Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you. As for example, when you’re on a diet and your mind tells you that chocolate cake is healthy nutritious food and good for you. It sometimes even goes through elaborate schemes of providing proof especially when you read that scientists have determined in recent studies that chocolate is definitely crucial to human survival. Or perhaps your mind convinces you that, for example, beer is “liquid bread” and has all the ingredients necessary to sustain a person throughout the day. Should certain essentials still be missing, it reasons with ironclad logic, they could always be added by ordering appropriate toppings on one or more extra-large pizzas.

That’s your treacherous mind for you. Why is it always sabotaging you when you try to do the right thing, staying on the straight and narrow? Well, it is because the mind does not have to negotiate the tight corners and narrow spaces a body is forced to do. Instead it just sits there and snipes at you with sarcastic remarks after you fall for its siren song and munch down an entire pizza by yourself. Never trust that treacherous mind, instead trust your wife to put you on a diet, as mine did some time ago.

There seems to be a law that once the lady of the house makes up her mind to go on a diet, everyone within the vicinity must automatically go on one too – even common household pets. As a matter of fact should there be any other critters like pests, bugs or vermin lurking in dark corners, depending on leftovers and garbage for survival, they would be advised to leave the premises at once. There won’t be one morsel of fodder available anywhere in the entire house! How could there be if each crumb of food, from then on, has a number assigned to it, called a “calorie-count”? At the end of the day the ultimate tally of those numbers will be recorded, which will determine if you have stuck to the new household program. Therefore to make things easier for you and to cut down on temptations and cheating, any foodstuff not essential for immediate survival must immediately be removed from the grounds. And in my case, no creature would be foolish enough to attempt to wrest even the tiniest piece of precious calorie-laden ration from me, since it would find itself in a fight to the death.

This also spells the end for that game-playing trickster mind of mine, at least concerning the subject of nourishment. Because, since each and every piece of matter that could be considered edible is dispensed with this calorie count, no scam is possible, especially if another, less gullible mind is watching over your own (as for example my wife’s ironhanded, unbending one). You will not cross over the line of that specific calorie count that has been determined for you, no matter how lightheaded you become. And staggering through the streets doubled over by severe pangs of hunger will get you nothing but unbelieving ridicule because it is prominently written in one of your wife’s diet-guru books that the human body can do without food for weeks. So why should anyone feel sorry for you if you black out? Instead you are required to go out into nature and not “worry so much about eating” but instead breathe in the healthy air  – who needs food when there is so much oxygen around?  

That is probably why you see so many guys today walking around with their mouths wide open. They are not really interested in breathing fresh air – they must have been put on a diet by their wives. What I suspect is that they are hoping against hope they might benefit from some airliner flying above losing a few candy bars by mistake. But unfortunately many airlines have cut down on serving lunches recently, which means that each and every peanut or piece of candy will be jealously guarded and fought over violently by the passengers. So better shut your mouth and stay with the program. Maybe, if you’re lucky your mind will play a trick this time, not on you, but on your wife and tell you where she has secretly stashed those cookies.