I am highly motivated by food. This is something you may have already guessed if you’ve met me in person. Whereas online I’ve been known to spend 10 minutes trying to take a selfie of myself that looks skinny, in order to create a false impression on social media.
Anyway, back to food. In my family, my son is highly motivated by money and my daughter by anything that will get on my nerves, like the insistence that she get to pick the same sushi restaurant 97 times in a row, even though I’m paying.
I was thinking about this yesterday, because my young adult son, Cheetah Boy, who’s a certified personal trainer, was telling me proudly how he’s been able to put weight on his bodybuilding clients, who apparently don’t like to eat.
“So-and-so has gained 12 pounds since I started training him,” the son bragged. “He said he only eats one meal a day, but I taught him that he had to eat healthy food more often to have the body he wants. So now he eats three meals a day.”
Even though I’m old and know a lot of stuff, I’m really unable to grasp the concept of voluntarily eating only one meal a day. I wish this were not the case, especially when I’m walking past a store window and I see an irresistibly cute dress in the window that I will never be able to wear.
It always reminds me of a friend that my son had when they were together in Boy Scouts. This kid would eat almost nothing. His helicopter mom was always lamenting to me about what torture it was to get him to eat, which I found interesting because the kid was actually slightly pudgy.
Just before the boys were going away for a weeklong camping trip, this mom was beside herself with worry, apparently that her son would starve to death during the week, since they wouldn’t have the only kind of rice he liked or some such. She was literally wringing her hands, which I thought was something people only did in books.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “After hiking all day, it’s my experience that kids will eat dog poop if they’re hungry enough.”
She just looked at me as if I was incapable of understanding how delicate and special her son was.
Fast forward to a week later. The boys all came home, filthy and with unbrushed teeth. When we picked them up, I saw my friend’s son. He looked exactly the same. Somehow he managed to survive the week without emaciation.
I would like to care less about food, but it does have its benefits. A few years ago, I took the family to Paros, an island in Greece. To save money, I booked us into Marisa Rooms, an adorable little guesthouse that was half the price of a hotel. I was still extremely gimpy at the time from chemotherapy and immunotherapy and so forth, and mostly staggered instead of walked. (But I’m obsessed so I still travel anyway.)
Our hostess, Marisa, picked us up at the airport because it was August and apparently there were no taxis to be had, since they were all shuttling French windsurfers back and forth to windy beaches.
We got set up in our cute, tiny rooms, took a nap and then I was ready for dinner. Now, I had assumed that my difficulty walking would be solved by the arrival of a taxi or Uber to magically transport us to the main part of town. Um, no. There were none available. The French people had all of them. I realized I was going to have to walk into town if I wanted food. (See above.) Walking was hard for me, but hunger was even harder.
I took my son’s arm and leaned on my cane, as we walked several blocks over cobblestones to find a good restaurant. I was gasping and perspiring by the time we saw one that looked popular (did I mention it was August?) but it was worth the effort, because the Greek food was as delicious as Greek food should be. We also drank some extremely cheap Greek wine, which made it even better.
I hobbled back home, leaning even harder on my son, and collapsed into bed. My legs hurt all night long from the unfamiliar exercise. The next morning, my legs were still throbbing but guess what? My stomach was growling and I needed breakfast. Despite the pain involved, I once again shuffled into town for a hearty meal. This went on for the four days we spent in Paros and, amazingly, my legs mostly stopped hurting.
Thus I learned the advantage of being food-motivated, which is that I will walk for food. Today, years later, I still have cancer and I’m still gimpy, but I’m much stronger, because of the whole carrot-and-stick equation. Though nowadays I try to find hotels that have restaurants — but sometimes you have to climb stairs to get to them, which is how I learned to climb stairs again.