eating machine

How is it possible that someone can eat so much and still be thin? 

Alexander is barely done with one meal when he is on to the next.  His constant complaint is that we have no food in the house.  But I do, I want to scream.  I have fruit.  Cheese.  Bread.  Milk.  Yogurt.  Tuna Fish.  Eggs.  Salad Stuff. Soup.  Lamb Chops.  Chicken.  Shrimp.  Crackers.  Pasta.  Rice.  Dried Apricots.  I mean really.  “I liked it better when you didn’t care what you ate,” he tells me. 

He has breakfast around 11, lunch around 1, snacks around 3, dinner around 8, and then maybe something else around midnight.  Where a big box of vegetable chips from Agata could last me two weeks, now it’s gone in two days.  It’s as if my growing boy is inhaling food.

Yesterday, for example. I make Alexander three hard-boiled eggs for breakfast with toasted walnut-raisin bread.  My son wants carbs for lunch, and ignores the tuna salad he has asked me to make.  He buys a box of pasta that indicates it provides 8 servings.  He makes half the box.  Dinner is grilled shrimp. In between lunch and dinner and midnight snack, my son eats buttered bread because he’s hungry, and I don’t have anything else good to eat.  Around 11:45 pm, I hear dishes rattling around in the kitchen.  He is making a salad.  I wake up and only one store-baked cookie remains of the three I recently bought.

Alexander has about 10% body fat and is in incredible shape.  His arms are thinner than mine.  He tells me I eat nothing, which compared to him is true.  Maybe if I worked out like he does I wouldn’t feel guilty having a piece of 7-layer cake for dessert.  Not to mention how nice it would be to have thinner arms than my son.