Junk food in the trunk, dude

Some days are just so awful they can only be fixed with bacon.

On these regrettable days, these bacon-as-comfort-food days, it feels as though a lot of hard work is being erased. I try to stick to a decent diet, I really do, and when I can string together a few days of dietary discipline I start feeling pretty damn good about myself -- my energy is higher, or so I imagine, and I stop checking the underside of my jaw for signs of double-chinnage. These are the days I feel invincible, like I could strap on my cleats, dash 40 yards and catch a perfect Tom Brady spiral in stride. With my butterfingers I’d probably catch it right in the teeth, but still.

When disaster strikes it all comes crashing down. The willpower, the fortitude, gone, poof, scattered confetti-like into the wind. Suddenly the bananas and pistachios in my kitchen look less appealing, the oranges and sunflower seeds downright repellant. Dreams of double-decker beef patties buzz about my head like fruit flies. And sure enough, when I allow myself to get a little naughty, I really do feel better -- for about a minute. Then I start checking for extra chins again.

They call this “comfort food.” More like “diabolical food.”

It’s amazing how food and stress are so intimately linked. You adopt a healthy diet -- trading in cookies for apples, ice cream for fruit smoothies -- and you actually can feel your stress evaporating with time, perhaps because your body doesn’t have to chug along with its veins clogged by meat grease and lard. But encounter some form of intense external stress, like a looming deadline or some dour family news, and the food that makes you feel better isn’t the kale and carrots and lean chicken to which you’ve grown accustomed. No, it takes a ball of fried pork topped with whipped cream and M&Ms to hit the ol’ reset button.

Years ago I came face-to-face with the psychologically soothing powers of food-like sludge. I had recently dropped a significant amount of weight, enough to fill several of the sandbags they use to keep rivers at bay during flood season, and was feeling pretty good about myself. Then a tragedy struck my tightly-knit group of friends, the kind that blots out everything else for a while. The switch in my diet was immediate, from fat-free this and low-calorie that to whole Toblerone bars and giant pizzas with cheese stuffed in the crust. It seemed like my only recourse. And it sort of worked, at least for a little while, until my pants once again started cutting off blood flow to my lower extremities. That was when I knew it was time to switch back to carrots.

Everyone links food to stress in their own unique way; some people get frazzled and stop eating altogether. My friend “Bertha” is like this. You can tell how smoothly her life is going at any given moment by how frequently she wears cut-off shirts that bare her midriff. A wafish sliver of a person, Bertha doesn’t have much wiggle room weight loss-wise. She could spend a month consuming nothing but peanut butter cups and Cheez Whiz and still shimmy through a set of prison bars. That’s why I root for her life to go well: When it doesn’t, I worry that she’ll evaporate like morning dew.

Others, like me, find solace at the bottom of a Skittles box. And like a stereotype of a pregnant woman, I’m attracted to bizarre food combinations. I once scooped myself a towering pile of frozen Cool Whip (justifying it by telling myself, “Hey, at least it’s not ice cream!”), and decided it would be far too bland without a little something extra. Lucky for me -- and unlucky for my love handles -- I had a bag of gummy bears handy. Whipped cream and gummy bears: It seems astounding to me now, but at one point in my life this constituted a legitimate late-night snack. It couldn’t have been more unhealthy if I’d topped it off with cigarettes and Elmer’s glue.

Nothing good comes from stress eating. Sure, you experience a momentary distraction from your woes, but once the moment passes you’re left with your original troubles plus a stomach ache from all those peanut butter-covered pretzels. The trick is to rid your home of junk food. This is a good practice generally as it encourages healthful eating, but for the stress eater it has the added benefit of ensuring you don’t bury your hardships under a mound of sugar. It’s one thing to fret over your workload, quite another to fret while your gastrointestinal system tries to process that eighth cream-filled doughnut.

My mother always taught me never to waste food, so on some level it feels wrong to grab fistfuls of cereal bars and cans of whipped cream and just toss them out the window. But it’s a necessary step toward eliminating gut-busting snack options. The only edibles in my home that currently quality as snack food are fruits, whole grain cereal and air-popped popcorn, none of which have been known to spur obesity unless they’re doused in a half-cup of melted butter. While butter would up the pleasure factor considerably -- butter makes everything better -- that’s been ousted, too. Its replacement? Butter-flavored cooking spray, which is a nice, zero-calorie stand-in that prevents me from curling into a fetal position and weeping out of guilt and shame. Now I only reach those epic lows after breaking down and reading celebrity gossip on TMZ.

Despite all that, some days simply call for bacon. This is what take-out restaurants and sandwich joints are for. Paradoxically, keeping a junk-free home makes junk all the more pleasurable -- like a diamond, the rarity of a greasy hunk of meat makes it shine all the more.