Diet Cop

"I'm on a diet. Don't let me eat anything bad, OK?"

Every woman who has ever dieted has uttered this request to some friend, co-worker, relative or spouse at one time or another. Want to know the crazy thing? Once you ask someone to be your diet cop they'll do it. And you'll hate them for it. For some time now I have made my husband my diet cop only to regret it when I had a bad day and needed a treat. I'd been good all week I deserved it. How could someone deny me an ice cream treat from Sonic? Because I asked them to.

I put my husband in a lose-lose situation where if he didn't do what I asked he wasn't being supportive. If he did do as I asked then he was mean and not letting me enjoy my food. The person who needs to be responsible for my food is me. That being said I have a screwed up relationship with food. It is my comfort, my friend. It is my enemy when I look in the mirror, or have an upset stomach from overdoing it. In the end I blow my diet and the cycle starts all over again.

Diet, that's a screwed up word. It has the word "die" in it. So essentially when you ask somebody to be your diet cop you are asking them to kill you. To be more accurate you are asking them to let you suffer. Diets are not a good thing and they don't work. I say get rid of the diet cop and the diet altogether.On that note, starting now I am going to try and change the way I see food. Food is not a reward for good behavior. It is not a cure for bad day. And I certainly do not deserve it just because I sat in traffic and spotted a DQ sign on my way home. No food is nourishment and that is all it is. That didn't actually strike me as true until I watched an old episode of Star Trek. I'm a nerd, sue me.

Anyway, Captain Kirk, Chekhov and Uhura were held captive on some far away planet where life was mapped out and no one deviated from plans or asked questions. What I thought was funny was that some scantily clad girl with green hair and a bikini made out aluminum foil brought Kirk his dinner. At one point he asked "What is it?" She answered with a blank stare, "Nourishment." That was it. There was no adjectives, no sounds of appreciation. She didn't add "And it's yummy!" That would've been just silly and gone against the storyline. The point is the food was meant to nourish him. Everything else was unimportant.

Trying to change your outlook on food is hard when you have so many other things you associate food with. You eat ice cream to mend a broken heart. You tell family how much you love them and are thankful for them over a table of turkey. And we celebrate life with cake. In all that we forgot to take care of our bodies and to feed it what it needs. Food is nourishment and that is all. Yes, it can taste good but ultimately it is supposed to nourish us.

To all my readers, let's learn to love and nurture ourselves and escape the food is love cycle.