Diet Is a Noun

When I was in first grade, we had to do a report on an animal of our choosing. My favorite animal at the time was a horse, so my mom helped me make a barn and I hot glued one of my toy horses into the setup (hot glue being perfect because after the report is done, it just peels right off without damaging the toy). We also had to write out certain facts on our chosen animal: habitat and diet, things like that. Diet, yes, that means what they eat.

I think perhaps our everyday vocabulary too often forgets that diet isn't just a verb; it's a noun, and not just a noun referring to the verb. Everyone who eats has a diet, but that doesn't mean that you're "dieting." So being aware of your diet as "how you eat" is something that we can all do.

This is why I've been focusing not so much on things to not eat as on things to eat. Instead of focusing on not eating, for instance, potatoes, which I used to always buy, I've been enjoying berries. Who even knew I enjoyed berries? I always said, I don't like berries, do you want the berries off of my dessert? But the berries I've been buying are pretty nice.

I guess it was like that with a lot of things, though. I only recently starting eating artichokes; now I'm rather in love with them. It took a while to warm up to asparagus, that elegant vegetable. Growing up, I used to always eat each bite of salmon with some salad greens because I didn't really like the salmon otherwise; now I forget the history behind that and think that it's just flavor pairing. Some things you just have to get used to.

Not that you need to get used to everything. Tomatoes I cannot eat because I simply don't like them--and fittingly enough, I now find that tomatoes, even in things like sauces, probably aren't a suggested food for me personally. Dandelion greens would be very healthy, but even my bearded dragon doesn't eat those; I thought arugula was strong until the day I tried dandelion greens.

I simply mean to say, enjoy eating good things. Food makes such a difference, as does out attitude towards it. Find what foods are healthy towards you personally and eat them. There are so many foods in the world (especially if you're living in a country where you can walk into a store and pretty much buy whatever food you can think of), so don't focus on the ones you're not eating; focus on the ones that you are enjoying. When I did that report in first grade, I didn't list all the foods that horses don't eat; I just wrote down what they do eat.