Fooled Mother Nature

Today I fooled Mother Nature - I had a headache at work! Woohoo! That's much preferable to having a headache on the weekend.

I've mentioned, I'm sure, that I've gotten fairly serious about losing weight again, and one of my tactics is taking fruit to work for lunch. Now, I'm not a big fan of apples, and I never have been, but they're so convenient they're hard to pass up as lunch fodder. No peeling, long shelf-life, reasonably filling, not very messy, they're an excellent lunch fruit except for the fact that I don't really like the way they taste. I really like bananas, but they go bad within 20 minutes of purchase. I really really like apricots, but they're too small for lunch duty; I'd need to eat 25 of them, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Pears are too juicy, or too hard, one or the other. Oranges are good and refreshing, but a bit messy and sometimes difficult to peel.

My point is that I usually take two apples to work. Normally I buy Fuji apples, which I find palatable, but the store ran out and I bought big green apples instead. Turns out they're Granny Smiths, and they're not suitable for lunch consumption at all. They have an odd chewing texture that I don't like - the nearest I can get to describing the texture is that it's like chewing underwear, but since I've never chewed underwear, I've clearly gone insane. And they're tart, and they have a strange taste that is actually made worse instead of better by the addition of salt. I'm sure that with some sugar, cinnamon and baking, they'd be wonderful, but as casual lunch food, they suck.

I just couldn't face the Granny Smiths today. Some days I'm tough, and some days I'm not. There they sat on my desk, the glistening green Granny Smiths of death, daring me to pick them up and eat them, and my morale collapsed. I was going to go to the cafeteria and get a (vastly overpriced) salad, but difficulties arose in the environmental lab that required me to work through lunch. Then I had a meeting, which kept me occupied until the cafeteria had closed for the day. By this point I was so famished I was tempted to start eating bugs and twigs, and since I hadn't had a chance to drink much of anything all day, I had a colossal headache from not getting enough water (at least that's my Bullshit Theory).

Meantime, other time pressures had begun to manifest themselves, and it wasn't about going out and having an unhurried lunch. I went to McDonalds and got two cheeseburgers and a drink, and learned that I could choke down two cheeseburgers in the time it takes to drive a mile. Healthy? Decidedly not, but it beat eating twigs and bugs, and eventually the drink took the edge off my headache, enough that I could work late without giving voice to a series of inarticulate screams of pain and rage.

For what it's worth, I've already lost about ten pounds. Of course, I'd gained those same ten pounds in the last couple of months so at best I'm back to square one, but it's better than nothing.