Go-to-Gay: Hot and Cold

We're glad to have Go-to-Gay Keith Stewart back today to talk about food. He has an interesting relationship with the topic at hand, so we'll leave it in his hands for now. Prepare to laugh. A lot!

Food + Keith = It's Complicated.

Food. How much do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Okay, don’t worry, I am not actually going to count. There is a word limit on these posts, and if I put my love of food into words, it would be long. Like the Great Wall long (China’s, that is).

My relationship with food is so topsy-turvy we are marked as “It’s Complicated” on Facebook. We love each other, but it can be a little one-sided. I feel like I love food much more than it loves me. Sure, when we were younger, it was great. We enjoyed each other’s company all the time. I could sit with food at any hour of the day or night and indulge with no consequences.

As the years passed, however, things changed. Food began to cause unwanted effects to my body. Maybe it was marking its territory, maybe it was just being passive-aggressive and leaving reminders of itself for me to find when it wasn’t around. I don’t know, I will leave that to the therapists to answer. All I know, is suddenly, my desire for food was still there, but my body couldn’t take it 24/7 anymore. There were nights I lay awake burning with acid reflux, there were lots of extra pounds of me rolling around seemingly every where, there were even inflamed joints that barked and screamed if I tried to move them.

Looking back, perhaps I could have been a better partner to food. I never really put enough time in on learning the background and basics of what makes up food. I took it for granted that it would always be prepared and ready to go for me. When I did try to learn how to prepare items for myself, it often did not go well for either of us.

There was the time I thought wax paper and parchment paper were the same thing. A can of biscuits, a 400-degree oven, and a visit from the fire department later, I discovered you can’t bake with wax paper.

I even failed at the simplest things when food was concerned. A simple Pinterest recipe for dehydrated strawberries landed me on a Pinterest Fails website as a featured failure.

How they should look

How they ended up looking

My latest unsuccessful attempt at re-connecting with food was a simple experiment in baked potatoes. Don’t ask how, but this is how that turned out:

As you can see, food and I have an intense, passion-filled, sometimes toxic relationship. I still love it more than anything else in the world, but sometimes we just don’t understand each other at all.

Keith Stewart is the author of Bernadette Peters Hates Me – True Tales of a Delusional Man. A native of Appalachia, he splits his time between his hometown of Hyden and nearby Lexington, Kentucky. His blog is www.astrongmanscupoftea.com. You can find him on Twitter at @Shiglyogly and Facebook at @AMSCOT (A Strong Man’s Cup of Tea). He is a regular contributor to HumorOutcasts.com and the GoodMenProject.com. He lives with his husband, Andy, and their two dogs, Duke and Dudley.