Eating

When my then-16-year-old daughter announced that she was going vegetarian, I wasn’t concerned, as we all liked veggies. And it would be a healthy diet. However, I soon realized there might be an issue—a fairly big one.

For months after we first started working with her, she’d show up not exactly hungry, but not exactly nourished either.

An hour’s worth of rehabilitation exercise on top of just a slice of toast and a cup of coffee, consumed as she hurried to get here on time, wasn’t working for her. She had diabetes, so inevitably hypoglycemia hit her midway through each session. Shaking, sweating, she’d rush to drink some juice to tide her over.

I subsist on dark chocolate M&Ms. They go well with my morning banana and hard-boiled egg, with my low calorie yogurt lunch, and as a snack after my dinner of soup or Slimfast. I recognize that my eating habits are questionable if not terrible, but ever since my dad died on November 1, 2014, I have stopped preparing nutritious meals that he and I shared. I take the road of least resistance: opening a bag of candy and dumping the rainbow-colored treat into a plastic container.