Epiphany #1: Thanksgiving, in theory, is a beautiful day of reflection upon our blessings, a time to give thanks for all of the things we have or successes we have achieved. I have my own blessings and successes to be thankful for. I don't need a special day every year to be thankful, but as custom and legal holiday's would have it, I have a day, Thanksgiving Day, to practice my gratitude. That's not the epiphany part, if you were wondering....
The epiphany came in realizing that while this day of thanksgiving as been set aside for the above named purpose, our consumer driven capitalistic society has cultivated this holiday into the purchasing power of a day that it is. And I'm not just referring to Black Friday (Thursday night). I'm also referring to the millions of dollars that people spend on food during this holiday. I mean, millions of dollars. Not only do Walmart and Target and every other department store benefit from the heaviest shopping day of the year one day after Thanksgiving, but Price Chopper and HyVee benefit from one of the heaviest grocery shopping days of the year, the day before Thanksgiving! Boy, that became evident when I practiced my favorite personality trait of procrastination and found myself at the grocery store at 5 pm Wednesday evening. Can you say MAD HOUSE! I have never seen Price Chopper parking lot so full nor have I seen waiting lines that long....at a grocery store! It reminded me of Christmas Eve at Walmart one year. (Yes, that personality trait hit again.)
So, I'll break this epiphany down for you. I realized just how much money people spend on food for Thanksgiving. I mean, I really don't have a dollar figure and I bet I couldn't begin to guess, but I imagine that there was millions of dollars spent by people all over the US buying food for Thanksgiving day.
This leads me to Epiphany #2 (and 3.) We are creatures of excess on this day of giving thanks. I mean EXCESS! To be honest, on Thanksgiving, I was really focused on my plate and the mess I was creating there, so I really didn't take in the whole spread right away. I skipped over lots of dishes so that I wouldn't over do it and wouldn't miss out on my favorites. But, in hind sight, as I was thinking about this entry, I recalled the huge, HUGE amounts of food on the counter on Thanksgiving Day (and the following Saturday as we celebrated my family Thanksgiving.) I distinctly recall a huge 10 inch deep, 10 inch in diameter pot of mashed potatoes alone (at my mother's house). Holy Crap! I moved that pot from the stove to the counter and it had to have weighed 10 lbs. And we ended up feeding about 11 people. At my husband's family dinner, there was a huge heated cooker crock pot thing full of turkey with another platter to it's side, full of turkey. Seriously, enough for way more people than were in attendance. Let me just take a second to recall the dishes available for the choosing (because I didn't take a picture of it.) There was a pot of baked beans (?? not sure why), green bean casserole, a platter of ham, a skillet of yams, a pot of mashed potatoes and gravy too, dinner rolls, deviled eggs, and dressing, not to forget the two pots/platters of turkey. This is what I recall from memory. That doesn't include the 2 vegetable platters and crackers and dip for before the meal and the two pumpkin pies, one apple pie, one pecan pie, brownies, and almond turtles for dessert. This was for 14 people, not including the 2 little tykes. A lot of food. Now, granted there was a lot of leftovers, but a lot of food, none the less.
I don't want to sound ungrateful. That's not the point of my rambling. I'm just pointing out that on this day of Thanks, not just in our family, but I suspect in yours too, was peppered with excess food. I wonder how much of that food actually gets eaten and how much ends up in the trash because we are mash potatoed out or because it sits too long in the refrigerator. Like I said, it was an epiphany. And this year isn't new or different than any other year in the amount of food present at my family dinners. I just think that my view on eating and food is so different this year, that I was more surprised and astounded at the reality of it all.
So, lastly, Epiphany #3 naturally enters my mind. In truth, this epiphany was probably my first realization but it seems to fit better as #3 for this process. I became painfully aware that where there's excess in food, there is likely to be excess in consumption. Tell the truth. Did you have to undo your belt or unbutton your pants to accommodate your intake? Did you take shifts through the meal time process? "Okay, I'll have this and this and this....I'm full... but if I wait a little bit before I go back, I can get seconds on this and this and that. Now, I'll have some dessert after I let this settle. But this tasted so good, another bite or two won't hurt."
People and families are different in how they consume their holiday meals. My family tends to do a major sweep of the dinner spread, taking in full plates, chowing down and talking all the while. Most go back for seconds on their favorites and then call it quits for a bit. We sit around and gab, maybe play a game or watch football on the tube. The food stays out on the counter for easy access. After about an hour or less, people start to filter back through getting another serving of their favorites and/or picking up a dessert. The food remains out....(no one has suffered from food poisoning from this practice, yet) people graze on the main dishes, appetizers and desserts. Finally, after a few hours of respectable grazing is completed, the food is packed up into to go containers for families to take home, if there are left overs. (This year, there seemed to be a lot of left overs to pass out.) My husband's family did things a little different. There was the main holiday meal with a major sweep of the meal. Many folks went back for seconds and some went back for dessert. After the hostess was done eating her meal, the women folk put most of the meal away leaving out the desserts and appetizers for grazing material. Generally, the post meal grazing was limited to desserts while my family chooses to graze aimlessly through the entire meal over and over again throughout the day.
Neither one is worse than the other (except in the risk of food poisoning is concerned...but that's a whole other topic of discussion). The general issue is that of excessive intake. Most people don't eat with those kinds of habits on a daily basis. Or maybe they do, thus the expanding waistline of America. ObesityinAmerica.org reports that more than 1/3 of Americans are obese. Obese is defined as a BMI of 30 or greater. Now I'm not trying to act like I'm all high and mighty. I am still obese at a BMI of 36.1. But that is much improved from my highest BMI of 47.2 at my heaviest and a BMI of 43.1 at the time of my surgery.
The biggest epiphany that I have had since having the vertical sleeve gastrectomy surgery on July 24, 2012 is that of excess. Boy does this surgery remind me about excess, AT EVERY MEAL! I don't eat in excess any more. I can't eat in excess, at least at this point. I hope to never eat in excess again. But the truth of it all is that eating in excess got me to the point that I needed and wanted surgery. It got me to the point that I had to have surgery, had to lose the excess weight for my health and well being. So, the question is, why do we continue to indulge in excess every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every Easter and most other "Eating Holidays"? It's our custom, our habit, our social norm. Eating is pleasurable and enjoyable especially when we do it with the ones we love. We eat because it's there, we eat because it tastes good. We eat because it's a holiday or a celebration. We love to eat. In the end, though, we don't love what it does to our bodies and we certainly don't love the excess issues that eating too much brings.
It's just food for thought. (Pardon the pun.) It's certainly a new place for my brain and stomach to be and it is clearly going to be a journey every single day.
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