I Was Judging UnFairly

Here’s the situation that happened at my house a few months ago. We had a group over for lunch, where different people were bringing different parts of the meal. I made a vegetarian chili, and one lady said she would bring bread. “Great,” I said. Well, I don’t think I would have said that had I known what she was going to do to the bread.

She came in with two small loaves of french bread and a Wal-Mart bag. She asked if she could heat the bread up in my oven as she was going to do cheese bread and it needed to be freshly cooked. “Of course,” I said, and turned on the oven. Then, to my shock, she pulls out TWO sticks of butter and asks for a bowl in which to melt them. Puzzled, I handed her a bowl and watched as she melted the butter in the microwave.

THEN, she used a pastry brush and brushed the entire TWO sticks over butter over the opened bread loaves. THEN, she put an entire bag of shredded cheese on each loaf and put the whole greasy thing into the oven.

I didn’t even know what to say. The whole time she was making the bread she was going on and on about how much her family loved this bread and how they just got so excited every time she made it. I was standing there in shock. This was not a morbidly overweight woman, but like many people, could lose about 25 – 35 pounds.

I wanted to tell her to stop smearing all that fat all over the bread but I just couldn’t bring myself to be rude. I wanted to ask her if just a sprinkling of cheese would be sufficient but I didn’t.

What I did do was make sure I didn’t eat any of that “high-fat, horrible for you” bread.

But then later,  as I realized that I was standing in “judgement” of her actions, I felt guilty. I did many, many similar bad food things throughout my years of struggling with my weight. I added loads of fat to foods that didn’t need anything added to them like bread, veggies, fruit, pasta, and more. I honestly wasn’t thinking about the health and/or calorie aspect of any foods I was making. I was just trying to make everything taste as good and yummy as I thought it should. And if bread was good alone, then bread with butter must be better. If fruit salad was tasty undoctored, then adding 1/2 cup of sugar to it would make it even tastier.

What a difference just having an awareness of the nutrition, calorie counts, and healthyness of foods our body needs makes. Perhaps the woman at my house really didn’t think about how many unnecessary calories and fats she was adding to her food. Like I used to be, perhaps she was just doing what she had seen done by other people.

In any event, I learned another lesson that day. I shouldn’t judge other people for their food choices, but should realize that they too can change as I did. Perhaps I should have asked her if we could leave one loaf “unadorned” for those of us who were watching our fat intake – or not. I also learned that it is very hard to know for sure how dishes are prepared. Had I not seen her make that bread I would have incorrectly assumed it just had a lot of cheese on it. I may have eaten a piece and scraped off the cheese. I like to think I would have been able to taste the excess butter though!

What do you think when you see people preparing food in a way that you never would? Do you say anything or just let it go? Any tips on guiding people in the right direction?  Diane