Is Z normal?

Tim cooked dinner again tonight, chicken risotto.  And very delicious it was, as ever.  He’s off down to Reading tomorrow for a couple of days – I haven’t really got time to go with him this time, I must get the auction catalogue finished.  I don’t know why it is that there always seems so much to do – we keep saying we’ll have a holiday but it never seems to be the right time to book it.  Yet I am less busy than I used to be.  This week, for instance, the only thing in the diary is the burglar alarm service on Thursday, but I have a long list of things to do.

Not that it matters, it’s good to be busy or else my natural propensity for total indolence would have no check at all.

But … I’ve been saying for years that I’m lazy and I have to have a lot of obligations and deadlines, or nothing would get done at all – but I wonder now if that’s true at all.  I still believe it is, but I also suspect that I might possibly be wrong.  My mother was so very industrious that I think I might have been comparing myself with her, in her younger days, all along.  I don’t think I can have a true perspective on “normal.”

Some years ago, a young friend of mine became painfully thin.  She had became vegetarian, then vegan, which was actually a form of anorexia in her case (I am making no statement in that regard about vegetarianism or veganism: it became, in this respect, her way of avoiding food because she had an eating disorder) and it came to a crisis when she was abroad on business and felt unable to eat at all until she collapsed.  She was brought home and received specialist care in hospital and, as she started to recover, it became apparent that she didn’t know what normal eating was.  She thought she was eating normally.  So – she is a very sensible and rational scientist who wanted to recover – she asked friends to keep food diaries and send them to her weekly, so that she could compare her normal food intake to that of others.  This worked, I’m happy to say, she realised that she simply wasn’t eating enough and made valiant efforts to eat a healthy quantity, and made a complete recovery.

But that’s what I mean.  How do we know what normal is?

Oh and, by the way, writing down every single thing you eat and then sending it to someone else is a very good way of eating less.  It gets a bit embarrassing otherwise.

 

3 comments on “Is Z normal?

  1. Glenda

    That’s interesting about your friend. comparing ourselves to normal and abnormal is probably the basis of a lot of our anxiety.
    Glad your London trip went well. In my imagination, I would think driving in London would be horrific.
    Glenda

    Reply
  2. Alan

    I always thought of normal as a range, and then there are outliers. I did the writing everything down I ate for a month once, an eye opener.

    Reply
  3. Z Post author

    Oh yes, we all think others are “more normal” or better or something, don’t we! And indeed, there’s a wide range. When I wanted to lose some weight because of my bad hip, I did find a food diary for a few weeks was useful, if only as a challenge. But doing it for my friend, telling someone thin about the chocolate biscuit you’ve eaten feels very greedy.

    I don’t often drive into London, but at least it was on a Sunday and the traffic wasn’t too bad. Very glad of the satnav though, I once got very lost driving to Islington on a wet November night.

    Reply

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