This proves it: Team Pie people are smarter. Don’t feel bad Team Cake, at least you’ll always have Marie Antoinette.
The price of cake has gone up this year. Not in the monetary sense, mind, but rather in the emotional sense. We should start here: I don’t like cake. Growing up I was always on Team Pie (key lime please!), my whole family was. So as a child when confronted with the standard birthday/graduation/wedding sheet cake covered with what my mother derogatorily referred to as “slick fifty frosting”, it was easy for me to refuse. I didn’t like it so why eat it?
It was all so simple then! Other than being confused by the term “slick fifty” – what does that even mean? – food made sense to me. I knew what I wanted and I ate it. But somewhere between my pie-filled childhood and my eating-disordered young adulthood I lost that ability. Years of restricting everything from fat to carbs to GMO soy products left me with an insatiable appetite. The problem was that after starving myself, I was hungry for everything. Anything!
I remember the first time I overspent on cake. It was half of a Funfetti box cake with the nasty frosting of the same name that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for two days since my son’s birthday party. It was not good, even in the low-standard realm of kids’ birthday cakes. Plus I’m pretty sure he snotted all over it when he blew out the candles. (Nothing says “make a wish” like “I wish that none of the party guests will get hepatitis!”) But I’d been subsisting on a self-imposed diet of very minimal calories for long enough that I was starting to dream of food. Something cracked in me that day and I ate a bite of cake. Then another. And another. Pretty soon I’d dropped the fork altogether and was shoveling it in by the handful. End of day came and the cake was gone. I felt sick.
To read what happened next and how Intuitive Eating didn’t quite save me from cake (yet), jump to Jen’s blog for the rest of my guest post.
Are you on Team Pie or Team Cake? Anyone have any clue what slick fifty means??
Written with love by Charlotte Hilton Andersen for The Great Fitness Experiment (c) 2011. If you enjoyed this, please check out my new book The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything
for more of my crazy antics and uncomfortable over-shares!
for more of my crazy antics and uncomfortable over-shares!