"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?
