Celebrations

Think back to your last family celebration.


Was it a birthday? A holiday? Celebrating a new job? A new baby?


Whatever it was celebrating, I bet it centered around food. Much time was spent planning out every detail of a meal, or of a dessert, or of the drink menu for that celebration. Am I right?


I'm taking a gamble that you answered yes to that question. It seems that every time we humans celebrate something , it involves a meal or a sharing of food in some manner. Look across cultures and religious traditions and you'll see the same phenomenon. (Trust me on this one, I have a useless, expensive degree in anthropology from a Big Ten University).

We use FOOD to celebrate. We celebrate holidays with elaborate dinner menus. We celebrate new jobs with drinks and toasts (for once, I'm not talking about the bread here!). We celebrate new babies and weddings with cakes. Birthdays mean a special dinner for the person of honour, and usually a big cake or dessert.

Everything revolves around food. It's no wonder that on a daily basis, we find ourselves celebrating little victories with "special" choices in our daily diets.

It's no different in my family. Today is my middle son's fourth birthday. As we do with every other birthday (well, maybe not the baby for a little while longer...), we let the birthday boy pick out his dinner for that night. Usually this means that we go out to eat. Tonight is no different: the new four-year-old wants to go to the "BBQ" restaurant for dinner. (translation: Famous Dave's)

I'm a little apprehensive about this, to be totally honest. This will be my first attempt out in "real" life with the new diet plan. It's been *relatively* easy to follow my diet rules at home. I can prepare my own foods, shop for healthy pantry items, and measure out my portions with my cute little blue measuring cups. I can't do any of that at a restaurant. A restaurant means a huge, heaping portion of things that I can't eat right now (hot rolls - yum - french fries - double yum - beer - sigh), and probably won't eat for a long time. Those items are some of the hardest to control myself around - well, except for the beer - and therefore, ones that I'm going to avoid until I'm sure of my resolve on this diet. Who knows when that will be!

Luckily, the BBQ restaurant has online nutritional information, so I'm researching it right now. I'll narrow the online menu down to a few items, and let myself choose from those once I get there. In the past, multiple times, I've chosen my item in advance off of an online menu, and then realized once I got to the restaurant, that item wasn't available at my particular location. I'm hoping that going in with a list of 3 or 4 things will help if the same thing happens again.

Then comes the biggest hurdle for me: being one of "those" customers. I need to find the nerve, deep down somewhere, to make requests when ordering my food. The french fries need to be substituted. Sauces need to come on the side. I need to make the meal as user-friendly as possible for my diet. This will go against every fiber of my being - I hate being so demanding of a waitress/waiter. It takes all of my resolve to ask for something to be omitted usually - laying down even more specifications will take absolute courage. Don't laugh! (I can hear you stifling the chuckles). I'm a rule-follower, not a rule-breaker. It's just my nature, and it shows up in the weirdest of places. A restaurant just happens to unfortunately be one of those places.

I not sure how we're going to handle the dessert issue. I'm leaning towards letting the birthday boy pick it and we all "share" it, and just not take any bites. That's going to take a lot of willpower, which I'm hoping I can find somewhere inside.

I have had great success this past week - and I'm determined to not let a birthday celebration get the best of me!! Wish me luck!