Bill Bryson is my favorite author. Years ago, when I first began reading his works (even the travel books), my reaction was "his writing interfaces seamlessly with my brain." I would marvel at how the way he put things would be exactly how I would have - I only lacked his talent, insight, wisdom, initiative, experience etc... It was surprising to me to encounter an author who wrote like I thought. I realize I elevate, without merit, my brain to Bryson's writing, but I could hear the words from his pages fit seamlessly into the flow of my thoughts. I don't experience that often. For Christmas 2018, I gave my closest friends his AT HOME - hardcover edition. By the way, I'm reading your suggestion, Jo Marchant's CURE, and she's coming darn close to prompting that same effect. Funny how styles work - or don't.
I have struggled with twenty excess pounds for a decade. I can blame my wife ("Lead me not into temptation - oh, never mind, I found it"). She is a devoted and talented baker. She is a do-er, and is not content to sit. I provide a stark contrast to that. To burn off excess energy, she bakes. She continues her battle with anorexia and uses the production of food to mitigate the obsessive part of the affliction. She has done an admirable job of coping and is, for the most part, very healthy and quite removed from crisis. If she is not allowed to cook, to bake, to manipulate food, her anxiety becomes hard to manage. I am the usual, and often solitary, beneficiary. Her cookies are perfection.
In order to be perfection, her baked goods are laden with butter and sugar. She's tried the replacements, the alternatives, and they were judged insufficient. We have ordered more types of flours, sugars, sugar substitutes than I care to count. I even bought her a flour mill one year. She has her preferences and she sticks with them. I never used to have a sweet tooth, but a few years into our 25-year marriage, I developed one. I consider it more of a fang, now; well developed and more menacing. Three of her cookies at night is my self-imposed limit. And they are goooood. I haven't had a store-bought loaf of bread in decades.
And so, after I'm done with this, I'll take off on my 20.96-mile bicycle ride that I do most every day as I attempt to fool myself this is some kind of proper compensation for the evening's indulgence. After many years of trying to bicycle off the pounds, I realize that it is an insufficient countermeasure to the sugar and flour I continue to consume. Exercise alone will not guarantee weight loss. The flour and sugar must go too, but my dear wife needs something to do. The sacrifices I must make for the betterment of others! Poor, poor me! My wife prepares cooked vegetables as often as she does batches of cookies, but somehow I pose no threat to that bowl.
