This is a re-post of an earlier Thanksgiving themed essay. Not surprisingly, the CoVid-19 Pandemic has altered my plans in an adverse fashion. The celebration dinner will be just me and one of my sisters. We’ll get through this year, but 2020 will definitely be one of the worst years of mine, and a lot of other people’s  lives.                                                              Word Count: 842

My Ongoing Commitment

To a Day of Gluttony

Year in and year out the celebration of Thanksgiving influences me to engage in a not-so-unique observance. What is this behavior I speak of? Essentially, I find myself carrying out the practices of a total glutton.

You know the type of person I’m talking about. Somebody who’s obsessed with over eating in all it’s gastronomical excess. This individual sucks food into their gullet like there’s no tomorrow. They sit down to consume various forms of organic nourishment and 100% of the time their stomach is totally able to adapt for all that extra food. People watching them feed are stunned to see them consume so much at once and often comment about the extra sustenance going directly into that hollow leg of theirs.

I really make a conscious effort to try and avoid this behavior, but end up not being able to do it. Events unfold in the following manner; The three or four days leading up to the holiday find me starving myself like a quintessential Third World refugee. I take only the minimal amount of food whenever I sit down to eat. Of course, I also politely, but deliberately decline whenever an extra helping is offered.

Is this some sort of weird subconscious decision on my part to starve myself? Am I doing this because I’m about to over-indulge to the point of ending up looking like a bad imitation of a beached whale? Or quite possibly, it could be my mind telling yours truly I should eat less in general? At least make some sort of somewhat plausible effort to maintain a svelte figure?

Whatever it is, I eat a lot less during the week leading up to Thanksgiving. Then dawn arrives on the actual day and my starving artist impersonation gets thrown out the window.

This schizophrenic behavior pattern on my part started out at an early age. Soon after reaching the age of enlightenment, I also realized Turkey Day meant you might want to participate in that most traditional of American practices, overeating. This happened on a semi-regular basis during my youth, and I started doing it whenever a more traditional holiday would roll around. The family would gather round the table to eat and pretty soon I’d be pounding the nutritional sustenance down like an unregulated candy consumer the day after Halloween.

Then when I got into my college years the pseudo-starvation diet became a common practice. Wanting to save precious financial resources that could be re-allocated for more important comic book or record purchases, I’d commonly go for a day or two of eating only the bare minimum. You’re young and dumb, so why not live off that leftover casserole before it turns into a bacterial breeding ground, half eaten pizza, and the occasional candy bar? Makes for a strong and healthy diet.

The Thanksgiving holiday would soon appear on the calendar and I’d physically stock up at the dinner table while home. All in anticipation of going back to the fasting practice upon returning to my locale of higher learning.

Living and working in sub-Saharan Africa only compounded the practice. Here cooking is more daunting than any type of food preparation practice one can think of in the states. Suppose you want chicken for tonight’s entrée? Not such an easy task since you’ve got to buy the bird first (live of course). Then cut it’s head off and watch the blood drain out (not as much fun as some voodoo priests make it out to be), de-feather it (gives new meaning to the definition of smell), and finally cut up the bird. We haven’t even gotten to the cooking phase of the operation yet. That’s another story entirely.

Basically, what I’m getting at is this, unless you really like to eat dinner just before crawling into bed you don’t cook all that much. In a lame attempt to bond with the locals over similar feelings of hardship, I’d often go without sustenance for extended periods. Followed of course by massive food consumption all in one sitting. Sort of like a camel who stocks up in anticipation of walking through the desert for an inordinately long period of time without.

This practice of starving then inhaling massive amounts of food carried over even after I returned to the states. Thanksgiving is just an isolated example of a food consumption practice that goes on throughout the year.

Now that I’ve reached the age where AARP brochures regularly show up in the mail, the practice of binging and over-indulging doesn’t happen that much anymore. Nutritionists will tell you it isn’t all that healthy to go without for long periods of time, then suck the stuff down like there’s no tomorrow.

Instead eat small amounts in moderation throughout the day. Your body is better able to handle it, and in the short term your stomach will thank you for it. Still fun knowing that at an earlier period in my life the stomach matched my eyes.