Ravings of a Textual Deviant

A few years ago, I ran into one of my few local high school friends. I hadn’t seen him in years, and therefore we absolutely, positively had to go out and get caught up over a good meal. One of the things that I got caught up on was that he’d accidentally become a vegetarian.

I had no idea how that happens, either.

It turns out that he hadn’t known his roommate—who did all the cooking—was a vegetarian. Both of them were eating all their meals at home (or bringing lunches to work) to save money, and my friend somehow didn’t notice that he wasn’t eating meat. Three months later, he went home to see his parents at Thanksgiving, ate a lot of turkey, and had a very bad night of it. At the time, I wondered how you fail to notice what you’re eating.

Now I know.

Starting a couple of months ago, I went about six weeks or so without eating red meat, for various reasons. I certainly didn’t miss it at the time; of course, I didn’t particularly miss food at the time, either. Some people are stress eaters; I even used to be one of them. Now, it seems that I’m a stress non-eater. (I don’t recommend it, by the way.) After the stress started to go away, it got too hot and humid to eat, and I was living mostly on fruit and cheese. Finally, I got to the point where I felt I could eat normally and ended up having a small portion of beef at lunch. My eating habits had been so badly out of whack that it took me about six hours to figure out why my stomach was doing such awful things to me.

I haven’t touched red meat of any kind since that afternoon, which was about two weeks ago. And while I find that I do kind of miss red meat, I don’t miss it that much. I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll try to get accustomed to it again; right now it seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’m still eating chicken, fish and seafood, but there are plenty of days when animal protein just doesn’t appeal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 8:28 am and is filed under Daze in the Life of..., Weight and See. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.