Dealbreaker: The Junk Food Junkie
Posted by: Diane Shipley | Filed in: Relationships
10:00AM, Monday August 11th 2008
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Food is one of the great joys of life. Or it is for most people. And when I say “most people”, I mean me.
For my ex, food was fuel, nothing more – something to be burped down between video games, beer-drinking sessions and advancing his engineering career. While studying for his degree, his dinner would routinely consist of half a loaf of bread, two packets of cookies and a large bottle of Coke. Seriously.
That’s okay when you’re a bachelor (as long as your cholesterol can take it) but can you imagine how difficult it is to keep a relationship going when your interests in food are so unbalanced? We’d go to grab dinner and a movie, but be finished with our drive-thru so soon we had hours to kill before the opening credits rolled. And it’s hard to get really romantic over a meal without wine… or a table.
Maybe if we had lived in the same place, or wanted to, we would have realized that the fact that we both had digestive systems was too tenuous a reason to stay together.
When your partner won’t sit down for a civilized meal, it’s a challenge to keep the love alive. No candlelit Valentine’s Day dinners for us, no sharing secrets over sushi or rapping over egg rolls. It’s just not as easy to bond over a Whopper at Burger King. (Although for special occasions, he’d take me to Pizza Hut, which at least has silverware).
Not to mention, a mismatched interest in eating out is incredibly inconvenient: we’d go to nice restaurant and I’d be in heaven while Burger Boy moaned about the lack of greasy food and the abundance of fresh vegetables—the kind of meal our wartime grandparents could have only dreamed about, in other words.
Because we had a long-distance relationship, and I was a student back then, I would go and stay with him for week-long stretches. (I can trace my weight gain back to this point; I’m sure my thyroid flat out gave up). One day, bloated from take-out and high on MSG, I went shopping for actual food. Nothing too dramatic: just the fixings for a stir-fry. Burger Boy was many things, but he wasn’t prejudiced against international foods, so I thought I was playing it safe. But when he found out what I was making, he just looked at the bean sprouts and shook his head in disgust. “I don’t eat twigs,” he declared.
I’d love to say that I carried on regardless, ate my tasty twigs and high-tailed it out of there. But that’s not true. Weak from hunger, I submitted to another belly-busting dinner and carried on dating the Man Who Wouldn’t Eat Real Food for another year and a half.
Because we were never in the same city for more than a week, I always got the chance to detox. But maybe if we had lived in the same place, or wanted to, we would have realized that the fact that we both had digestive systems was too tenuous a reason to stay together.
If we had been meant to be, of course, our differing tastes wouldn’t have mattered; we would have worked around it. But when you really shouldn’t be together in the first place, it doesn’t matter what you eat, or where you eat it: your relationship, like so many of our dinners together, will end up in the dumpster all the same.
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Elle
[report]wrote on August 11 2008 @ 09:22 pm:
All of that junk food is going to catch up with him. My ex would inhale Diet Coke like it was going out of style and then complain about why he couldn’t lose any weight. Like um, just because it doesn’t have normal sugar in it does not make it good for you. O_o
Amelia
[report]wrote on August 12 2008 @ 05:40 am:
@Elle The tower of Diet Coke cans in my office must explain why my wedding “diet” isn’t going so well. I drink 3 a day.
Elle
[report]wrote on August 12 2008 @ 09:29 pm:
Whoops! It’s all about caffeinated water now.
Daniel
[report]wrote on August 13 2008 @ 08:52 pm:
I don’t like junk food. i like chinese food. i often eat out with my sugarmomma i met.
Rob
[report]wrote on August 14 2008 @ 11:06 pm:
I guess I’m lucky in a way. I actually know how to cook, and very well. If pressed to impress, homemade cheese and mushroom sauces are work, but not that difficult. And yes, I’m very interested in women. I just enjoy eating good food (but not in copious quantities).
It’s amazing to me how many women today proudly claim they can’t cook. I don’t mind doing the cooking, but it would be nice to meet a woman who can do more than K/D. My cupboard currently has a bottle of olive oil, 2 cans of tuna (for the stray cats I adopted a few years ago - to me tuna is now just cat food so I can’t eat it anymore), 2 cans of pea soup (I call it my emergency food, as in I will never eat it unless there is a thermonuclear war), and a few bags of pasta. Underneath the counter, a giant bag of Basmati rice. That’s it. Everything fresh, no preservatives. Oh, I do keep a bag of frozen vegetables, but they are flash frozen when they are fresh.
I shop every 2-3 days and buy whatever my mood dictates - fresh meat (I love meat and those sirloin grilling steaks are awesome), fresh mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, Celery, carrots, etc.
Not every guy is a neanderthal when it comes to food, but in the interests of full disclosure, I did buy 2 cheeseburgers, a poutine, and a garden salad at Harvey’s today. First time in 6 months I’ve gone fast food. Every man needs his fix once in a while
I have one addiction: every so often I get this enormous craving for McDonald’s French Fries. Probably the salt. But that’s it for junk food for me.
J
[report]wrote on August 15 2008 @ 10:33 am:
I’m actually a weird junk food addict/foodie combination. My guy doesn’t eat junk food and is pretty good about eating healthy food and a variety. The problem is his palate is limited compared to mine, even though most would say that his palate is pretty good. For me, it’s not extensive enough, so this limits where we (I) can eat. Fortunately, I have friends who love to eat, but it would be nice to go to certain restaurants with him instead of waiting to go with a friend.
Nick
[report]wrote on August 15 2008 @ 03:58 pm:
Elle and Amelia - Diet Coke has zero calories in it. Drinking it would put on no fat and is pretty much the same as drinking water.
Amelia
[report]wrote on August 15 2008 @ 04:08 pm:
@Nick Not that I am a nutrition expert but I think the sodium in it does make you bloated.
Elle
[report]wrote on August 15 2008 @ 04:24 pm:
@Nick - Why not just drink water then? Soda has no nutritional value at all and let’s not kid ourselves, comparing it to water is dubious at best. If you need a caffeine boost there are plenty of other options out there like caffeinated water, black tea, etc.
Do a google search for the health benefits of Diet Coke if you want to read more. This is a quote from a women’s health site:
“Diet soda may not have the sugar or calories of regular soda, but it’s chock-full of other health-draining chemicals, like caffeine, artificial sweeteners, sodium and phosphoric acid.”
Rob
[report]wrote on August 15 2008 @ 08:19 pm:
I’m just going to tease everyone, but studies that have found artificial sweeteners to have effects on health have been pretty much suppressed.
http://www.sweetpoison.com/aspartame-side-effects.html
I got 146,000 (so really 200) results when I searched for aspartame health effects. Artificial sweeteners are something our bodies regard as a foreign invader.
It’s better just to use natural sugar, or get used to no sugar at all. Took me a while to get used to coffee with half-cream, no sugar, but the natural flavour of coffee is much better than the over-sweet stuff most people drink.