Minimally scathed.

Tonight could have been a disaster.

I work with the youth group at our church and tonight, instead of the regular meeting, we participated in something called "HogFest". This is basically a large scale food scavenger hunt for the kids, but leaders are encouraged to participate as well. Despite my own moral objection to the practice in a church setting (gluttony, anyone?) it is fun for the kids, which is what it is intended to be. And the kids do have fun.

Many of the items on the scavenger hunt included donuts, sandwiches, candy, ice cream, quesadillas, bread sticks, and lots of other junk foods. Before we began, I bargained to try to not have the leaders participate, but I lost and we were supposed to help. Fortunately, we didn't really have enough time to visit many of the places, so we were a bit limited. Long story short, I ended up eating one glazed donut and three bites of Wendy's chili. Probably about 200 Calories, which I can live with because all I have had the rest of the day was a small zucchini with 2 tbsp of roasted red pepper cashew cream, 12 oz fresh green juice (in which I put spinach, lemon, lime, ginger, cucumber, apple) and 1/2 cup of vanilla soymilk. I'm sure my Calorie intake for the day was under 1,000 so I can live with it. I also had a lot of water and hot tea so I am hydrated.

I also think I confirmed an eating disorder in one of the youth group students. I have known her for a while through church and she is stick skinny and in high school, but I also know she is very active and I haven't (until recently) spent enough time with her to know her other habits and personality to determine if she did have an eating disorder. But tonight, she was on my team and looked for every excuse to not have to eat. She ended up (reluctantly) eating a donut, but primarily got excited when one of the items on the list was a gallon of water. (Note: no one student had to consume all of one thing, so the gallon was divided up among the team) She chugged and chugged the water, and on our following stops, continuously told me how filling the water was, and how she just couldn't possibly eat any more food because her stomach was so full.

I'm not one to placate nor instigate any type of hostility or eating behavior. I've been around enough of that in my life to let ANY comments roll of my shoulders. There really isn't a safe thing to say to a person with an eating disorder. Besides, there were enough people in the group excited to eat a lot of food, so I simply told the girl That's okay, yeah, Water is filling. Just do what you can and don't worry about it.

So overall, I escaped relatively unscathed. I certainly feared worse.