Some days are better than others (dietarily speaking)

From my stomach’s perspective, it’s like that popular children’s book about Alexander: yesterday was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day.

Well, it wasn’t all bad gastronomically. But too much of it was. It just happens sometimes: I get too busy and made too many poor gustatory choices. Our housecleaner was working in the kitchen all morning (which was wonderful) so I took the kids to Bruegger’s. The egg sandwiches sounded tempting until it occurred to me that I’ve never seen a frying pan at Bruegger’s, so where exactly are they getting fried eggs from? Pre-packaged and microwaved? Instead I went with cream cheese. And a bagel. That’s not awful, but it’s not great.

My mother and I both like to cook, and since we’re next-door neighbors we frequently share our creations. She gave me a serving of a delicious chick pea, tomato and feta salad, so I had that for lunch, and then started to feel like I was more on track from a nutritional standard. But then in the late afternoon I embarked on a long drive to my in-laws’ house – I expected it to take an hour but it took more than two because of traffic – and along the way ate a bag of caramel popcorn and a chocolate bar. That was way more sugar and stickiness than I needed in one afternoon.

And when I arrived at my in-laws’, I was already late for the dinner celebrating my father-in-law’s birthday, so of course I dug right in to my mother-in-law’s homemade macaroni and cheese. Followed, naturally, by birthday cake. And not just any birthday cake: ice cream cake, made with mint chocolate chip ice cream, crushed cookies, and fudge sauce.

Did I mention that all of this was only a couple of hours after the sticky sweetened popcorn and the chocolate bar?

Some days are like that. Other days I try to practice good nutritious locavore habits, especially on Farmers Market days when I buy piles of fresh tomatoes, basil, peppers, corn, lettuce. At times like that, it’s easy to eat right, although there are favorite foods that make me think I would need to develop a much firmer ideology if I wanted to go whole-heartedly locavore: bananas, avocados and coffee are just a few of the distantly grown crops it would be hardest for me to give up.

So yesterday might have been dismal gastronomically, but rather than dwell on it, I remind myself that today I’ll do better. I’ll start the day with an aerobic workout and a quart of water, like I always do, and I’ll pursue better eating habits than I did yesterday. While it’s not exactly like we get a completely clean slate dietarily every day – what we eat obviously accumulates in and on our bodies in various ways – it’s also true that one bad day of too much popcorn and chocolate and carbs and white flour doesn’t mean I won’t adhere to better standards the next day.

And then once I’ve convinced myself of this from a nutritional perspective, I remind myself that it’s true in other areas as well. There are days when I scold the kids too much; I remind myself I can improve the next day. There are days when I do too little work, or neglect to read anything of substance, or grow exasperated with my husband. But just as with bad eating choices, none of those mistakes is irreversible.

So I take a lesson from popcorn and chocolate: it was the wrong choice, but I’ll make better choices another day. Forgive yourself. Try again. It’s much healthier in the long run than stewing in self-recrimination. There will be caramel popcorn days and locally grown tomato days, whether the food is actual or metaphorical. Not happy with the choices you made today? Do better tomorrow. That’s a good enough approach for now.