For better or worse, Sorin

BODY

NUTRITION

I am who I am

I am what you may call a gourmand. I enjoy food, I like tasting new food. If there's food anywhere being served, I'm happy. And while that may have worked well for me when I was younger, age started catching up with me. My fast metabolism - which allowed me to eat what I wanted and not gain weight - lost its charm. My skinny-eating-mojo was gone!

It was never something that I thought would last forever, but never in a million years did I think that 30 would be the deadline. It was almost as if it was written in my DNA. Wish I had received that memo! At least I could've had some sort of training for it. Mostly mental, I assume, as I wasn't going to give up short-term food satisfaction for long-term nutrition.

That's one of the issues I suppose: it's hard for me to think about what this specific gourmand-lifestyle will mean in the future. Without proper exercise and sleep, of course.

So for a lot of years (basically until 30 years old) I haven't been paying attention to WHAT I ate or HOW MUCH of it I was ingesting. At times, it felt like that: ingesting. Not eating, not enjoying. Just devouring and using it for what I thought was fuel. But it isn't necessarily what was always happening. A lot of times I felt stuffed. It felt like I needed a nap after most big meals. I started investigating pills to help me feel better after a meal. My father recommended some and they did help.

But little did I know that was another issue that should've been my warning sign: you shouldn't feel WORSE after a meal. You shouldn't feel like you had LESS energy than before it. And yet, a lot of times in the past, that was exactly what was happening. Oh, and need I mention the pills? No meal should require pills after it, to help it go down faster. Or even worse: help you make room for dessert. I have to be honest, as I'm writing this, my stomach starts to turn. It's both a physical and emotional (more on this later) sensation.

So while I didn't eat big meals per se, I did eat a lot of times in a day. Breakfast was usually light - some sandwiches and sometimes tea or water (rarely coffee). Lunch was when I started to let loose: a kebab, a McDonald's menu (with Coke Zero), sometimes something from Mega Image, like pastries or some sort of grilled chicken with fries or a meat and cheese sandwich.

While that may not seem exaggerated, it was mostly due to a lack of time. I was never actually hungry. Rarely, if ever, did I feel like I NEEDED to eat or that I was getting hungry during meals. When I got home from work, however, things changed. No longer was I restrained by the 1-hour lunch. Suddenly I had hours and hours to satisfy my cravings. So because the meals I had at lunch weren't that nutritional, my wife always cooked something for the two of us.

That was another mistake. While it may seem like it was something small - and it usually was - it actually represented a second lunch. It was either a chicken soup, some grilled chicken or fish with fries or vegetables. Sometimes there would also be a desert - I could rarely turn it down.

All of these sound fine on paper and I haven't completely changed the way I eat now. The issue was that these 3 meals weren't the only ones of the day. After dinner, we would go to the nearest Profi or Mega Image and purchase anything our hearts desired: cookies, chips, snacks, sweets, Coke Zero and energy drinks. Oh how we loved our energy drinks!

While initially I was the only one using energy drinks to stay up later at night to work on my own projects, I became a negative role model for my wife. She also started doing the same. The difference was that she didn't drink coffee, so she would use energy drinks more like juice. I would take my time with a can, but that still doesn't make it right. I know that now. I wish I did back then.

You have to understand, these weren't things I did some of the time. This was ALL of the time. And then weekends were even more "fun". There's this little known grocery store near the seaside Casino, that we called The Weird Store. Because it has sweets and snacks from different parts of the world - mostly cheap Turkey candy. Saturdays or Sundays we would make it our site of pilgrimage.