A Girl's Gotta Eat

Recently, I saw the movie The Young Victoria. I loved it, thought it was just about the cutest movie I had ever seen, and decided that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert might just be my favorite people ever. So, because I'm me, I decided that I needed to do some research on the real Albert and Victoria (my research prior to the film consisted of a few text messages to a friend who teaches history, which basically just sets me up to be a total hypocrite when a student asks me if he or she can use a text message as a source in a research paper....oh well). For me, research means getting a book, so I got on Amazon and ordered a book all about my new favorite couple. I started reading and realized pretty quickly that basically all my favorite stuff in the movie was actually a bunch of lies. By pretty quickly, I mean before I had finished reading the prologue. I was a little disappointed.

So there I was thinking that I was going to have to find a new favorite historical figure because my old new favorite historical figure was really just a movie character. Then, I found this fabulous tidbit of information: Queen Victoria apparently loved her food. So much in fact that some guy named Duc de Nemours who had come to meet her in the hopes that they could get married got totally shocked by her eating habits and hit the road.

I guess if time travel were possible, Duc de Nemours should probably look into coming to the here and now. I have heard so many girls discussing the concept of "date food," which I think is a little strange because if you keep dating someone they will eventually find out you eat real food, but at least modern women wouldn't shock Duc de Nemours. And all of this made me think about how for New Year's I did what every girl does--start a diet.

In my case it's more of a restart because I went on a diet for my best friend's wedding, which was just a few weeks before I started teaching, so I also got a bunch of new, cool, "teacher" clothes. I then started teaching, and during my first year, I managed to gain back my pre-best-friend's-wedding-diet weight. I'm not really unhappy with my weight now or how I look--it's just that some of my cool "teacher" clothes don't exactly fit anymore, and that makes me sad. The only real problem with that is that I, like Queen Victoria, like food. I like to make it, eat it, watch other people make it, read recipes, etc. So, I'm now hanging out in a fine place between "I like my food" and "I like my brown pants."

Luckily for me, I am a master at manipulating my diet. I'm allowed to eat a certain amount of points everyday. If I, like I did today, eat a 3 point breakfast, a salad for lunch, and skip over my afternoon snack because I'm in a really long meeting and don't have time to eat it during planning before my students come for last block, I have enough points left to eat a cheeseburger for dinner (and some fries, but I didn't really want to gloat about my diet food). While I know that this isn't really the way my diet is supposed to work, I still find great joy in the fact that it can work this way on days when it has to, and this week has been a really long week.

And then I thought about why every girl feels the need to go on a diet all the time anyway. I hope we're not doing it for boys. I think every girl deserves to look in her mirror every morning and think to herself (or say out loud, which is, I must admit, a real pick-me-up on those days when you just had to give yourself a major talk to even get out of bed) "I am quite beautiful." If we can't think this about ourselves, it will never matter how many people think it for us. So, I've decided that I'm allowed to eat cheeseburgers sometimes. Even if it is in public. Even if there is a boy around to see.

Tonight I sat down and ate my cheeseburger alongside my book about my new favorite historical figure, and I thought, "Who cares if my eating habits shock some guy?" I mean, Queen Victoria's did, and she ended up with her face on a stamp and having an entire era named after her, which in my book, is not so bad.