Taco Bell

Let's talk about food aversions. They're not as bad as morning sickness, I will grant them that, but when they're persistent, they can still make a hungry lady's life pretty miserable.

My food aversions are not just me disliking food I used to like. I can look at a plate full of perfectly cooked cheesy scrambled eggs, and all I see are the rotting entrails of several cats, topped in shredded maggot. And eating is not just a matter of closing my eyes and choking it down anyway. If something doesn't sound good, my body will reject it, and I'll throw up within fifteen minutes. I don't know what causes this, but it's really, really annoying.


(ETA: I don't ever feel sick unless I eat something that sounds gross. Or sometimes after I take a vitamin. Or if my stomach has been empty for most of the day. So I'm actually not miserable all the time, just hungry.)

It's much more persistent this time around. This is probably why I've only gained a total of five or six pounds, which is fine by me. If I can manage to eat a good protein-rich breakfast right away in the morning with lots of water and take half my vitamins (vitamins on empty stomach = blaaaaarhhhhftz), the days usually goes pretty well, and the aversions aren't so bad. But that's IF I wake up wanting to eat something other than a celery stick and a Cheerio.

Some days it's only healthy food I can eat, which is nice. I stuff myself silly on lettuce and mangoes and chicken breast and feel good about myself at the end of the day. Other days, it's only lettuce. And then I starve all day, but at least I'm not eating something devoid of nutrition. I feel lousy and tired and heartburny, but I console myself that I've had plenty of vitamins A, B and C that day.

And then we have today and yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that. All I want is bad, bad food--the kind that sits in my stomach for three days, encased in a ball of grease and sodium. We don't generally keep that kind of stuff around the house, mainly because I have NO RESTRAINT in the face of bad snack foods. So I've been wasting away on the couch, every cell in my brain fixated intently on beef soft tacos supreme from Taco Bell. Why Taco Bell? I have no idea. I'm not even sure they use bovine flesh in their tacos. I eat it maybe once every six months (and it's always when a strange craving for the stuff takes over out of nowhere... hmmm).

We don't even have a Taco Bell in this town. Yes, that's right, I live in a town that HAS NO TACO BELL.

James went out last night, and at ten o'clock, after a full day in which I ate a piece of toast with peanut butter, a mango, an orange, and six spoonfuls of plain yogurt, my brain finally lit upon the one thing that would make me happy and complete: the Taco Bell. So I called him and asked him if he could pick some up for me on the way home. When he got home with it a few hours later, I think the intensity of my face-stuffing scared him a little.

I was already in bed when he got there. He came upstairs to see if I was still awake, and he neglected to bring the bag of food with him.

Me: Where are my tacos?
Him: Oh, I was just seeing if you were awake first. You want me to bring it up.
Me: YES. PLEASE. NOW.

(I may not have said please.)

And when he came back upstairs, I sat in bed hunched over my two tacos like a starving vulture on the last piece of roadkill in Arizona, and I shoveled them down in about ten seconds.

Usually that takes care of it. My focus narrows to one single food, which I must have before life can go on, and then once I have it, I'm over it. Actually, I'm usually disgusted by it after that (one of my most annoying food aversions: leftovers. No matter how delicious the meal, anything that's spent time in the fridge post-meal becomes a horror of rotting flesh and congealing vegetable matter).

But not Taco Bell. Oh no. I now want MOAR MOAR MOAR of the stuff. Right now, my vision of a perfect meal is a pyramid of soft tacos stacked up to the ceiling.

So what I'd like to know is, what is in the stupid beef soft taco supreme that is so special? Is it a drug? A special chemical? What does my body want out of such a thing? I really wish I could figure it out because this is going to get expensive.