Thanks to Kate McQuown Budabin for this guest post; Kate is a professional story teller specializing in Jewish-themed story times for young children. She lives in New York City (and, full disclosure, is our editorial intern’s mom).

One day when I was twelve, I toasted a slice of bread over the gas flame on a pancake turner, buttered it, spooned on a layer of cinnamon sugar to melt into it, went to heaven while I gobbled it down, and returned to earth to make another … and another… and another…until the loaf was gone. Fifty years later, I can still taste that gritty richness.

My whole life I’ve been an appreciative and melodramatic eater. When I was 26, I nibbled my way through a tureen of 40 mussels after a hearty lunch. At 29 and pregnant, my regular lunch involved two sandwiches, a bag of carrot sticks, an apple, an orange, a bran muffin or a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies with extra bran, and a little box of raisins—I knew I needed lots of iron! Cooking was an act of love, and eating was an act of pleasure. Not eating felt like denying myself love – not moderation, but deprivation. I feel similarly about eating food that’s just adequate – why waste a meal? And I refuse to eat anything that actually tastes bad to me, whatever the supposed health benefits.

Then, at 40, after two years of intense thought and preparation, I went to the mikveh, where I became a Jew moments before our children. Soon after, I began carting boxes of pots and bags of silverware to the keilim mikveh, part of making my kitchen kosher. I bought different sponges for washing meat and dairy dishes. “blue for moo, and red for dead,” my husband George quipped.

I kashered my kitchen partly from conviction, partly to make a home in which any Jew could eat. It was not easy for me: as my rabbi said, we don’t stop eating pork roast because it’s disgusting, but because even though it’s delicious, G-d says that Jews shouldn’t eat it.

Amazingly enough, that was that. I still remember the succulence of my pork roast, and I still keep kosher. At friends’ houses, I ignore the ham and eat the hummus. We bought a house on Cape Cod, and there I eat —cod; or bluefish. I leave the shrimp and mussels to the summer folks now.

More than just following kashrut, I got creative. I rejoiced when I discovered that beer can sometimes have the effect of milk in baking. I was thrilled to discover how close turkey chops could come to pork chops. I like olive oil better than butter for sauteeing anyway. I bought Sephardic cookbooks, and discovered the spices of Indian Jews. But even though there is no way that meat sauce tastes quite as good without the Parmesan, I have kept a kosher home now for over twenty years. When it comes to kashrut, I control myself.

Why? Numerous reasons come to mind. For one, I promised G-d, not just myself, and the promise was total – you can’t just cook the occasional clam and still have a kosher pot. The strictness of the rules kept me from just trying to think of loopholes. Instead, I put a lot of the “treif” energy into exploring a whole new cuisine. Although I grew up without kashrut, and learned to love a lot of unkosher foods, I have a good memory for tastes, and can still enjoy ham and clam chowder in my head. Making a kosher home is as important a religious duty as prayer, and that adds a facet to the interest I already had in mindful cooking: cooking from scratch, seasoning with spice not chemicals, reducing sugar or increasing fiber as much as was consistent with good taste. Perhaps most effectively, kashrut brought me into a loving community rather than isolating me, as most diets do, from the others at the table who eat carbs, or fat, or whatever is forbidden.

All of these play a part in my kashrut self control. They hold some clues, also, about the other diets that have temporarily worked for me, diets I’ve needed because after 40 years of eating what I wanted with no consequences, I began to gain weight when I ate too much. And I always ate too much, always had, never learned how not to.

I did quite well, in 1989, on Weight Watchers, losing about 15 pounds, and discovering the mango, a fruit of which one could eat a LOT without counting it as more than one portion. Like kashrut, Weight Watchers afforded me community through the camaraderie of the meetings. It also offered mindfulness and reason, two other important aspects of Jewish law. I enjoyed keeping track of what I ate, and I appreciated the attitude that one slice of wedding cake would not send me to hell.

Later, I tried the South Beach diet. I’d seen Atkins work for people, but I adore potatoes and whiskey. I couldn’t live without the one, and I knew where permission to have all I wanted of the other would lead me! The first two stringent weeks of South Beach, without even a piece of fruit or a bite of bread, took me cold turkey off my comfort food addiction. I actually felt strange and a little unbalanced, but I stayed off carbs for the whole two weeks—except for a bite of challah on each Friday night. After that, it was actually not hard to have just one small potato, or one slice of challah, and I didn’t have any desire for a muffin. I liked the vegetable and protein breakfasts, and at dinner, I filled up on heaps of greens with garlic and lemon and one portion of meat.

But once again, I gained back much of the weight.

I am a widow now, and my children are pretty well grown. I need a plan that I can keep to on my own, cooking for one person, eating alone, sometimes content and sometimes lonely. I could be toasting an entire loaf of bread over my gas burner, like I did when I was twelve, but I’m not. While nothing but kashrut has ever consistently controlled my eating, all of my attempts have taught me something. Weight Watchers gave me a well-rounded diet, including barley and whole grain bread and potatoes mashed with garlic. South Beach afforded me permission to have enormous helpings of greens or salad vegetables, because I have never in my life succeeded in being constantly moderate. I like to live large!

Kashrut taught me that my body and my health are G-d’s gift, a gift I’m responsible for tending well. Kashrut also grows from the Jewish attitude that the food itself is G-d’s gift, meant to be respected, conserved, and enjoyed. In fact, kashrut and WeightWatchers share that attitude. Eating and cooking become acts that connect me to both G-d and my community. Now even while eating alone, I can belong to a community of people who eat with and for the world.