Growing up, I never ate breakfast and rarely ate lunch. I got all my calories from a multi-course junk food feast that ran from right after school to bed time. When I started college, I had no idea how I should use my 21-meals-a-week meal plan. I think it was my sister Jill, always more sports minded than I am, who suggested sometime during my senior year at NYU that breakfast might be a good idea before the morning lap-swimming sessions we did back then. I think she told me it would help me lose weight. In retrospect, I totally credit Jill for inventing breakfast.
Dan invented lunch several years later. In all honesty, I still sometimes skip or skimp on lunch. But Dan is a lunch person. In fact, just this past Monday, we had a spat over the fact that I was too busy to eat lunch. So when we’re together, lunch it is! And you all know what dinner for me is–a restaurant extravaganza or home cooked meal daily.
And yet on day like today, when I had a robust breakfast of whole wheat pancakes, followed by a terrific Thai lunch of a huge spicy cabbage salad and fragrant green tofu curry, followed by a homemade veggie-turkey burger with oven fries and homemade aioli, I don’t feel lucky or well fed. I don’t feel like a normal cookbook author and restaurant critic.
I feel guilty, like I should have abstained from something, somewhere along the line. It’s true that I had no alcoholic beverages and that I worked out for an hour. It’s true that I could have had a cookie or a cup of hot chocolate after dinner and chose not to. It’s true that everything I ate today was vitamin-pack and nutritious. It’s true that I’m in my healthy weight range. So why do I feel like a failure?
