Smooth Operator

Everyone has a "naughty" friend their childhood. The one that pushes the teacher's buttons, the one who gets in trouble at school yet acts like an angel at home, the one who lies and gets away with it (most of the time), and the one who smokes and drinks well before its appropriate or legal.

That friend of mine was Erin. 

We played the Ouija board, toilet papered houses (I swear it was for school) and loved a good, innocent prank. 

One day after school in my basement, we decided it would be a good idea to prank call the operator (remember you could just hit zero?) and sing her the song, Smooth Operator by Sade. Mind you, * 69 may have entered the scene, but caller ID wasn't a thing yet. This operator was no dummy. As soon as we got through enough Sade to have us doubled over in stitches, we hung up the phone. 

Not a minute later, the phone rang. And whaddya know? 

It was our operator friend telling us she was so smooth that she knew the number we were calling her from. We looked at each other with panic in our eyes and hung up the phone on the receiver with a loud bang. To ensure she was gone, we picked up the phone two seconds later and waited for the dial tone. Phew, safe. The operator was gone and you can bet she was the one with the last laugh. 

My mind jumped back to this memory this past weekend when my friend asked our girls if they knew their phone number. The question was to demonstrate that kids barely use phones anymore to "talk" with friends and rely almost entirely on social media to communicate. A long pause followed by an "I know there are some 7's and 8's in the number" told me they had no clue what their phone number was. Ooof.

This got me thinking about how diets are a lot like social media and our body's are the phone. Diets pretend to be necessary, disconnect us from our selves more often than not and "feed" us with constant information about what we should be doing. Our phone, our body, gets neglected in the process as we constantly use it to search for more things out "there" instead of within. 

We interact with our phones and food everyday, but at what level do you know your body when it comes to food? Yeah, sure, you eat everyday and interact with your food, but do you know exactly what food you like and what really tastes good to you? Or do you rely on someone else telling you what you "should" eat and  just follow along. Rice cakes, cottage cheese, Kombucha and Kale? Would you actually eat the foods you're eating if weight wasn't an issue? Do you have more of a best to be told than to lead when it comes to food and body?

Diets pretend to be all smooth operator, knowing what you like, but there's no way that any diet can be exactly the right prescription for you, let alone what millions of bodies need. Everyone has a unique phone number and everyone has a unique need for certain foods and amounts of foods that are just right for them. Diets are not smooth. They are rough and tumble and often damaging. 

Don't believe me? Thinking you still call the shots? Remember the last time you deviated from any diet and felt "naughty"? You only feel this way if you think there's rules, regulations and standards that must be followed and that all of these rules are tied up in "health" aka weight. Let me remind you that as an adult you get to call the shots about your food without any feelings of shame or guilt and health and weight are not one and the same. 

Go ahead and be naughty and break the "rules". Stop lying to yourself about what you want and desire. Let the Diet Culture Gods lie and get caught by one anti-diet crusader at a time instead. We've got diet culture's number now.