Fare Thee Well, McNuggets. We Hardly Knew Thee.

About a year ago, I was seeing an acupuncturist. He kept giving me vague dietary advice, then got frustrated when I utterly and completely failed to follow it.

"You have to eat anyway!" I remember him sighing. "Why not make better choices?"

I wiped the buttercream off my face and gaped at him. Where do you even start?

What "making better choices" actually means is "change everything you know." It means "don't drink with your friends," "get to bed by 10 so you can wake up to cook before work," "politely decline pizza when you're out at 2am (oops to that 10pm bedtime.)" It also means "make food an issue."

Anyone with a specialized diet knows this: you can't hide food. It's very public and very intimate all at once, and it becomes a topic of conversation whether or not you want it to.

• If you say you're a Vegan, people nod indulgently but think, "No, I don't want to give $10 to Greenpeace." 

• If you're gluten-free, people wonder what you have and silently hope they don't get it. 

• If you decline enough drinks, your date might ask you if you're a recovering alcoholic. (No, I'm not, but I wasn't going to make out with you anyway, no matter how drunk you got me. Michael.) 

So what do you do when you don't want food to be an issue? When you just want to hang with the normalos? When you want to buy a bunch of Sour Patch Kids and shove them at your face with wild-eyed abandon?


This is the interesting thing I have learned: you can only really fight it so long. At some point, the rebellion gets boring. Your inner teen loses its angst. Raging against the machine gets old when "the machine" equals "feeling better."

The thing is, if you're like me, you know the feeling of "raging" far better than you know the feeling of "feeling good." What is that even like? How can you chase a wispy ideal? It's way more comfortable to stay in miserable stasis than it is to strive for greater things.

I have had mostly delicious garbage to eat today. But I also feel like crap, and I'm noticing the link. I've been yo-yoing like this for months, and he more I do this, the flimsier my denial becomes. Eventually I'll go cook some quinoa, and be weirdly excited about it.

Though I am in no position to give diet advice, my advice is this: just keep plugging. It will click eventually.

In the meantime, enjoy these little bastards.