My Peculiar Food Obsessions: Foods I Must Give up If I Am to Regain My Health and Physique

My wife suggests that I might just have a touch of OCD because I am given to ritual, and I purchase the same products over and over again. I have a ritual for everything, and if I do not perform that ritual, I just don’t feel right. Plus, she offers my closet as further evidence. I have worn the same brand of clothes and shoes for years. I don’t deviate. I don’t branch out and try new brands, new styles, but I stick with the familiar.

But she offers as the strongest evidence my peculiar food obsessions. If I like something, most of which is absolute junk, I eat it day end and day out until I finally grow tired of it then I move on to a new obsession. However, my metabolism has changed tremendously in the last two or three years or so. At one time, I could eat as much junk as I wanted and though I worked out only sporadically, maintain a relatively nice physique and good health. But new health concerns mark the end of this era.

Suddenly, I am facing the specter of high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Suddenly, it is necessary to work out and eat right to maintain my weight and good health. And as my wife is apt to do, she was quick to insert reality into the whole situation. She made a list of my food obsessions that I must give up immediately if I am to reclaim my physique and good health.

1. Fruity Pebbles

My wife gets up early each morning to insure that we have a good breakfast before leaving the house. She fixes a hot cereal, usually oatmeal, and slices fresh fruit and various melons. But much to her chagrin, I then get up and break out the Fruity Pebbles. My children look on in envy, and she looks on in seething anger as I forego her healthy breakfast for an artificially flavored, sugar fortified cereal.

2. Coffee

My wife often points out that even before I have left the house, I have already consumed a pot of coffee. Then I prepare a to-go cup to take coffee with me on my drive to work. And then I spend much of the morning soaking up coffee in the faculty lounge. All this coffee, she points out, cannot be good for me, but I don’t know how I’ll do without it.

3. Pork rind strips and Fanta cola

Around mid afternoon, I begin to get a craving for something salty and something sweet. So I go for the pork rind strips and Fanta cola. Again, my wife questions the sanity of introducing a daily dose of fried out salted pork rinds into my system and then washing it down with soda. And my kids point out that the Fanta fruit flavors bear no resemblance to the flavor of the actual fruit. But so what. They are so wickedly refreshing.

4. Slurpees and hot sausages

During my drive home in the evening, I always stop by the local convenience store to pick up a Slurpee and a hot sausage to hold me over until I get home.

5. Lemonheads

This is perhaps my biggest food obsession. Even I can’t explain it. It started small. My wife would buy a bag of lemonheads to get her through long meetings, and I would eat whatever was left over. But then she quit buying them all together. Something about the sugar content. So, then I began to buy them myself. At first a bag would last me about a week. Then a bag would only last me two or three days. Then the next thing you know, I’m up to a bag or two a day. Not the tiny little box, mind you, but the bags they sell in grocery stores.

It’s gotten so bad that my students and colleagues present me with bags of lemonheads whenever they attempt to get in my good graces. Each lemonhead is like a sweet, tangy piece of crack. They just keep calling me and calling me.

But in case the health argument didn’t work, my wife presented me with the approximate cost of my food obsessions. She estimated that I spent approximately ten dollars a day on my food obsessions. And if you multiply that by the twenty or so days a month that I go to work, not counting the numerous snack runs on weekends, it comes to about two hundred dollars a month.

I might not be health conscious, but I am money conscious, so I know it’s time for me to quit. Not only am I setting myself up for a early death, I am setting myself up to die broke.

What peculiar food obsessions do you have?