Feeding the Exotic Pet

The past couple months -- basically, since the holidays -- have been a bit physically rougher than usual, and I think a lot of it is my eating habits.  While on vacation or eating a lot with other people, my patterns shift due to some combination of food availability and a tendency to assimilate my diet toward the more "normal" diets of other people.  That latter shift is not always a conscious one, though it can take that form.  For example, other people are eating X, and X looks good, so I decide to have some (e.g., wedding cake).  Or I use some variant of the "but I'm on vacation so the rules don't apply!" logic.  Or I feel like it's easier to just go along with what other people are doing (note: this is not a common tendency of mine, but it can definitely happen when what other people are doing is, for instance, eating something delicious for dinner).  Or I have this subtle feeling like eating my normal way will look strange or suspect to other people so I choose something more normal.  But there's also this simple tendency when I'm eating around other people to assimilate to their eating habits, seemingly unmediated by any kind of conscious logic on my part.  This force seems strongest when the habits seem "healthy" (e.g., eating a lot of veg) or are relatively close to the way I eat (e.g., some variant on a low-grain neo-paleo type diet). 

Unfortunately, "healthy" diets and typical paleo-style diets don't actually seem to work well enough for me, either physically or psychologically.  But I have identified through empirical experimentation (trial and error) certain things that do work for me pretty well -- it just leads to a kind of weird, idiosyncratic set of eating patterns that are difficult to sum up or describe.

I'm wondering whether it would be easier to maintain my own patterns in atypical contexts and in social situations if I were to think of myself vis-a-vis eating as though I were an exotic pet with a particular, unfamiliar, and unusual set of eating requirements rather than a human who eats abnormally.  I mean, it seems weird (and kind of creepy) to feed your pet snake previously-frozen mice/salamanders/birds that you have heated in warm water before serving, but because that's what snakes do well eating, it's not the case that people think that the snake itself is somehow weird for eating it or that the snake would feel weird about it, if it were given to that sort of self-reflection, or that one can substitute normal human food for a defrosted toad.  Does this make sense?  I guess I just mean that I suspect it will feel easier if I think of it as eating the strange but typical diet of the Sallicus species rather than as eating a (weird) variant of a human diet.  By classifying myself in a way that is distinct from "human" (with regard to eating), I would hope to avoid assimilating to a "human" diet.

In any case, I'm hoping to keep moving my eating habits back to those of Sallicus and away from human diets in the coming weeks.