It seems like everybody is on a diet

Or planning to be on a diet

Every other TV commercial is for a diet program or diet product

Supermarket shelves stacked with low cal this and low carb that

I was enjoying a nice dinner party

Until the dinner table conversations were hijacked by dieters

We fast for 16 hours every day

I never eat meat

I have been vegan for decades

Oh we stopped eating carbs years ago

They are so bad for you said the lady next to me

Pointing to the roast potato on my fork

I nodded but ate it anyway

It tasted so good

I could hear the potato whispering to me

Ignore that dumb potato hating woman next to you

Just eat me and enjoy

I ate more potatoes

I smiled at the potato hater

She looked way too thin and wrinkly

I bet her shelves are full of diet books

Nothing tasty ever comes out of her kitchen

She is on a crusade to get everyone to join her diet cult

Well I am sorry lady but I am not signing up

I enjoy eating and drinking a lot more than dieting

She keeps droning on and on about dieting so I stop listening

I let my mind wander

I decided to invent my own form of dieting

You can eat and drink anything you want

At any time of day or night as you please

But your mind is on a strict diet

You are only allowed to think nice thoughts

No negative thinking allowed whatsoever

Sure you can hear people say negative things

But their words are not allowed to stay in your head

Those words go straight into your mental trash can

You can certainly look at dieting commercials 

Knowing that it all goes into your mental trash can

With time your memory banks become exclusively positive

Even your imagination is consistently happy and playful

I must write a book about all this

It will be a best seller for sure

In the meantime I decide to go back to the dinner table conversation

The lady next to me is still jabbering away about her diet

I watch all her spoken words fall in my mental trash can

I decide to put more roast potatoes on my plate

There is still one left in the dish so I offer it to her with a cheeky monkey grin

She is stunned into a jaw dropping silence

My mental trash can burst out laughing