Making wise choices in food and relationships

I recently bought an $8 carton of eggs. Read that again. Eight dollars. I asked the man at the farmers market for a dozen and handed him a twenty without asking the price. He handed me back $12. It wasn’t until I walked away and counted my change that I realized — hot damn — I just bought a carton of eggs for the price of a movie ticket. And the worst part? I wasn’t even upset. They were free-range and organic, after all.

Here’s the thing: I’ve cleaned up my eating in the last few years. I eat more fruits and vegetables, I cook at home when I can, and I buy organic when the prices don’t give me cardiac arrest (eggs excluded).

I stopped drinking coffee and stocked my cupboards with green tea. I cut out a lot of sugar and flour, and I eat fewer processed foods. I’ve learned to make good decisions when it comes to the way I eat.

If only my choices in men could be so healthy.

Like a lot of us, when I’m confronted with a bad-for-me partner I ffeel dct powerless to resist. It’s like facing down a double cheeseburger: delicious for a little while, but destined to wI corrode my arteries. I wish I could walk away from these men the way I can now walk away from a box of Twinkies.

It turns out I can, says author Katherine Woodward Thomas in her her book “Calling in ‘The One’: 7 weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life” (a feng shui-meditation-psychotherapy-decluttering karmic guide to relationships).

“On the most fundamental level,” she writes, “ keeping your life free of the messes and entanglements that unwise choices create is actually one of the best things you can do to prepare yourself for love.”

Yes, but how? I always seem to reel in the same self-centered types.

Ms. Woodward Thomas says that we all have a fantasy that once we see our unhealthy patterns — double cheeseburgers, Twinkies, men who don’t listen — and commit to doing things differently, we believe that only good things will come into our path. Our lives will be filled with microgreens and supportive partners.

“This is rarely the case,” she says in her book. “What is more likely to happen is that, instead of immediately attracting a whole new kind of person into our lives, we find ourselves attracting exactly the same kind of person.”

The difference? We’re wiser now, she says.

“This time we know exactly where a particular path will lead. We must make the more difficult choice by saying no to the enticement of doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results.

“Let’s learn to value the making of the ‘right’ choice not because it’s the right choice for others, not because it’s the expected choice, the easiest one, or the path of least resistance. No, let’s instead learn to value the making of the right choice because it is the right choice for us.”

If I can choose to buy outrageously priced eggs because I know they’re better for me, then perhaps I can learn to choose a man who is equally healthy. Maybe he’ll even have his own organic farm. ¦