I've always loved sweets. As I young girl, I remember eating pie for breakfast. I was often able to get away with this as my mother worked nights. When staying with my grandparents down south, my favorite breakfast was pancakes with white Karo syrup or toast with butter and sorghum syrup. I don't want to make this sound like all my meals were bad because being from the south we had lots of fresh vegetable meals and we only occasionally had meat. This is just to show that from an early age if I had my choice I would go for the sweets.
My food choices didn't get much better as I got older, either. Being on a strict budget limited my food choices. I occasionally found healthy recipes to prepare but with working full-time I often went for the quick and easy. Spaghetti and hotdogs and beans were staples at our dinner table. I never thought about food being good or bad. I guess my thinking was that if it was sold at the grocery store, it must be good for you. I was really in for a wake-up call!
My girls were grown, I was middle-aged, and I was ready for a career change. I was feeling the stress of working in a hospital as a respiratory therapist giving hands-on healthcare, so I decided to go back to school full-time. My choice of geography would eventually lead me to my current work as an epidemiologist.
Working in a hospital I seldom sat down and when I did I would often get a stat call. Now I was sitting down all the time—in class, in front of a computer, and occasionally late at night in front of the TV. I was at school 10-12 hours a day—usually 6 or 7 days a week. My meals needed to be quick and cheap. So I stopped on the way to school and got a bagel, no cream cheese, and finished my breakfast off with a “poor man's mocha”--coffee with a package of instant hot chocolate and lots of cream. The closest on-campus eatery offered a variety of quick foods. Most of them were a bit pricey but they did offer pizza or breadsticks, which were reasonably priced. The breadsticks were the cheapest and you would get sauce and cheese with them. The pizza had the thick chewy crust and you could get it with pepperoni or a supreme with a few veggies. As I recall the pizza cost about a dollar less than what I now recognize was a reasonably healthy sandwich and the breadsticks were about half the price of the sandwich. Occasionally, I would walk across campus and get a burrito from the Mexican fast food place. Since I often stayed late in the computer lab, I would have some chips and a soda to keep me going until I got home. As I recall, my grown daughters were living with me part of the time that I was in school, so at least then I would sometimes get a nutritious home-cooked meal for dinner.
I lived this way for about 6 years while I got my BA and MS. My lifestyle was setting me up for some serious health issues. I didn't know this at the time but my pancreas was being overworked, my cells were getting weary, and my arteries were starting to thicken. I would soon be getting my “wake-up call.”
'Til next time...
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