “food” and “bad,” and my dukes are still drawn. The filmy mantle of immortality that fluttered over my being all those years of my youth leaves a powerful imprint. Some part of me still believes that I can eat whatever I want or, more likely, eat nothing at all, and still imagine hale, hearty health to be my incontestable right.

Routine, I have found, is key. If you stumble upon something that strikes a balance between “good” and “tasty,” remember it in ink. The happy convergence of a sense of indulgence and an absence of guilt, after all, is a rare one. Eat it up.

To wit, I consume pretty much the same thing for lunch every day: a vegetable sub. Load it up, say I to the nice folks in plastic gloves behind the sneeze guard, thus perpetuating the deception that a weighed-down sandwich is a treat, even if it takes its weight from a half pound of green peppers.

Immortality? Not so much within reach for me as it once seemed, alack. This revelation leaves a gaping hole, to be sure. But I fill it with lobed vegetables.