Fast Food

I love fast food. That has been the hardest part of this journey of mine - giving it up. Not driving over to Wendy's during my lunch break for a double cheeseburger meal PLUS 2 orders of the 5-piece nuggets or stopping to get ANOTHER cheeseburger on my way home. I don't know what the appeal of it is, but man do I love it. In my senior year of high school, I finally got a car. This meant I could leave for lunch. I think I ate McDonald's almost every day for about 4 months. I got the same thing every time - a double quarter pounder with cheese only, fries, and a Diet Coke. Every day. A double quarter pounder has 740 calories. There's roughly 30 days in each month. If I calculate how many calories I had in those 4 months in just lunch alone, I'd get about 88,800 calories. From LUNCH. That doesn't count what I ate for breakfast, dinner, or in between snacks. Considering that about 3,500 calories makes up a pound, that's over 25 lbs. I gained 25 lbs from lunch. That number to me makes me want to cry. I can't believe what I did to my body. It's not just the weight, it's all the other things. The sleep apnea, the back and knee aches, the rashes I get from my thighs rubbing together. Hell, the rash I get my stomach overhang as it rests on my pubic area.

Not only is that bad enough, but my first few jobs were all food related. I worked at a cookie shop, a chocolate bakery, Cold Stone Creamery, and Miami Subs. You can better believe I made good use of my employee discount. At Cold Stone, I'd often make a quart of ice cream to take home with me, more than once a week. At Miami Subs, I often took home 20-30 wings and pretended to call someone at my house so my coworkers wouldn't think it was just for me. On my days off, I'd go through their drive thru and order my 2 favorite meals there: a 12" cheesesteak meal and a cheeseburger meal. Of course, I couldn't let them know it was all for me, so I made sure to order 2 different kinds of drinks so they'd think one of the meals was for someone else. At the cookie shop, I often got there at 6:30 to start baking and I'd be there alone, baking racks and racks of cookies. You can better believe that some of those warm cookies made it into my mouth before we opened up. At the chocolate shop, I was OBSESSED with their chocolate covered oreo cookies. I often would take a few into the bathroom and eat them there. I had no shame.

When I lived at home, I often snuck food into the house. I rented the guest house from my parents while I was in college, but it's built onto the main house, so I still had to walk through there to get to my part of the house. I kept a big, black bag in my car so that I could fill it with whatever fast food I bought on my way home and bring it into the house without my parents seeing. The looks on their face whenever I made a bad food decision was never easy, so hiding it became a way of life. Disposing of the empty fast food bags become an issue, too. I couldn't just throw them out like a normal person or they'd see them. So, I kept a trash bag in my closet that I'd put the empty bags into and whenever my dad took the garbage pail down to the street to be emptied, I'd take my trash bag full of fast food bags and empty it into there in the middle of the night. That way, they'd never see the vast amount of fast food I consumed. It really was like hiding a drug habit. They always knew, but rarely would they say anything because of how upset it would make me. No matter how upset I was, it wouldn't stop me from driving to Whataburger.

My boyfriend (who is probably the most supportive, loving, caring person I know and has supported me throughout this whole journey) even said something to me that made me open my eyes a little more. A few times when we went out of town, we stopped at Burger King before we got on the road. To a friend of ours, he said, "You always have to have Burger King before we leave town". Now I KNOW he did not say this to hurt me or even suggest I was addicted to fast food, but man did that hurt. I quickly said, "I don't HAVE to have it, it's just always on the way out of town and YOU always want food for the road". That comment plagued me for weeks. This was about 3 months before my surgery. We went down to Ft. Lauderdale with his family about a month after my surgery and I made sure to pack healthy snacks for the road so that a fast food stop wasn't neccessary.

Fast food is everywhere. It always will be. I have GOT to learn the power to drive by them and not even consider stopping. After all, it's a matter of life and death.