To Do or Diet

Okay, so I've finally admitted it's time to do something about my weight. Well, not so much my weight as my shape. I can't bend over without impaling myself on my zipper tab, I get breathless emptying the dishwasher, and someone recently offered me his seat on the bus because he thought I was expecting (the "baby" is fourteen). I accepted the seat without correcting him.

There are so many weight-loss programs and ideas out there. I've watched friends get out the calorie charts and fork out tons of money for pre-packaged meals, herbal supplements, and gym memberships. I've seen others dive into all-protein diets or all-veggie diets. They never seem to keep off any weight they manage to lose. And I can't help but think it would be cheaper to just hire a ten-year-old to follow you around all day and slap your hand every time you reach for the french fries.

I've spent a lot of time pondering why diets always seem to fail. And I've decided it's because they all have one thing in common: they all focus on FOOD. What you can eat, what you can't eat, when you can eat it, counting calories, weighing portions, substituting celery for corn chips...All a dieting person does is think about food! They shoot themselves in the foot every time they get on the scale and think about what they are supposed to eat that day.

To be successful, I think a diet should get your mind OFF of food and focused onto something else. I want to walk into a Diet Centre and have the instructor announce, "Today we're watching slides of the chateaux of the Loire Valley. After that we're going to teach you how to shear a sheep, take a field trip to a butterfly conservatory, go white-water rafting, and then we'll come back and have a guest lecturer teach us all how to speak Swahili."

Wouldn't that be a kick? Keep your mind so busy with other things that you don't have time to think about food. Keep your hands busily entangled in knitting or macramé so you can't reach for the Twix bar. Keep life so enthralling you won't even notice you only snatched a healthy shake for lunch.

It is possible. There have been days when I've been so caught up in what I'm doing that I actually forgot to eat (or do laundry or pick up the kids from piano, but that's another issue). Until I can find such a Diet Centre, I think I'll sit here at my desk with my bowl of Ritz Crackers and watch to see how my friends all make out on their diets.