Shakira was right, the hips don’t lie.

And unfortunately lately they’ve been telling me that they don’t fit into my jeans anymore. Probably because I’ve had an indulgent summer with conferences and retreats where chocolate always floated around within arm’s reach.

So last week I decided to turn over a new leaf. (A lettuce leaf, if you want to be exact.) I and my family were going to eat more vegetables. Along with the other groceries, last Saturday I bought a squash, two heads of celery, two heads of lettuce, two heads of cauliflower, asparagus, cabbage, and tomatoes.

I am all about good intentions.

By the end of the week we’d managed to eat the squash and some of the lettuce and tomatoes. But I was not going to waste the stuff. I wasn’t going to let it wilt in my refrigerator. So on Friday for dinner we had cauliflower, asparagus, and a salad.
My children came to the table with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “What’s for dinner?” younger son asked.

“This,” I said waving my hand over three bowls of vegetables.

“These are side dishes,” middle daughter said. “You’re not supposed to have them as the main course.”

“Well, tonight we are,” I said.

Oldest son headed to the refrigerator, trying to circumvent my meal. “Get over here,” I told him. “You’re eating healthy tonight.”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, going into the family room.

“Sit anyway.” While I went and tried to pry him off the couch, little sister sat down and ate all of the hard boiled eggs from the salad.

“No fair!” younger son yelled pointing at his sister. “She took the only real food!”

Middle sister picked the melted cheese off of the cauliflower and then pronounced that she only liked the cauliflower stems.

Younger son went into a litany of his sufferings. “No white bread or sugar cereal, and now this. Do you know what my friends at school said when I told them we only had basic cable? They said, ‘Well, what about the TV in your bedroom?’” He then glared at me because he doesn’t have a TV in his room.

At the end of dinner, we had lots of leftovers and the children probably all had cold cereal as soon as I left to go exercise.

But all of my hard work did pay off. The next day middle daughter came up to me and loving told me that I was very skinny. “You don’t need to buy more vegetables,”
she added.

Well, that’s probably the fastest diet in history.

No matter, this week I bought artichoke hearts, tomatoes, celery, avocados, lettuce, spinach, onions, potatoes, and a few other things that I’m not sure what actually are—but they look healthy. They still have dirt clinging to them and what not. We will eat veggies throughout the week, and if not, we’ll eat them all on Friday.