As you might guess, I have have a subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine. O lives in my…uh…bathroom. I read a little here and a little there and I usually get through one month just in time for the next one to arrive in the mailbox.

I read, but I don’t always retain exactly what I’ve read. I don’t think it has that much to do with the uh….ambiance…as it does the time allotted and the fact that I rarely read one whole article from start to finish in one…um…sitting.

Anyway, some time back, I think I read a quote in O from a food critic (I think) who said she does not eat what she does not love. I think I said, “Hmmmm.” (as apposed to “Aha” which is what you are supposed to say when you read Oprah.) Now just put a pin in this thought for the moment; we’ll come back to it later.

I’ve blogged before about my mother and the “Clean Plate Club” so this pick and choose, don’t-eat-what-you- don’t-love concept is quite foreign to me. I learned a long, long time ago to just chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and, if absolutely necessary, just swallow. I came to understand, to internalize if you will, that taste was of no consequence and the “choice” was not mine to make. There were no alternate dinner menus and Mom’s table. Also, I learned that resistance was futile, that I had no power over the food, either the taste or the quantity. That learned behavior has become the unconscious part of my eating, the part that has nothing to do with the food itself, nothing to do with hunger.

Now, as I mentioned in the sidebar awhile back, I’ve been reading, along with the rest of the known world, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. If you haven’t been reading along with Oprah and I and everyone else, I won’t get all new age on you here but I will say I’ve learned a little something. I learned that I’ve been holding on to my weight, my unhappiness about my weight, and my….victimhood…as the major part of my identity, my ego. It’s time to rethink all of that.

It occurred to me that the whole clean plate thing was probably, okay definitely, also a part of my ego. Suddenly, I remembered the bit a about the woman who didn’t eat what she didn’t love and I thought “aHa!” It occurred to me, in a momentary flash of clarity, that I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want, or don’t like. There is no one here who is going to chastise me, punish me, or otherwise make my life miserable if I leave something on my plate or say, “I don’t like this; I don’t want it.” the clean plate rules no longer apply. How incredibly simple.

So I’ve started an experiment: when I put food in my mouth, I’m deciding on a case by case basis whether or not I like it. If I don’t, I spit it out or just get rid of the rest. I’m allowing myself, in a way my mother never did, to be a picky eater.

I don’t remember to practice this with everything I eat every time I eat. I’m still unconscious much of the time but here is one shining example: I gave back a cannoli last week (a cannoli!*). Sweet Hubby ate it; not me. It was sweet, it was pastry and I might have eaten it and then regretted it later, or turned it down and felt deprived all day. Instead, I tasted a tiny bit, decided it wasn’t a good cannoli and realized I didn’t love it. When I gave it back I didn’t feel deprived at all.

AHA!

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*BTW, the best store-bought cannoli I ever had in my life are from this place: Vaccaro’s Italian Pastries in the “Little Italy” of Baltimore, Md. If you’re ever in B’more, you better go there….or else.