Is it Time for Your Cake Week?
A Totally Healthy Relationship with Food
There was a time in my teens when I made myself a hot fudge pudding cake every night.
And then ate it.
I’d typically capitalize the title of a cake, but I was so familiar with the hot fudge pudding cake that I could make it without the recipe. I made it in a 9x13 sheet pan and the only thing I remember about it now was how chocolately it was. Perhaps that’s obvious from its name, but this cake had over a cup of cocoa inside of it. The recipe came from the box of hand-written recipes my mom had in our cupboard, but it might as well have come from hell.
This thing was evil. It was delicious, sickeningly sweet, and helped me grow to almost three-hundred pounds by the time I was fourteen.
Did I mention I used to proceed the cake with an entire frozen pizza?
Regardless, this article isn’t about my TOTALLY HEALTHY AND NORMAL RELATIONSHIP TO FOOD. This article is about Cake Week.
To understand Cake Week, the hot fudge pudding halcyon days of my youth are important to know.
After I stopped eating 6000 calories a night my weight plummeted. Can you believe it? I think I should write a diet book called “How I Went from Obese to Just Technically Obese According to BMI by Cutting 4000 Calories of Sugar From My Daily Diet: A True Story of the Courage to Believe.” It’s just that easy to lose eighty pounds! Well it was for me. My body loooooooooves to be 215 pounds. I can starve myself and weigh 215 or I can actually have a social life and weigh 215. It’s what my body wants.
These people all weigh between 210 and 220… pending their time slot in Cake Week.
But it took me a long time to realize this. It took me about ten years of binge and purge cycles in an attempt to look like the skinny beautiful young gay boys I saw in New York to realize my body wanted to be fed. Not just fed, but strong. My body and its Germanic farm genes would love nothing more than to eat those 6000 calories a day… after working in a field for twelve hours. My body seriously loves to work. It loves to move and push and just, generally, be supes butch. I prefer to be supes butch with painted nails and a statement necklace, of course.
The revelation of my weight equilibrium came to me sometime around my twenty-sixth birthday, and, I know, was helped along with what quickly became known as Cake Week.
The First Cake and Its Week
Cake Week is the one week a year where I indulge the Hot Fudge Pudding Cake part of my brain (I’m not as casually familiar with this cake as I once was, which is good for both of us). Every day for a week leading up to my birthday, July 19th, I let myself eat an entire cake. An entire cake.
Not just a piece.
An entire cake.
That first year started because my friend Sara was visiting me in Washington, DC. I was having a hard time in a new city and a new job, and I HATED my birthday. When you have a summer birthday, there’s a lot to hate. A lot of us with summer birthdays grew up with the scar of the dreaded end-of-school-year roundup. While everyone else got to bring in snacks on their birthdays, the summer birthdays were relegated to standing up on the last day of the school year and being sung to as a group. We didn’t even get to bring in personalized cupcakes.
It was very upsetting.
As a summer birthday grows up, the loneliness only grows. In high school, then college, and finally in your 20’s, you discover how difficult it is to get a group of people together in the summer. You can’t have a party this weekend because half your friends are out of town, but good news, the other half of your invite list is gone the next weekend! You end up spending a lot of time chasing a party that could never exist.
So I was angry about my birthday, but not necessarily about getting older, when Sara came to town. For years, my mom had sent me what she called a “birthday in a box,” which was a party banner, a card, a box of Funfetti cake mix, and a tub of Duncan Hines frosting. Most years, I got as far as the frosting. This year, with Sara as my birthday date, I resolved to make the cake. It had been years since I let myself bake, trapped in the fallacy of thinking deprivation would lead me into the skinny utopia of the 20-something gay ideal.
It could have turned out better, but spoiler: it was delicious.
Sara and I drank a bottle of champagne (cheap, cheap burning grapes) and ate it all. The next day, we bought an ice cream cake. And then a buttercream beast from a local bakery. And before I knew it seven days were gone and I’d eaten nine cakes. Turns out: I didn’t gain eighty pounds. I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t lose my long term boyfriend or my job. I had a lot of fun indulging my cravings and had a ton of energy in the gym.
Cakes week was born. By the time the next year came around, I was determined to make it a tradition, so I did. Ten years later, it’s flexed from seven to thirteen cakes and individual pieces to whole bakes.
Adjusting the Volume
As the years have gone on, I’ve let myself eat as much of the cake as I want, but the option to remains to eat an entire cake. I’d say by the end of the week, I’ve typically eaten at least four full cakes, with the remnants frozen and picked over by the end of August. Also, I always take one day from cake week to eat two pies. Everyone knows two pies equal a cake. It’s basic math.
Why is it so important to let myself eat an entire cake?
Because I love it. Because every part of my animal brain, when it sees a cake, says , “Don’t let this see the light of another dawn. Consume. Devour. INGEST!” My friend and former colleague Marj, once described it as craving volume. Craving the desire to be full. It’s a curious sensation, and I’m sure that statement may trigger many people’s issues with eating, but whether it’s cake or iceberg lettuce, sometimes I just want to eat a giant bowl of anything. I just want to eat it all. I want all the pizza. I want all the ice cream. I’ll eat until there are no more of the six dozen Monster Cookies my mom just sent me, even though I calculated that meant I ate 24,000 calories in under twenty-four hours.
Hypothetically.
Cake Week scratches that part of my brain that just wants.
Cake Week also frees me from the stress of caring, if only for a week. For this week I don’t worry about calories or exercise (although I often have some of my best workouts of the year when I’m hopped up on all this cake juice!). For this glorious week I see friends in ones or twos, a week of tiny parties that let them partake in the immaturity of indulgence. It’s freeing to not worry about tomorrow. It’s freeing to eat as much as you want without worrying about being judged or saying that awful phrase, “I don’t think I could eat a whole dessert… maybe we should split something?”
I want the whole dessert. I’ll order two and eat half of yours, too, if that makes you feel better.
You can see the evolution of Cake Week in their dedicated galleries, but if there’s one thing I can leave you with, it’s the encouragement to give yourself a “Cake” Week, whatever your week of indulgence may look like. Maybe it’s a week without email, or taking a week off work and watching all the Real Housewives from the beginning (you may actually need more like a month for that). Maybe it’s a week of video games, or reading, or hiking. Whatever it is, take a week to indulge that part of you that doesn’t worry about the consequences, assuming you’re not doing something that literally will destroy your life or those around you. No The Purge weeks, please.
For me, I’ll keep eating my cake. I’m lucky enough (or cursed enough?) that eating an entire cake doesn’t make me sick. It honestly doesn’t even make me nauseous.
Sometimes it hurts my joints. I should probably keep an eye on that.
