My friend and I planned a lunch outing. Simple enough. I wanted to go some place where we could have a good visit and I could enjoy some good, abstinent food. Black Angus was my immediate first choice—a little pricy, but the filet mignon would be worth every penny of it. I also had a back-up choice—my tried-and-true Hong Kong Buffet. (It’s a Mongolian BBQ type place where I can have them cook the meat separately from the veggies and then weight them out at the table, add the exact amount of oil needed and have a textbook ‘weighed and measured’ meal.) Just a note: filet mignon with garlic mashed potatoes, fresh steamed broccoli and wedge salad is way better.
As I contemplated my plan there was the slightest little feeling of discomfort hanging over me—that little “this is your conscience speaking” feeling that you aren’t being rigorously honest with yourself. So, knowing that I really wanted to work my program carefully I made a noble concession: I was would skip the wedge salad—if I was being completely honest, it probably did had sugar in the dressing and way too much oil, even if it did give me a good 5 extra ounces of veggies. (If you call iceberg lettuce veggies.) Then I could either order some additional steamed veggies or take a ziplock of carrots to supplement my meal with.
I was feeling pretty noble about this monumental concession to give up the wedge salad and was secretly convinced that my sponsor would see this heroic sacrifice as a commitment to my program. Deep inside I knew that when it came down to it, there would probably be 8 oz. of garlic mashed potatoes and there was a low probability that I would discard the extra 4 oz. Sadly enough, the first question she asked when I mentioned the restaurant was “are you going to take your scale?” Drat. How could I say “yes, but I’m not really going to use it for the potatoes and the extra 1 oz. of filet mignon.” Of course, I was willing to use it to make sure that I got my full 12 oz. of veggies rather than getting short-changed.
I was momentarily pondering how to address this issue and still maintain my integrity when she threw out an even more disturbing bombshell: “I don’t know of anywhere in the 90-day OA program where mashed potatoes out at a restaurant are okay.” That was not what I wanted to hear. It didn’t come as a total surprise. My first sponsor didn’t allow mashed potatoes. In fact, I almost dropped out of the program 16 months into it when she told me if I ate them at my daughter’s wedding dinner down in southern California
Fast forward to the conversation with my current sponsor….here we are having the “mashed potato” discussion AGAIN. Only she wasn’t being the dogmatic tyrant I saw my first sponsor being. She was pointing out that in addition to the added fat that sometimes they do put some sugar in to “pop” out the flavor. So the question arose in my mind, which I will from now on simply refer to as the “mashed potato” question: On (my) program, do we eat, now and forever, food that is separate, easily “weighable”, and possible to identify all the ingredients, or so we eat that way in general, but not worry about it when we are out and just do the best that we can? That is a much bigger question than it sounds. In fact, it presents a proverbial ‘fork in the road’ in terms of how I pursue this recovery journey from the managing the food addiction standpoint. The ‘I did the best that I could” at a restaurant opens up a real slippery slope.
In a flash, the mashed potato question went deeper than that. It instantly went right back to our previous discussions on step 1: have I really accepted the fact that I am a food addict and I can’t eat like other people without the disease reactivating sooner or later? And for me, the question, does whether or not I eat garlic mashed potatoes have anything to do with it?
I could tell that the mashed potatoes had opened a can of worms that I was not ready to deal with just then. So, I dropped the subject and said we would just go to Hong Kong Buffet. As it was, we had a delightful, abstinent lunch and all was well….except for the fact that the “mashed potato” question has been haunting me ever since. There seem to be two somewhat different approaches to the 90-day OA program. One is a very tight, narrow line with a much more strict food plan—no exceptions. The other is basically the same in that there is no flour or sugar, 3 weighed meals per day, but with a little more flexibility in eating out situations where we don’t have as much control over our food. I see both of them as viable options and see people that I respect and admire working the program both ways. However, I have to honestly admit that of those people I know who have lost a lot of weight and maintained it over along period of time, virtually all of them work the tighter program based on the premise that they are food addicts and will never be able to eat like a normal person again.
Hum...I don't like where this discussion is taking me.
This post is so deep! I think the "mashed potato" dilemma is applicable to everyone. We all have to decide where to draw the line in life and stick to it. So inspiring!
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