Gluttonshame

During the Great Life Purge, flashbacks of gluttony didn’t just sneak up on me—they stormed in like uninvited relatives, loud and unrelenting. Just today, I winced remembering a scene from six months prior, when my wife and I, wrapped in the post-dinner glow of calories and denial, settled in for a couple Arrested Development reruns. The show—a chaotic valentine to familial dysfunction—still felt razor-sharp, sharp enough to leave paper cuts on your frontal lobe.

As the theme song played, I rose from the couch with the sanctimony of a monk on pilgrimage. I was off to retrieve my so-called “satiety apple,” that smug little orb of virtue allegedly designed to curb cravings without detonating my calorie budget.

But then I heard it—a low, seductive hum from the direction of the microwave. There it was: a lone pie box, faintly glowing like radioactive treasure, humming a siren song of buttery crust and spiced filling. I opened the box. Inside, the final slice of Thanksgiving pie waited like a femme fatale in a noir film—dangerous, irresistible, and destined to ruin me.

I didn’t stand a chance. One second I was a man of discipline; the next, I was hunched over the sink, inhaling that pie like a raccoon who’d broken into a bakery. Crumbs flew. Filling oozed. I was mid-bite, feral and euphoric, when my daughter Alison entered the kitchen.

She paused, surveyed the carnage, and with surgical precision asked, “When’s the last time you were on a diet?”

I froze, mid-chew, cheeks ballooned like a chipmunk caught mid-heist. “It’s one slice of pie,” I sputtered, wiping whipped cream off my face. “Hardly a relapse worthy of a family intervention.”

“Don’t be so defensive,” she replied, with the kind of tonal flatline only teenage girls can weaponize. “I’m just asking—when was the last time you had a strategy?”

“I didn’t realize you were moonlighting as the historian of my weight management failures,” I muttered, scrambling for dignity.

“What strategy?” she deadpanned, her eyes sliding toward the now-empty pie tin in the sink like a prosecutor resting her case.

I opened my mouth in exaggerated mock offense, miming emotional devastation. We laughed, sort of. But her words hit like a sucker punch wrapped in fondant. Despite my kettlebell crusades and protein piety, my daughter saw me for what I was—a man-child undone by pastry.

The truth hurt because it wasn’t just about pie. It was about a lifetime of performing duets with food, not as nourishment, but as codependence. My relationship with eating wasn’t a partnership; it was a soap opera—a never-ending saga of longing, betrayal, and deeply inappropriate snacking.

I suffered from food noise—a chronic condition in which the brain becomes a 24-hour food court blaring meal ideas through a megaphone. It wasn’t a craving. It was a full-time broadcast. Even as I wiped pie filling off my shirt, some inner gremlin was planning breakfast, brunch, and an emotionally necessary mid-morning protein bar.

I had, of course, tried everything. High-protein meals? Check. Fiber-packed produce? Ate it until I squeaked. “Permission to eat favorite foods”? Please. That just gave me moral cover for more cheesecake. As for “hunger cues”—those had long since been drowned in a Wagnerian opera of appetite, where every aria ended in a trip to the fridge.

I didn’t eat because I was hungry. I ate because I was enchanted. Food was my symphony, and I was its slobbering conductor. While others savored notes of flavor, I devoured entire movements. Pie wasn’t dessert—it was the crescendo. A bag of chips? That was a tragic aria. My kitchen was a concert hall, and I, a helpless Snack Serenader, crooning sonnets to chicken shawarma and tearfully composing odes to sourdough.

Romantic? Maybe. But make no mistake: this was less about joy than it was about entrapment. I didn’t eat food—I worshipped it. I wasn’t hungry for sustenance—I was desperate for an encore.

And that’s when the memory landed with full force: the gluttonshame. A post-binge echo of mortification so potent it deserved its own DSM entry. Gluttonshame—the echoing pang of regret triggered by the memory of a food orgy, often witnessed, preferably by someone genetically programmed to judge you—is no passing embarrassment. It sticks, greasy and persistent, like pie filling on a dress shirt. It whispers, “This is why your jeans stage a mutiny every morning.”

Symptoms? Defensive sarcasm. Performative chuckles. Sudden existential dread. And an uncontrollable urge to delete your food log and relocate to another time zone.

I felt it all. But if the Great Life Purge taught me anything, it’s that these flashbacks are necessary. They remind me that change doesn’t happen without confession—and a little mockery. Because behind every gluttonshame echo is a man trying, however clumsily, to crawl his way back to self-control—one apple, one salad, one deeply judged slice of pie at a time.