The Diet That Lasted Until Lunch
My willpower and I had a good morning together, once.
The diet began at 6:00 a.m. on a Monday and died at 1:15 p.m. the same day, which means it lived for seven hours and fifteen minutes, roughly the lifespan of a mayfly with commitment issues.
I want to tell you about those seven hours, because I was magnificent in them.
Preparation had taken the entire weekend. I do not do things halfway; I do them all the way up to the point of doing them, and then stop. Saturday I threw out everything delicious in my kitchen, standing over the bin like a customs officer, confiscating biscuits with real regret in my heart.
Sunday I went shopping and bought foods I had only ever seen in other people's photos: quinoa, kale, Greek yogurt so thick you could tile a bathroom with it, and a bag of almonds that cost more than my first phone. I bought a food scale. I bought a water bottle with motivational timestamps down the side, the kind that says KEEP GOING at the 2 p.m. mark, as if hydration were a war.
Sunday night I meal prepped. Five glass containers in a row, each holding a small, sad, honest lunch. I photographed them from above like everyone does. I sent the photo to my sister with the caption, new era. She replied with one word: okay.
My sister has known me for thirty-one years... That okay contained all of them.
Monday, 6:00 a.m., I rose like a monk. I drank warm lemon water, which tastes like punishment with vitamin C. I did nineteen minutes of a twenty minute workout video, which I logged as twenty.
Breakfast was oats with chia seeds, and I ate it slowly, mindfully, the way the app told me to, tasting every spoon. What it tasted of, mostly, was wallpaper paste and virtue. I finished it feeling clean, superior, and quietly hostile toward everyone I knew.
By 9:00 a.m. at my desk I was a changed man. I mentioned the diet to two colleagues before they asked. This is stage one of every diet I have ever attempted: the missionary phase. I explained macros to a man who runs marathons. He listened with the patience of someone who knew exactly how this week would end for me and had decided to let nature take its course.
At 10:30, the mid-morning snack: eleven almonds. Not twelve. The app was specific, and I was devout. I ate them one at a time, like a squirrel doing penance, and told myself they were satisfying. Here is a fact about almonds: they are food in the way a handshake is a hug.
At 11:45, my stomach filed its first formal complaint. I drank water... KEEP GOING, said the bottle. I kept going.
And then, at 12:50, my phone buzzed. It was Ayesha.
Ayesha is my oldest friend, oldest in the sense that we met when we were seven and she pushed me off a swing and then felt so guilty she gave me half her lunch every day for a month, which in retrospect set the template for our entire friendship: minor injury, followed by food. She had moved abroad three years ago. Her text said: SURPRISE. In your city for 24 hours. That café near your office, the one with the unstable tables. 1pm. Do not argue.
I would like to tell you I hesitated.
I arrived at 1:09. She was already there, at our old corner table, the wobbly one we always chose out of loyalty, and she had already ordered: two coffees, and between them, in the center of the table like a lit candle, one plate of the almond croissants we used to split when we were broke and twenty-two and could only afford one.
I sat down and looked at the croissant, and the croissant looked at me, and Ayesha looked at both of us and said, what.
I said, I started a diet today.
She checked her watch and said, it is 1:15. It had a good run.
The diet did not fail. It lost, fairly and honorably, to a life that tasted better.
We stayed at that table for three hours. We split the croissant the old way, unevenly, her tearing it and me pretending not to measure which half was bigger. We ordered a second round of coffee, then a sandwich we did not need, then dessert we needed even less. She told me about her divorce, which I had known about only in headlines, and now got in full, with jokes carved into the sad parts the way she has always done it.
I told her about my job and the promotion I did not get. Somewhere in hour two she laughed so hard at the almond squirrel penance thing that she cried, actually cried, and had to turn to the window, and a stranger asked if she was okay.
Walking home that evening, full of everything, I tried to summon the guilt... I sat there waiting for it like a man waiting for a bus that never comes. Instead what arrived, uninvited, was a memory of my grandmother, who fed people as a first language and considered a refused second helping a diplomatic incident. She lived to ninety-one on ghee and gossip. I ended up writing about her that winter, a whole string of poems that started out being about food and turned out to be about childhood, which I have since learned is where every poem about food is actually set.
Here is what I have worked out, after this diet and its four or five identical brothers over the years. My diets do not fail at breakfast, when discipline is cheap. They fail at the exact moment life shows up in person and offers me something warm. And I have stopped entirely regretting that. I read an essay once, on a writing site I like, about why safe poems lose, how the poem that risks nothing wins nothing, and I sat there thinking: this is also true of lunch. The eleven almonds were a safe poem. The croissant with Ayesha, split unevenly on a wobbly table, was the real one.
She flew out the next morning. At the airport she hugged me too hard, the way you do when the next one is a year away, and said, keep the diet, just schedule it around joy. I wrote that down on my phone at the gate. Some people get their philosophy from books. I get mine from a woman who once pushed me off a swing.
The glass containers lasted the week, if you are wondering. Tuesday's went to a colleague. Wednesday's and Thursday's I ate, virtuously, at my desk, tasting nothing. Friday's quinoa is possibly still in the office fridge... evolving. The water bottle survives; I use it, though I have covered the 2 p.m. KEEP GOING with a sticker.
And the food scale sits in my cupboard to this day, pristine, unused, next to the good plates we save for guests. Every few months I see it and feel the brief itch of a new era. Then I remember the corner table, the two coffee cups, the torn croissant between them, and I close the cupboard gently.
Monday, though... Monday I am definitely starting again.
Ayesha lands on Tuesday.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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