The Sad Bitch’s Guide To Not Starving
Nearly ten years ago, I wrote a Google doc titled, “The Sad Bitch’s Guide To Not Starving" and I distributed it to my friends.
In the intervening years, The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die has become available in stores. I am obviously very bitter that someone else achieved international success with an idea that I was too lazy to develop past a Google doc, but great minds think alike! In any case, you may not be able to afford The Sad Bastard Cookbook, or it may still be in transit to your house and you need help eating NOW. So I’m making the Sad Bitch’s Guide To Not Starving free on Tumblr.
I wrote this in the mid-2010s, when it was common to write blogs in this sort of manic, YELLING AT YOU style. This has made for some cringing on the reread, but I have only been able to tone it down so much.
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Forget everything you know about food. This guide is for people who are struggling to feed themselves because depression has fucked over their appetite, energy level, or motivation. Our culture often teaches us to categorize as “wholesome” foods that are not nutrient-dense. When you’re struggling to eat, you want to make your food count. So here is the operating principle, and we need to be clear on this: Calories Are Good. We want to maximize micronutrients as well, but at the end of the day, this is about getting fuel in you, and a calorie is a motherfucking unit of fuel.
Caloric restriction intensifies depression and anxiety. Undereating when you’re depressed will make you more depressed. That’s why this document is focused on eating ENOUGH, with a secondary focus on getting a decent variety of nutrients.
If you have a dietary restriction -- you have celiac, or you’re vegan, or diabetic, or doing FODMAP friendly, or following a religious diet -- obviously continue to adhere to it. Do not make yourself sick or give your Depression Brain a religious transgression to torture you over. But this is NOT the time to worry about everything you’ve heard about added sugar and empty calories and preservatives. The word “processed”? Now officially your friend. The more “processed” the food already is, the less processing YOU have to do to it.
Think simple. Easy. Quick. Whole raw chicken? Bad. Whole cooked chicken from the deli section? Good. Your grocery store’s prepared foods section is your friend in general. Beans you have to soak? No. Think pre-chopped. Think already peeled. Think triple-washed-and-ready-to-go.
Know what makes you more likely to eat. For some people that means variety. For some people that means consistency. Some people see boiling water as astronomically more effort than the microwave. I tried to focus on somewhat “wholesome” depression foods (meaning you get more bang for your buck in terms of protein, vitamins and minerals, etc.), but if you’re reading this and you just ate an entire party-size bag of salt and vinegar chips: Go you! You hit your recommended daily value of Vitamin C and even got some protein! (I just looked this up. I had no idea you could get all that from chips! Aren’t potatoes grand?) More importantly, you ate.
IMAGINE YOU ARE A SMALL CHILD.
Eat peanut butter. Eat other nut butters if you’re fancy. Eat peanut butter on apple slices, or make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or if it’s That Kind of Depression, just eat it with a spoon. Eat nutella.
Drink juice. “Juice has so much sugar!!” Well, get some with no sugar added if you want, but remember: calories are good. It’s true that juice is not AS good for you as the fresh version of the fruit, but guess what? It will give you a lot of the same nutrients for a lot less effort. And here at Sad Bitch Incorporated, we are all about maximizing the nutrients-to-effort ratio.
Eat applesauce and little cups of fruit. Eat yogurt, whatever kind you feel like.
Eat raisins. Other dried fruit are also great if you have money and want to be fancy, but raisins are fine. Raisins have iron, which is mostly found in high-effort foods like meat and spinach that you are likely not eating right now.
Get the most vitamin-rich cereal you know you can convince yourself to eat. (If that's Coco Puffs? Not my problem. Not your problem right now either.) Eat it with the kind of milk you like best, not the kind you feel like you should be drinking. Eat it dry if you prefer.
Use rare bursts of energy to boil yourself a week’s worth of eggs. DON’T THROW THE YOLK OUT unless you hate it or have an actual cholesterol problem of the magnitude that the doctor warned you about eggs. Egg whites are trendy because of diet culture, but the majority of the nutrients are in the yolk!
DIPPABLES ARE GOOD AND EASY. Dip carrots or pita chips in hummus or spinach and artichoke dip. Dip tortilla chips in salsa or guacamole or queso dip. You know what else you can do with tortilla chips? Dump your favorite salsa on them and some beans if you want, and cover them in shredded bag cheese. Microwave. BAM. Sad bitch nachos.
