New Year...

New Year...New Diet

Warning: This post is more for my “single ladies”. I spent my Christmas holding my baby niece as she and I impersonated Beyonce’s Single Ladies dance over and over and over. To see her with her little arm in the air and sweet innocent “uoohh oohhhh ohh” voice, gave us all a laugh and love for this song. Miss you Mila bean!!!

Each evening for the past 3 nights around 9:30 I lie on my slightly uncomfortable bed with my computer in my lap, and gaze at a blank Microsoft Word screen. My thoughts on this New Year have run through my mind over and over. My new Goals… Dreams… Life…Good stories, but everything I wrote seemed to be a bore. Around 11:45pm surfing Glamour.com and procrastinating on writing, I stumbled upon an article titled the “Man Diet”. How fitting for the New Year, isn’t it?

A few weeks back a dear friend inavertedly peered at her boyfriend’s iphone that lied on the kitchen counter only to discover an alarming amount of dirty Skype messages. She said the simple thought of the words exchanged were so vulgar it can causes her to vomit. It’s time for a “Man Diet”.

My other dear friend spent an incredibly romantic New Years vacation with a boy from home, although not officially her boyfriend, he flew half-way across the world just to be with her. One week later he had slept with another girl and kissed a different one the night after. When my friend’s messages were ignored day after day, her instincts and Facebook reviled the truth. “Man Diet” is a must for her.

Another great friend sent a simple “Happy New Years, I hope you have a wonderful night” to the boy she has been dating for the past three months. Only to received a message that read something like, “I can’t talk now I’m headed to the cabin with my girlfriend for New Years.” So her suspicions of him having a serious girlfriend are true, I wonder if his girlfriend would have liked the hotel room he surprised her with.

A “Man Diet” such as described in the article, shares the basic principles of a regular diet. Get ride of the crap, no chips, no soda, no chocolate, fast, cleanse and start over from the basics: pure whole nutritious foods.  “Doing the emotional equivalent of a juice cleanse on your love life--detoxing from all the toxic trappings of dating. In order to properly cleanse, you need to rid yourself of “junk food love”--negative experiences, obsessive thoughts and damaging actions. Like delicious Cool Ranch Doritos, bad dating habits can be unfulfilling, yet still really addicting, so you need to wean yourself off of them and start fresh.”

What a great diet! It’s one that actually feeds your emotional health and nourishes the soul. We all have bad habits, maybe too much Facebook or ‘hooking up’ with a guy we know we shouldn’t. We’d never save spoiled milk in our refrigerator, so why save the things we know that are harmful to our bodies? Would you eat five doughnuts everyday morning and assume your body wouldn’t change? As if your heart was your refrigerator, it’s time to throw those doughnuts away and grab a crisp new apple instead.

But then there’s a problem,

What if you have been on a “Man Diet” for almost two years and now suffer from anorexia?

It’s been almost two years since I have been dating someone. I’ve been talking to guys and gone out on quite a few dates, but actually dating. Chatting is we’re “talking” or in contact semi-regularly, but “Dating” involves a level of exclusiveness, not fully commitment but there’s a good amount of time spent together getting to know each others’ likes and dislikes, almost a trial, “humm, I can see us together” sort of thing.

I have been in starvation mode for over two years. It’s almost impossible to date someone at home. Take this summer, my mother bagged, almost forced me to go on a date with her co-worker’s son. It’s not that I don’t like dating, I enjoy that weird exciting feeling in your stomach, and the ohh what to wear question, but how is this dating thing going to work? “Hi, our mothers set us up, I live in Rome, and leave in 4 weeks for a year”, nice to meet you. He was such a sweetheart though and I did enjoy our dates, but I found after the first or second date I was annoyed, I didn’t want to get to know anyone, no matter how great he is, I wanted to throw my baby niece in the air and bug my little sister. I didn’t want to date. If I meet a person a home, what’s the point, I live in Rome, and vis-versa.

 Dating in Italy, well I should just join a convent and become a nun, it’s nearly impossible.  I don’t date Italians, I’ll have fun with an Italian boy, but I would never for a second consider them more than a friend. We do have English speaking boys from all over the world whom somehow all know each other, which leads to an environment worse than Junior High School. Receiving messages asking if I have been with people I don’t even know. Everyone knows everyone and everything about everyone. It’s ridiculous. Again I prefer my “Man Diet”.

Maybe I’m trying to bake a Cake, but have the recipe for cookies?

Or maybe I think I want to bake a cake, but really I want to cook a pot roast. Whatever it is that I want to cook, I must make sure that my recipe is correct, and then check that I have the right food in the frig. I think I want something more than ‘just friends’ and then relies that I don’t want anything at all, I’m just not hungry. Or some days I’m craving a certain food and know there is only one person who satisfies it. But whatever the case maybe, my first step out of “man dieting” is to slowly put those ‘good foods’ back in my refrigerator, so when it is time to decide what I want to bake, I have the right ingredients handy.

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This year I will encourage my girl friends to start their very own “man diet”.  Throw out that old doughnut that never texts back, or put down that mid-night ‘cookie’ visit after the clubs. While I’ll ask my friends for encouragement to put forth a little effort into something I want to ‘bite into’, but until then, I guess I’ll just keep looking through cookbooks awaiting  a recipe that can’t go without a try, and enjoy every  minute that I have as head chief in my kitchen..

Eat  - good whole foods

Pray- all day everyday

Love- the life you live

Here is the link to the hillarious book review:
http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/smitten/2012/01/do-you-need-to-go-on-a-man-die.html