More on my love hate relationship with bread

I’ve never been on a diet in my entire life — until now. Unless you count when I was a junkie, living on dope and gas station food, but that wasn’t quite as intentional.

I’ve been clean for nearly a decade now, and I’ve really packed on the pounds over the years.

Bread is the most exquisite, perfectly textured, spongy…

It’s so fucking good. When I hear that old cliche of prisoners only being fed bread and water, I always laugh. Because I’d be in fucking heaven. Especially if the water was Fiji or Liquid Death. I’m a sucker for premium branded tap water. But I don’t think that’s on commissary.

Anyway:

I fucking love bread. It was hard to quit. Not hard like quitting drugs, but the relationship between food and dopamine is almost as strong. Eating an entire Chicago-style deep dish pizza is as good as anything I’ve ever smoked or inhaled through my nose.

The high only lasts while you’re eating it, but god damn can some good provolone, mozzarella, pepperoni, hearty marinara sauce and bread put you in a whole different headspace. A breadspace, if you will.

I think that’s why a lot of former addicts turn to food when they get clean. It gives you those happy chemicals without scrambling your brains all up. The downside is those carbs and calories don’t sneak up so much as sprint up and tackle you. And you can’t just go cold turkey. Er, I guess you totally can go with just cold turkey. That’s kind of the point of keto, in a literal sense.

But it’s the one vice no one can ever survive quitting. We have to eat or we’ll die, but too much of anything is always bad.

Dieting is more of a struggle than I thought it would be, but not because my stomach is rumbling. I went into this kind of blind, so I was pretty surprised at how cranky I started getting sometimes. Physically, I feel a million times better without all the carbs, but I’m a drama queen now. I feel better mentally, too. But I CRAVE those old comfort foods a lot.

Eating has become a bit of a chore. Instead of every meal being a feast worthy of royalty, it’s just a non-negotiable thing I have to do. It’s like taking a shower, or brushing my teeth.

I do get to eat some pretty good stuff though; that’s the best part about the keto diet. You can still eat plenty of toxic garbage, just less of it. And without some of the sides you used to love.

I’ve already managed to make some good progress with the weight loss, so I’m not complaining by any means. Just a little grumpy. And daydreaming about living in a bread house, and sleeping on a premium memory-bread mattress, with bread pillows I can sneak bites of.