The Daily Binge

There's a whole other world out there...

Sorry I’ve been MIA. Let’s talk about TV for a moment.

-I’ve been enjoying the heck out of “So You Think You Can Dance.” The dwindling number of girls is unacceptable, because that greatly reduces my likelihood of seeing Pasha each week. And Neil! And WHERE is Dominic?

-As much as I like Mark & Courtney’s “The Garden” dance, I’m sick of seeing them do commemorative re-dances of it when the original performance will always be my favorite. They were dancing FOR THEIR LIVES, and you could see how it translated into the piece. If the producers want to remind us how great it was, they should just show the original footage.

-How cool was Levi Johnston on “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List” last week? He and his friends were surprisingly good sports about the whole thing.

-I’m a little bit weirded out by “True Blood” right now. Episode 3 got a little too freaky for me. Though the cute wolf pics on the wall of the Were-Bar were LOL.

-What else am I forgetting? Oh, “Top Chef?” I don’t know, I miss the Masters.

-One of my new bosses is le obsessed with “Big Brother,” so I might have to jump on that bandwagon. He makes it sound really fun. Did you know that they have to compete for food? And if they don’t win it, they might just eat tasteless gruel for 40 days?

Tasteless gruel? I smell a segue…

So today I had oatmeal for lunch. The Twilight Zone twist? I was craving it. I was like, this is going to be delicious. I guess absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Absence? Wha?

For the past… about 10 days, I guess, I was eating a wheat/gluten free diet.

It all started during that whole crazy breakfast burrito/quesadilla/almost barfing day. I came home and told my roommate about it, and she very responsibly forced me to throw out my potentially poisonous chicken and use some of hers. I mentioned that I go through phases where tortillas and bread smell weird to me, and she said… “Maybe you have an allergy.”

Simultaneously I was hearing that maybe oats and grains are bad for us, because (much like lactose) our bodies weren’t created to handle the huge amounts that we consume in the Western world.

So I decided to drop wheat and gluten from my diet, and see what happened.

Let me add– I generally can’t even make it through Passover without cheating and eating some bread. I’m a little bit obsessed.

But… I did it. I dropped wheat and gluten from my diet. I ate a lot of fruits and veggies. I discovered brown rice pasta. I realized that Greek yogurt isn’t so bad, if you load it with strawberries and blueberries. I checked labels. I wrote down everything I ate. I brought all my own food to work. I made eggs for breakfast. I cooked turkey patties on the stove and ate them with my rice pasta, or without a bun.

I was so hardcore, I even went out for drinks with a gluten-free guy. (Okay, that was a total coincidence. But it was very appropriate!)

I found out that Mike ‘N Ikes are gluten free. And– THANK GOD– so is Heinz ketchup. M&Ms are gluten free in the US, but not in the UK. And I was already in the habit of getting protein style (no bun) at In ‘N Out.

I had to turn down cake a few times, and my favorite frozen yogurt in my hometown (but Pinkberry is safe, as are several varieties of Edy’s/Dreyer’s).

In short, it wasn’t so bad. Every once in a while I was hit with a pang of– if I really turn out to be allergic, I might never eat x again. But… I wasn’t too devastated. It’s just food. And a lot of times the things we crave taste better in theory than in practice. (Someday soon I will write about my red velvet-related identity crisis.)

The hard part is eating at restaurants, or going to get-togethers. I became that weird person who wanted to make substitutions, or brought my own food.

I was planning on going to a doctor to get tested (I probably still will… eventually), but in short I realized that I wasn’t feeling THAT much of a difference. Turns out that a lot of people in the office were feeling blah because of the air quality.

So… I dug my box of Tofuttis out of the bottom of the freezer, and dusted off my oatmeal and my Fiber One bars.

I DID surprise myself this morning when our script coord brought in Noah’s bagels (good ones) and lox (LOX!), and I thought, nah. Not today. Not to be a big Jewish stereotype, but generally a good bagel with lox and cream cheese (and even the beef steak tomatoes!) is my Kryptonite.

So the wheat/gluten free week was perhaps a major folly, but it was a grand experiment, and I think I will keep up a lot of the habits I began this week. And I will try to limit my intake of the bready stuff, just in case. (I have this crazy theory that if I eat minimal bread and do sit-ups every day, I will someday own a somewhat respectable set of abs.)

xoxo…

My roommate's silo of oatmeal. Not what I ate for lunch, but similar.

Now that you know what I had for SNACK today, I bet you’re dying to know what I had for LUNCH. (Just kidding.) (But I’m going to tell you anyway.)

I ate oatmeal. A whole serving of it. With raisins, from an actual bag of raisins. Not looted from a cereal box.

