When food bloggers fast

"Food blogger," huh? I know, it may be a little presumptuous to call myself that, here at the outset of post #3. I'm just getting my sea legs with this thing, learning how to navigate the waters of this new and exciting project. And yet, much has already opened up, I am happy to report.

When I used to think of myself as a writer, back in late high school when I felt like I knew everything, I would walk through my life conceptualizing my experiences as stories to be told. I would meet someone, or learn some bit of history, and imagine the one-act play or the short story that could be spun from it. The landscape of life was strewn with sparkling gems of stories, just waiting for me to tell them.

Throughout college and beyond, my love of writing (and also of photography) faded as I worked to make my way through the intellectual and emotional challenges of young adulthood. I've never stopped writing poetry, and I've never stopped journalling, but writing became less about a creative outlet and more about self-exploration and healing. In the past 6 or 7 years I've filled many a journal with my musings on anguish and redemption.

And there was the creative writing class I took, third quarter of my senior year in college. I remember distinctly feeling like I had been, somehow of my own volition, wandering through a dry desert for the past 3 and 2/3 years, and suddenly I was allowed to slake my thirst. As you can imagine, it felt pretty good to encourage those sluggish creative juices to start flowing again. Incidentally, that was the same quarter I started working on the organic farm at my college, which was similary epiphanic. Mustard flowers! Warm, sun-ripened peaches right from the tree! The miracle of planting, tending, and growing! It was my own little Renaissance.

Well, then I moved to NYC, and stepped onto this legal career path which I've been treading for the past seven or so years. It has certainly had its ups and downs, sometimes a source of misery and sometimes a source of empowerment, excitement, fascination, and (in fact) miracles beyond my wildest imagination, but it certainly hasn't allowed me much downtime. So writing as a sustained discipline, again, took a back seat.

Because of all that, this blog is truly a return -- coming full circle to a point on the cycle I know so well, yet one that is so full of promise and newness.

When I was in high school I had the following Pablo Neruda quotation stuck on the wall above the door to my bedroom:

"You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend . . . I bow to them . . . I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down . . . I love words so much . . . "

I felt that so deeply. Re-reading that quote returns me to the flushed, thunderous passions of my writing-focused teenage years. Writing was my haven, my power place.

Just now, in looking it up on the internet, I found that the rest of the quote reads:

"I love words so much. . . The unexpected ones . . . The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop . . . Vowels I love . . . They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew . . . I run after certain words . . . They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem . . . I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives . . . And I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go . . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves . . . Everything exists in the word . . . "

They are so beautiful I want to fit them all into my poem. That resonates so strongly now. What a blessing.

Anywaaaaaaaaay. So, Miz Food Blogger, what about the food? Very astute question, my dear reader. The funny part is, here I am, three posts into my bloggy foray into the world of food, and today was all about not eating.

Yes, today was a pretty rough day, as I had a blood test at 4:00 p.m. that required 12 hours of fasting prior. Since I wasn't up having a delicious meal at 3:45 a.m., that meant that I woke up hungry and was hungry all day. Grumpy, light-headed, slow. Why such a rigorous blood test, you ask?

Well. This time around on planet Earth, for my special journey of learning, I have been endowed with a constellation of symptoms that together comprise a syndrome, called PCOS -- polycystic ovary syndrome. It's a largely mysterious, insulin-driven condition in which a woman's ovaries are over-active in terms of the amount of male hormones they produce. It's relatively common in the Eastern-European Jewish crowd; we of the knishes and challah and kugel. I'll spare you the gory details, but in essence, PCOS and insulin resistance -- which is the root of diabetes -- go hand in hand. Since diabetes runs in my family, it's especially incumbent upon me to manage my insulin levels. And, as you might have guessed, the best way to do that is through mindful eating.

I have learned a lot about PCOS and insulin resistance over the years, mostly by gleaning bits of information from other people, and a few key books. What's repeated throughout the literature are a few simple eating guidelines: always pair carbs with protein and/ or fiber, and always make sure that the carb to protein ratio is no greater than 2:1. That's because carbs by themselves cause an insulin spike (i.e., the sugar rush), whereas somehow proteins and fibers tend to mellow out the body's reaction to carbs. So, for example, eating a little almond butter with your apple is a good idea; spreading hummus on your crackers is a good idea; some tahini in the oatmeal is a good idea. You get the picture. When insulin is kept in balance, ovaries calm down, and body is happy.

I tell you all of this as background information. These health concerns, and their corrollary eating principles, will surely shape and spark my kitchen witchery as I become more adept at cooking and eating. And so, in turn, they will become one of the glittery strands of story that I will weave throughout this blog, as I chronicle my own personal food odyssey.

Ultimately, it all comes around again to pleasure. Good health just feels so damn good. Eating well feels so good. Eating food that is sumptuous, and that also has a literally healing effect on my body, feels terrific. It feels like I'm spreading my arms wide in the warm, scented night air and lifting my face to the moon, in gratitude for the aliveness in my heart.

And that feeling? That's the one I'm aiming for.