bearing blog: My own personal madeleines, or... maybe there is a time and place for excess.

When I was a child, my mother would take us on Saturday mornings to a tiny little pretzel bakery on Xenia Avenue in Dayton, Ohio -- just about every Saturday that we remembered to do it in time to get there before they closed at 1 p.m. If we were especially lucky, we would arrive just as the hot soft pretzels were coming out of the oven, their steamy, bready smell filling the building no larger than a single-wide trailer. "Extra salty ones," Mom would request, and the bakers would pick over the pile cooling in the bin to find the ones that were totally encrusted in crystals of salt. We would get a dozen and a half in a paper bag, an armload for a little girl, the bag almost too hot to touch, and grab a handful of mustard packets from the basket on the counter. We'd sit in the front seat of the car and we'd each eat three or four pretzels, burning our fingers and mouths, before taking the rest home --- to be finished by the end of the day, because the fresh homemade pretzels would be break-your-teeth hard by morning. No preservatives or dough conditioners here.

To this day, no butter-soaked mall pretzel will ever compare to the taste of plain salt and dough, slightly bitter from the mild alkaline bath that seals the surface and helps the salt stick. No SuperMegaJumboBallpark pretzel will ever be as satisfying as those hand-sized, golden-yellow twists. The closest I have come to the right flavor and texture is the top half of a salt bagel from Bruegger's. Nope, Smales Pretzel Bakery near the corner of Xenia and Wayne is the standard by which all pretzels will forever be judged.

So yesterday I was in Dayton, and I took my kids to the pretzel bakery. A baker (the same guy I remember from my childhood, I think) gave the kids lumps of dough and showed them how to twist them into pretzels, while I paid for my pretzels. They were still a little warm. And we sat in the car and wolfed them down. I ate three, right there, with mustard from the little packets. Over the next hour I ate three more. "Grandma Susan used to take me here when I was a little girl," I told the kids. They nodded at me, their mouths full of pretzel. I was pregnant with Milo when my mother passed away; but they know her as Grandma Susan anyway.

What about gluttony and the pretzels?

In the years since I moved away from Dayton, I've been back to the pretzel bakery five or six times. Each time I have eaten several pretzels in the front seat of my car. And each time the memories that the flavor brought back were mixed with guilt at having eaten so much. A guilt I never felt when I was sitting with Mom in her car on Saturday mornings, exclaiming about our good luck at arriving just when the pretzels were coming out of the oven, or digging through the paper bag looking for the very saltiest one (for mom) or the one that was just the slightest bit burned (for me).

Yesterday I ate three pretzels one after another and discovered that the guilt was gone.

Even though I wrote only a few days ago about the dangers of binge-like inhaling-instead-of-eating... I think I have to temper my remarks a little bit. There is a place for "the feast," for celebration of plenty. There is a place for having something that is so good that you want to eat a lot of it, and for eating a lot of it. The thing is, part of my good memories about the bags of hot soft pretzels... inseparable from the experience... was the fact of eating three at once in the front seat of the car, there in the gravel parking lot, next to my mom, and all of us sharing that experience. That is what the memory is made of. I can just hear how Mom would have reacted if my teenage self had said, "No pretzels for me... they're full of calories," or "I'll stay home, because I just know if you buy a whole bag of hot pretzels, I'll eat way too many." I can't imagine ever declining a trip to the pretzel bakery. Sitting in the car and inhaling fresh hot salty pretzels was one of the few loves that Mom and I ever had in common.

Yesterday I ate a half-dozen pretzels because eating a half-dozen pretzels is, well, the tradition I shared with my mom. She's not here anymore and the pretzels still are; I can take my kids there and give them a little bit of what my mother gave me.

I am sure that many diet writers would tell me this is an unhealthy thing to do. That I am trying to recapture a relationship through food, and that the food can never fill the hole that is missing. And that I ought to be satisfied with a reasonable portion: half a pretzel, or just one. But I don't think that's quite correct.

I have no guilt about it anymore because now I know in my bones that I can compensate. I am free from guilt because those six pretzels (that's how many I ate yesterday all together) weren't added on top of my normal or normally excessive eating. Knowing where I was going, I had only a boiled egg and some fruit for breakfast that morning. Those six pretzels (and a vanilla Coke from Frisch's; I'm loading up on nostalgic food while I'm in Ohio) were my lunch. Even as I ate them, I knew I wasn't going to want anything more than a big green salad and some protein for dinner, and indeed that's what I ate. No, it wasn't a really well balanced day, not in terms of nutrients, but... it was not a gluttonous day. It was instead a rare, very rare, treat, tempered by light eating in the hours before and after. So much less dangerous than it used to be, because now I know how to make room for it.

In the end, I believe, we have to give ourselves permission to feed our memories and hearts from time to time. Careful though: It's a good idea to steer clear of this kind of thing while you're still learning how to compensate, because if you haven't developed the necessary skills, it's true, you can derail your confidence. Such an experience can wait a few months until you've really learned how to absorb the impact: Don't try it before you are sure you are ready. And even after you've learned how to compensate, you've got to save such "treats" for the ones that are really important. Because you can't feed your body like this every day. But... there can be room for those rare experiences, not for your physical health, but to bring balance to your well-being. After you've learned how to compensate for excesses, excess can be enjoyed.

But only in careful, careful moderation.

(Posted in the Weight Maintenance category but not Weight Loss... because I really could not safely have had this experience until I was done with the "loss" part.)