Also– when I was in Palm Springs a few weekends ago (yes, I am a jetsetter), I had some of the hotel’s complimentary breakfast oatmeal. It wasn’t bad, with brown sugar and raisins stirred in. But every time I spooned it up, there was this weird stringy spiderweb/spit thing happening between the spoon and the bowl. Very unsettling. So I didn’t finish.

I ate oatmeal for lunch today because it was a topsy-turvy, weird, what-the-fuck kind of day. Allow me to elaborate. (Or stop reading, if you don’t want to allow me to elaborate.)

My lunch really starts with yesterday’s lunch. Our benevolent boss-man likes to treat us to lunch every now and then, and he ordered up some Chipotle so we could Taco Tuesday it up. And it ended up being SO. MUCH. CHIPOTLE. Like, we had so many little cardboard bowls of steak and guac and that corn salsa stuff that I think we technically became a franchise for the day.

So we gave the leftovers to the poor. AKA the assistants. AKA… I took some home. But I couldn’t eat it last night, because I had already ingested so much chips and guac that I nearly required hospitalization. I ate a Jello pudding for dinner and fell into some sort of coma on my couch.

This morning I went to yoga at 6am. On my way back to my apartment, I was struck with a stroke of… well, not brilliance. I was struck with a thought. I could buy some eggs, tortillas, and Mexican cheese, and use the leftover steak and pico de gallo to make a pretty kickass breakfast burrito.

So I went to the store. Turns out that if you go to the grocery at 7:15am, they’re restocking the shelves. So I see an employee near a tortilla shelf with a pretty paltry selection (just wrap-style ones), and I say, “Do you have any other tortillas?”

Boy, did they.

He led me to an actual wall of tortillas. They come in so many sizes: medium taco, small fajita, burrito. And you’ve got your whole wheat, carb balance, flour. I picked up a few packages to get a closer look, and started some sort of tortilla avalanche, because suddenly tortilla packages were falling at me from all angles. So I grabbed a bag that I swear said “Pro-Life” on it (medium taco, flour… and maybe “Pro-Choice,” now that I think about it), and ran for it.

So I got home and in some sort of backwards out-of-order frenzy cooked up the breakfast burrito, which didn’t taste bad. Then I took a shower, and sprawled on my bed. Usually I give myself a few minutes to chill before I launch into getting ready.

My last thought before I zonked out was, “That food was sitting out in the office kitchen for a long time yesterday. I hope I don’t have food poisoning.”

An hour later, I sat up with a start. I looked at my clock. 10:05am. I’m supposed to be at work at 10am. Luckily I knew what I wanted to wear and live five minutes from work, so I blew off my blowdryer and booked it.

As I exited my apartment, I dropped my keys on the floor. I leaned down to pick them up and– out of NOWHERE– I swallow down a wave of near-barf. Luckily in some psychic stroke of genius I’d also purchased gum at the store, so I popped a piece in when I got to my car. But I was like, What the FUCK is going on? Do I have food poisoning?

So I decided to eat something mild for lunch. Oatmeal. I ate it. It wasn’t so bad. It was a nice detox… but I’m still on barf-alert, because I don’t really like oatmeal.

When you feel like eating a mild lunch… you know, like maybe while you’re recovering from surgery, or because your tastebuds have been scalded… look no further than oatmeal. That’s my ringing endorsement.

And–apparently– it’s healthy.

In the end, I didn’t even have to tell my story or make any excuses (not that I would have, because I hate excuses… and barf), because I got to work before my bosses.

I don’t think I have food poisoning, but I’m not sure WHAT happened. I often get light-headed when I change altitudes, and I got light-headed for a moment in yoga today… and the stress of oversleeping might have made me sick. Maybe just having a bigger breakfast than usual made me sick. Maybe the eggs were bad.

Bottom line– I think that as a precaution, a sane person might throw out the leftovers.

But I am not sane. I’m kind of stupid.  I’m probably going to make quesadillas for dinner with the leftover chicken. Because obviously I never learn. I mean, I have all the ingredients now. I have pro-life tortillas! (Actually, I hope they’re pro-choice.)

So the barf-alert will continue into the night. Especially if there’s any guacamole lying around. When that shit goes bad, it takes no prisoners.

Usually I don’t get this personal. But I figured I’d change it up. Tell you the real gritty deal. Spill my guts. (Or not.)

And hey, I ended up liveblogging the “True Blood” premiere. Maybe I’ll transcribe that here later, with a few thoughts of the non-140-character variety.

Now it’s time to legit try to settle my stomach… with a Tootsie Roll pop.

xoxo…