You can microwave cheese onto anything. My favorite is to melt a hunk of brie on broccoli florets. Sad bitch fondue!
You can microwave eggs! You can microwave a potato into a baked potato, but you have to stab it first so it won’t explode!
Do you know how many kinds of canned soup they have now? Enough to keep you alive for a long, long time.
BUT THE SODIUM! OK, listen: obviously if you have a heart condition where you have to watch your sodium, I’m not telling you to disregard it. Look at the numbers and if even the lower-sodium varieties are too high for you, choose something else to eat.
But for everyone else, this is a trap. Every piece of nutrition advice you’ve ever heard that is running through your mind right now is a trap. In the middle of a major depressive episode is not the time to worry about Future You’s health problems. The goal is to stay alive long enough to see what awesome drugs they have by the time you develop those health problems.
DEPRESSION BRAIN DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR HEART: THAT DOUCHEBAG JUST WANTS TO TRICK YOU OUT OF EATING.
You know what else they have in cans? Fucking everything. Peaches, pears, corn, peas. Every kind of bean you could ever imagine, including about a dozen pre-seasoned varieties of baked beans! Chili! Olives! Mushrooms! Tuna fish! Canned tuna + those dried sheets of seaweed you can get at the Asian market = sad bitch sushi. Dip it in soy sauce. What did I just tell you about sodium?
Eat canned cranberry sauce all year round. Buy some cold cut turkey and make it a Thanksgiving sandwich. Sweet potatoes are such a nutritional powerhouse that they practically created civilization. Can you get them in a can? You bet your ass.
Cans are cheap as hell and they stack neatly. Go wild. When the zombie apocalypse comes, you will have an army of people ready to do your bidding, because of your decadent variety of canned foods. Who’s getting scurvy? Not this sad bitch.
THIS IS THE GOLDEN AGE OF FREEZER MEALS. Bagel bites! Marie Callendar pot pie things! You can get pretty good Indian microwave meals at Trader Joes! I am a sucker for those bagged pasta deals with the sauce included. The best of these will include both a protein source and a vegetable of some sort. Many vegetarian meat substitutes come in freezer-to-microwave format.
Make sure anything you get with meat is pre-cooked, so that if you don’t give enough of a fuck to troubleshoot the cooking time so the center isn’t cold, you won’t die!
Ravioli can be just as quick to boil as ramen and carry a boatload more nutrients. They have every variety from sausage to summer squash, but I’m a mushroom and cheese die-hard. You can get frozen pierogies; frozen gyoza; frozen samosas. Every single culture has invented a foodstuff that involves wrapping some combination of vegetables and/or protein in dough, and you can get nearly any of them in a large bag in your supermarket’s frozen section.
You can get almost any fruit or vegetable frozen. Throw a bag of frozen broccoli in your box macaroni and cheese. Dump any random bag of frozen veggies into the water with your spaghetti. Put a handful of frozen berries on your instant oatmeal.
MAKE IT TASTE GOOD. Garlic salt + lemon pepper is my go-to lazy seasoning blend. Some people would rather put adobo on everything. The point is, know what you like and try to keep it on hand. Figure out what makes food taste good to you and abuse this knowledge until you’re sick of it. Put as much ketchup on as you want. Go wild with the mayonnaise. Steak sauce makes everything better.
Put half a cup of sugar on your oatmeal if it’ll get you to eat the oatmeal. For that matter, put it on your fruit. Invest in one of those “pie spice blends” that usually has some combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and cloves. Pie up your applesauce. Or just cut up some apples, cover them in pie spice and brown sugar, and microwave them: sad bitch apple pie.
When all else fails, there’s always Bars. Clif and Luna bars have gotten me through many a morning where I was too sad and lazy to do a real breakfast. Kind bars are pretty nice. Those super high-protein bars are great if you can stand the texture. Trail mix has also saved my ass a number of times.
DRINK LIQUID. Gatorade. Seltzer. Those little water flavoring packs. Do whatever the fuck it takes to trick your ass into drinking some water.
Soda is not actually dehydrating. That’s a myth. Same with coffee and tea. (Alcohol is dehydrating, though. The science on that is legit. Alcohol is basically the only liquid you can drink that does not count as drinking liquid.) Otherwise? Juice, lemonade, iced tea, chocolate milk -- drink whatever the fuck you want. Just put fluids in your body.
This will give you some margin for error. Get a gummy one if you want. You have my permission.
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